Faces and Places HOT SPOT – US Issue (November 1998)
Why do celebs like Sandra Bullock, Renée Zellweger, and Beavis and Butt-head love this laid- back Texas town ?
WHEN SANDRA BULLOCK
CONCLUDED last year that she could no longer
live in Los Angeles - "I never felt as if I had my bearings there,
"she says - she decided to build her three-bedroom stone dream house next
to a lake just outside Austin, Texas. But for months she hesitated to tell
people where she was flying on weekends. "I was a little anxious that if
everyone else in the industry visited Austin, they'd want to move there,
too."
Bullock doesn't have to
worry about Austin's becoming the next Hollywood - at least not yet. But
Austin is helping Texas live up to its self inflicted nickname, the Third
Coast. Producer Lynda Obst (Hope Floats) and actress Madeleine Stowe
own homes outside the city, and the first-class section of the Friday-evening
three-hour nonstop flight from L.A. is usually full of film-business A-listers,
ranging from Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger to powerful William Morris
film agent Mike Simpson, all former Austin residents who love to slip back to
their old haunts for the weekend.
A city of 600,000 located in
the rolling hill country in the middle of the state, Austin is the perfect
landing place between New York and L.A. It is a liberal city, with an eclectic
group of residents - flamboyant politicians (Austin is the state capital), the
nearly 5o,ooo students who attend the University of Texas, high-tech wizards
who work for such corporations as Dell and Motorola, and music fans drawn by
the many downtown clubs, which feature such Austin-based performers as Shawn
Colvin and Willie Nelson.
Apparently, celebrities feel comfortable mingling in
public in Austin. The romance between Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt first went public last spring when the two
were spotted nuzzling at Austin's Four Seasons Hotel. (He had flown in
to visit her while she was
shooting the upcoming Office Space.) In many interviews, Zellweger has
rhapsodized about her love of the chicken tacos at Güero's, a comfortable
downtown dive, and the music at clubs like the blues-oriented Continental.
Bullock, who was raised in Virginia, says she fell in love with Austin when she
drove through a few years ago while on a cross-country road trip with a
"friend." (She wouldn't say whether that friend was McConaughey, her
long-rumored paramour, but Obst, a friend of both actors, did say that
McConaughey showed Bullock "the romance of Texas that feeling of freedom
that you get when you can ride around the back roads in your pickup
truck.")
Bullock, who is also relocating her production company
to Austin, says that what makes the city unique "is that you can find so
many wonderfully artistic people here who care about creating great
films." Such respected young directors as Richard Linklater (Slacker,
The Newton Boys) and Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi, From Dusk Till Dawn)
live and work there. When resident Mike Judge, the creator of King of
the Hill and Beavis and Butt-head, was offered the chance to direct his
first live-action film (the aforementioned Office Space), he insisted on
making it in Austin. (In the past year and a half, Io features have been shot
in the city.) Austin is also home to one
of the most powerful movie gossips in the country, Harry Knowles, whose Web
site, Ain't It Cool News (http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/),
is visited by some 300,00o people a day. The city has even become a favored
haunt of one of the film industry’s most reclusive figures: the highly
acclaimed director Terrence Malick (Badlands; Days of Heaven), who has
an apartment downtown.
Most days, you can find aspiring moviemakers
discussing camera angles at the 24-hour Star Seeds Cafe, next to Linklater's production
offices, near downtown. At night they go to the Alamo Draft House Cinema, where
instead ofpresenting music, the proprietors show an obscure movie every day.
Linklater is so enthusiastic about the burgeoning film community that he has
founded the Austin Film Society which presents films that haven't been
distributed nationwide, and he is a major backer of theTexas Filmmakers
Production Fund, which gives grants to support works in progress. "Why go
off to L.A. and get lost in the crowd?" he asks. "Everything you need
is here."
Besides, the way things are going, local filmmakers will have plenty of famous actors and actresses to cast in their next movie. They'll probably be living just down the street. "How can Hollywood stars not likeAustin?" asksTom Copeland, executive director of the AustinbasedTexas Film Commission. "It's one of the most laid-back, glitzfree cities in the country. If you're going to expose yourself to the stress of doing a major motion picture, then why not do it in a place where you can slack off the rest of the time?"
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Article by Gregg Steward
© 1998 by Faces and Places
typed out by the webmaster of The Famous Sandra Bullock Page