XRAY SPECS: Chafed Elbows (1966)
Isn’t that what every artist wants? To do the thing in the way they want to do it and have everyone they care about want that for them, too?
Tex Gresham
Tex Gresham is an award-winning screenwriter, novelist, and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. His books include Sunflower, Heck Texas, and This Is Strange June. His debut feature, MUSTARD (which he wrote, directed, edited and acted in), is available to stream for free on Vimeo. He’s online at www.squeakypig.com and on Twitter as @thatsqueakypig.
XRAY SPECS: Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker
This film is a Freudian’s dream. The way Cheryl constantly offers him milk isn’t exactly subtle.
X-R-A-Y SPECS: All-American Murder
All-American Murder isn’t bad, but it’s almost an extraterrestrial product, a movie made for humans by something that has no relationship to the physical universe.
X-R-A-Y SPECS: BLOODY NOSE, EMPTY POCKETS
Like Terminators or cockroaches, dive bars will always rise again. They’re one of the last bastions of organic and spontaneous social connection.
X-R-A-Y SPECS: ZARDOZ (1974)
I knew I was going to love it when the head started to vomit guns. The tone felt like a Monty Python film. Is that a common comparison?
TEX GRESHAM on film with Rebecca Gransden
What film, or films, made the first deep impression on you? This might come as a shock, but I think watching E.T. as a kid rewired my brain, changed my DNA, shaped my life’s path. I would rewind the ending over and over and just bawl my eyes out as the ship made a rainbow across the sky. I wasn’t just sad—it was joy as well. And I didn’t understand how I could have two feelings at the same time, and how this movie could do that to me. Very often film is one of the ways we first come…
LOVEBIRD by Tex Gresham
Most people have no idea what goes on in retirement communities. They don’t care to know. When your kids dropped you off at Del Largo Sueño a few years go, they made tearful promises to visit, but you never saw a tear fall. They faked guilt to hide the happiness that they wouldn’t have to watch you die. Your son, Clifford, and his new wife didn’t stay long enough for you to unpack and hang your sweaters. Your daughter waited around, and then she asked for “gas money.” She’d been biting her cheek all day, her eyes sunken like little…
CUTTING ROOM by Tex Gresham
The woods stopped being an enchanted place where the sound of animals scurrying through undiscovered territory felt light and natural. Sunlight blocked, trees strangling the brassy tones into a steel-tinged umber. A fluorescence coated every surface, something we’d walked into, a transition from scene to setting. Maybe it was the deer that brought this change––maybe it was something else. Limp and drained, the deer’s face was a shocked mask of deadness. Blood spumed out its crooked mouth like seafoam on the surf of a slaughterhouse floor. I was a boy out hunting with his dad and uncle in the humid…