With the Academy Awards coming up again for us movie fans tomorrow night, it’s interesting to note today that a number of movies and one TV series have been made over the past half century that either feature Houston as a setting or use its locales as the site for some anonymous or “other place” story. Unfortunately, only “Terms of Endearment” with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson survive as first-rate films. The others, unless we give Hollywood fame walks to John Wayne for playing himself again in “Hellfighters” – and to Goldie Hawn, for doing a pretty good job in “The Sugarland Express”, are all pretty much garbage can liners and bird-cage catchers.
OK, maybe, “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” also belongs on our short list of acceptable effort, But this is Houston, not LaGrange.
Annotation: “The Sugarland Express” was made in 1974. Since that time, the good people on the City Council of that booming Houston suburb had separated their town’s name into the two words: “Sugar Land”. If anyone out there knows when and why they took this step, please leave a comment on this column to explain it, or else, e-mail me at houston.buff37@gmail.com. – Inquiring minds want to know.
Here’s the a link to the probably incomplete list of Houston-based or connected films compiled on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_set_in_Houston
Here are the VHS covers to a few of the few Houston efforts and some brief comment:
1983
They used a nice neighborhood near Rice to film this story of a middle-aged mother, her relationship with her coming of age daughter, and her flirtation with the astronaut bachelor neighbor,
1968
Who can pass on “The Duke”? I never said I didn’t like to watch John Wayne playing Red Adair, if he were really John Wayne?
1987-88
Houston Knights Cast
What a stinker of a show! – The only aspect that “HK” got right were those spot on puffy 80s doos!
1977
They should have re-made this movie after the 2005 World Series and re-cast the murder victims.
1974
One more time: Why and when did this city change its name from “Sugarland” to Sugar Land”???
1956
How could a production team that had the common sense to cast veteran character actor Edward Arnold as a villain actually boil this movie into the exploding rotten egg it came to be? I don’t know, but they did it. I say I don’t know, but that’s just my nicer side as a critic oozing out. We all know how they did it: Single scene takes on a badly written and barely acted script were a good start. Then they went to every cliché about Houston as an overgrown hick, cowboy town and quickly found the shallow water in the pool of deep thought among criminal minds. If we are going to make a movie about Houston, it needs to be about a bunch of bumpkins trying to steal billions of barrels of oil. Right?
Oh well, if you find that Wikipedia left out your favorite Houston movie, let us hear from you. And if you have written a good script about the Houston we really are, please contact Martin Scorsese, or the Cohen Brothers, at your agent’s earliest convenience. We need to upgrade our city’s movie resume’.
Tags: Movies Made in Houston
The Pecan Park Eagle 
March 1, 2014 at 4:05 pm |
Bill: The town has always been Sugar Land with the two words separated; it appears that way in the town seal of incorporation in 1959. Only in the movie does the name appear as one word. In 1894, Mark Belt, Texas was officially renamed Pear Land, but soon evolved into Pearland–which newcomers invariably mispronounce as “PEARL-und.” The movie Brewster McCloud was also filmed in Houston at the Astrodome, UH, and other locations.
March 1, 2014 at 5:02 pm |
Thanks, Tom, It wasn’t just the “Sugarland Express” movie that made me think the history of the singular spelling as preceding the two-word form. When the great hgh school running back Ken Hall was tearing up the playing fields of this area back in the early 1950s, I followed his exploits carefully in the Houston Post as the star from “Sugarland”. We also drove through “Sugarland”: with the city limits expressed in singular form constantly on our trips to see my grandmother in Beeville.
A few minutes ago, I used my archives site to check out how the newspapers handled the spelling back in 1952 and found nothing but the singular “Sugarland” spelling over all the hundreds of references I pulled up to view. Perhaps, people just didn’t care as much back then, but “Sugarland” was far more real than a movie producer getting it wrong once. Your information simply makes it more puzzling than before.
March 1, 2014 at 5:31 pm
Bill: I consulted my high school’s yearbook, the Gusher, and found that Pearland got beat by Sugarland (Kenny Hall) 47-13 in 1953. Perhaps when the town incorporated in 1959, they officially separated the two words.
March 1, 2014 at 4:10 pm |
Night Game, starring Roy Scheider
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097971/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_50
a fairly lame made-for-HBO movie in 1989 about a creep who only murdered when an Astros LHP was the winning pitcher. It had some good Astrodome/Astros footage interspersed and shots from the Galveston Bay area. They actually spent money to dress up the old Broadway Theatre in Galveston that was showing porno movies at the time to make it a respectable well-lit movie house for a couple of scenes in the film. If you like to spot area landmarks or just love to remember the Astros in their rainbow uniforms, it’s worth a watch. Otherwise, the 4.9 out of 10 rating at imdb.com is pretty accurate.
March 1, 2014 at 4:48 pm |
The David Lindsey murder mystery, “Mercy”, was set in Houston, with many detailed descriptions of the Houston landscape and settings. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. It was made into a movie starring Ellen Barkin, but it apparently was filmed in Toronto, Canada.
March 1, 2014 at 6:45 pm |
“Bad News Bears in Breaking Training,” which I believe was the first (maybe the second) sequel to the original “Bad News Bears” has some great Astrodome footage. It also had cameos by several Astros – including J.R. Richard, Enos Cabell, and Bob Watson, among others – in the “Let them play, let them play” scene. The movie is neither good, nor is it an outright stinker, but the Dome footage makes worth at least one viewing.
March 1, 2014 at 8:30 pm |
The Astrodome scenes in “Bad News Bears in Breaking Training” were shot 4/3/1977 between games of a doubleheader against the Padres. A baseball practice scene was shot at Bayland Park. A scene was shot at Texas Pipe Bending on Galveston Rd., supposedly where the coach was working.
