Eagle’s Eye
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
When the 50-year-old writer and director Eagle Pennell died in his sleep in 2002, he left behind only four feature films, a segment of a documentary anthology, and one short. For the native Texan filmmaker’s many admirers and boosters, particularly in the vibrant Austin independent film scene that Pennell helped to establish, his untimely death not only silenced one of America’s most eloquent regional creative voices, it was the final disappointment of a career that for some was as much defined by squandered promise as by sterling work.
“Eagle was often his own worst enemy,” Richard Linklater, the Austin-based director of “Before Sunset,” “School of Rock,” and “A Scanner Darkly,” said recently. Pennell, an acute alcoholic, hadn’t made a film in eight years at the time of his death.
Mr. Linklater first met the late director around the time Pennell’s breakout film, “Last Night at the Alamo,” was making the festival rounds prior to being distributed nationally in 1984. The two became friends as Pennell’s decline hastened and Mr. Linklater’ s (and the Austin film community’s) cachet began to gain steam in the early ’90s. “I caught Eagle kind of on his tail end,” Mr. Linklater said. “I was on the ascent and he was on the descent. He had his chances earlier and things hadn’t really gone well. I learned a lot from Eagle. Some from his mistakes.”
Pennell’s performance-driven portraits of life on the Texas working-class margins are a consistent lot. As independent film (a term that wasn’t in the hype dictionary when Pennell began making pictures in the mid-’70s) became synonymous to some degree with directorial audacity, Pennell’s leisurely paced, gently observant, and visually restrained movies remained conceptually low-fi. “Louis Black, the editor of the Austin Chronicle, is quoted as saying, ‘Every Eagle film seemed like a great first movie,'” Mr. Linklater said. Ironically, Pennell’s actual first feature, 1979’s “The Whole Shootin’ Match,” has effectively been a lost film for at least the last decade.
Beginning today, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will present “The Whole Shootin’ Match” in a new high-definition restoration that confirms the rough-hewn brilliance of Pennell’s storytelling gifts. The film is an episodic and good-natured amble built around Frank and Lloyd (Sonny Carl Davis and Lou Perryman, respectively), a pair of good ol’ boy dreamers trying to reconcile the need to make a buck (and, in Frank’s case, the relative flexibility of marriage vows) with the pursuit of having themselves a time, the Lone Star State way. Prone to get-rich-quick schemes, short workdays, and realistically awkward honky-tonk come-on’s and dust-ups, Frank and Lloyd share an abundant, natural, and easy-going joie de vivre that is endearing and wholly unpatronizing in its presentation.
It was also influential in ways undreamed of in 1979. “Legend has it that when Robert Redford saw ‘Whole Shootin’ Match,’ he put it out as the kind of work to champion at the formation of the Sundance Film Festival,” Mr. Linklater said. Mr. Redford has also gone on record saying that Pennell’s first feature inspired him to establish the Sundance Institute’s filmmaker development labs.
Shot in grainy black-and-white on weekends for a measly $30,000, “The Whole Shootin’ Match” sustains a refreshingly real and unassuming mood through its nuanced characters, not via complex camera coverage or “look at me” self-congratulatory direction. Pennell “loved his characters and his idea of filmmaking was character based,” Mr. Linklater said. “That’s his DNA. It’s in his art and the way he approached storytelling. That’s what I always related to.”
According to Mr. Linklater, the fatal thirst that was also in Pennell’s DNA was only partly to blame for his ostensible failure to trade up in budget and concept after his initial successes. “In our culture, we strive for growth and bigness,” Mr. Linklater said. “It was other people’s egos and ideas of success that we projected onto him. I think Eagle just sort of had a niche, an operating level that worked for him. When he had bigger opportunities, maybe he kind of sabotaged them because he didn’t feel like he belonged there, you know? He had a deal at Warner Bros. but nothing really came of it. I think he felt more comfortable on a $35,000 budget with a crew working on weekends piecing together a movie.”
Today, the post-Sundance American independent filmmaking scene increasingly resembles a farm system for Hollywood or a high-visibility arena for mammoth auteur egos.
“There needs to be room in the indie film world for the renegade artist who’s working out of his backyard and making something unique. Eagle should be one of the patron saints of American independent film,” said Mr. Linklater, the man whose own feature debut, “Slacker,” sent a generation of upstart filmmakers scrambling for cameras and film stock. “In my world, he is.”
Through November 21 (70 Lincoln Center Plaza, at Broadway at West 65th Street, 212-875-5601).