March 1, 2014 at 10:29 pm |
The third highest grossing film ever shot in Houston was Reality Bites, I think. There have been dozens of others of various success, but any serious list would have to include Urban Cowboy, Rushmore, Robo Cop 2, Powder, Tree of Life, Jason’s Lyric and The Thief Who Came to Dinner.
As to Sugar Land, the City will firmly and happily tell you that it has NEVER been one word. I grew up in Sugar Land/Mo. City. They have no control over people who don’t care to learn how it’s spelled.
March 1, 2014 at 11:25 pm |
That being expressed, I must first include that the list referenced to Wikipedia here must be a fairly serious one. It includes all the films you reference in chronological order.
As for “Sugar Land”, and once upon a time before I think many of you were born, the Associated Press and hundreds of American newspapers readily printed stories on a routine basis that referred to the place as “Sugarland”. While I share your enthusiasm for the fact that those people who don’t care to learn how to spell are a vexation, random misspelling by careless individuals fails to curb my curiosity for the reason(s) that a time existed when all spelling in supposedly literate print media was 100% on the “Sugarland” side.
Check out a few pages of collected reference history and see what was going on back in 1952, for example:
http://newspaperarchive.com/tags/ken-hall-sugarland?ndt=by&pey=1952&py=1951
The question goes on, insufficiently addressed by us all beyond theory. Although it may have been hypothetically answered by Tom Hunter, who posted this possibility earlier in this link of comments:
“Bill: I consulted my high school’s yearbook, the Gusher, and found that Pearland got beat by Sugarland (Kenny Hall) 47-13 in 1953. Perhaps when the town incorporated in 1959, they officially separated the two words.” – Tom Hunter.
That needs to be researched. If true, it would directly explain why you grew up with “Sugar Land”, and some of us who are older saw only “Sugarland” as we made our own run at maturity in this part of the world.
March 2, 2014 at 12:04 am
My apologies! Upon further review with the news archives, I find that a media search aimed only at “Sugar Land” will also retrieve its own deluge of references, even back to 1951-52. My memory still tells me that the city limit signs from 1951-52 did read “Sugarland”, but my mental images prove nothing without documentation. So, I don’t know. I do know that the Houston Post called it “Sugarland” back in 1952. My only memories of “Sugar Land” are from the 21st century.
Someone knows the whole truth here about Sugarland/Sugar Land. It simply isn’t us, for now.
March 2, 2014 at 2:06 pm |
Need to add Robert Altman’s “Brewster McCloud” in which Shelly Duvall was discovered as a jewelry clerk at a Foley’s in some Houston mall and cast. Bud Cort lives in the Astrodome and flies around it. There are many scenes driving around in Houston and the early 1970s Houston is very much evident. It’s hard to get for some reason though. An Altman classic.
March 2, 2014 at 9:33 pm |
A remastered edition of ‘Brewster’ was released in 2010 on DVD, still available from Amazon. I bought one a couple weeks ago, in a fit of Dome-nostalgia.
March 2, 2014 at 6:44 pm |
Re: The Sugar Land vs Sugarland debate. Sounds like the people in the current city government are too young to know the history. All of research cited above says the spelling Sugarland certainly DID exist.
March 3, 2014 at 2:34 pm |
Thanks for the tip Sue. As for the correct spelling of SL, wouldn’t whatever is noted on the documents establishing the first post office there lend itself to the claim of the first “correct” spelling? Such documents often precede a community’s incorporation.
March 3, 2014 at 2:41 pm |
How could I have forgotten Rushmore? Not only a subtle and creative and biting movie with superb acting, but filmed at St. John’s and Lamar High Schools, right smack in the middle of where I took my dry cleaning for decades at the late, lamented Esprit Cleaners on Westheimer, directly across the street from Lamar High School. (They just closed down about a year ago.) I think the barber shop scenes were filmed in he Heights. I’d say this was the best movie so far shot in Houston.
June 20, 2014 at 6:37 am |
I grew up in SW Houston in the 60’s and I used to visit my grandparents, Harry & Lela McCurdy in Fort Bend County all the time. We would turn off in Stafford to get to their farm on Hwy 6, but I recall the road signs on both Hwy 90A and Hwy 6 spelling Sugar Land with 2 words. There weren’t many movie theaters in SW Houston in those days so we used to drive out to the old Palms Theater across from the Imperial Sugar refinery. As I recall the city limits signs read “Sugar Land” too.
I have lived in Sugar Land for many years now. If you go to the city’s website, there is an section called “What’s In a Name” which explains that while some local businesses have used Sugarland in their names (most notably Sugarland Industries), the name of the community, town and now city has been Sugar Land since 1853 when BF Terry and WJ Kyle bought the Oakland plantation and renamed it the Sugar Land plantation.
More than one website, including Wikipedia, states that Spielberg misspelled the name of the city in Sugarland Express. This is not surprising since he got his geography completely backwards in the movie. His young couple is trying to get to “Sugarland” (which Spielberg places somewhere near the Mexican border) when in fact, they were already in Sugar Land when Goldie sprung her husband from the Jester Pre-Release Center. Perhaps Spielberg was paying homage to Ken Hall who is usually referred to as the “Sugarland Express”. However, if you Google “Ken Hall Sugar Land (or Sugarland)” and click on “Images for Ken Hall”, you will find several newspaper clippings about Hall which spell Sugar Land as 2 words. I will email you copies of the clippings and other contemporary photos which use the correct spelling of Sugar Land.
October 15, 2014 at 6:32 am |
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Movies Made in Houston | The Pecan Park Eagle