Texas Doesn't Care
The Gumaverse website took 2nd place out of 18 in the Accessibility Internet Rally for which it was designed! Since the end of the competition, I’ve been building on the pages, adding content, and trying my best to keep up the high bar of accessibility that my team set. If you haven’t scoped it out yet, now would be a good time because there is new work out today. That URL again is… gumaverse.com
The Fortunate One
I first met Alex Dupree at the Hole in the Wall in Austin. We played on the same bill on a weeknight in the front room, where the window faces out onto Guadalupe St. and toward the University of Texas across the street. This was during one of the many waves of post-Covid easing up, probably sometime after a recent vaccine or booster shot had been made available, when social gatherings were coalescing again in spite or because of their sparse attendance.
I knew people who knew Alex, and I knew he had a record out recently, and I had avoided listening to it because I was and still am sore about Austin music. That night he played solo, with only his voice and a guitar. In the mostly empty bar, surrounded mostly by other people who were also playing that night, Alex stiffed me with the bill for my attention, and I paid all of it.
Alex’s songs are masterfully told vignettes featuring the kind of people we like to hear stories about. He carefully positions his subjects on top of oblique chord changes and then sits back and pushes them around for our amusement using only words, letting their capriciousness, lust, and longing do the rest. His characters are like the best film noir characters: tempted by a brief glimmer of (fake) diamonds, they’ll do almost anything to come out on top. They repeatedly tempt fate even as they are hogtied to it, and they get thrashed accordingly.
The set that night was Thieves-heavy, and I did acquire a copy of the record that evening and start listening. One of my favorite songs has turned out to be “Fortunado,” a delirious recounting of a legendary huckster, a pool hustle gone bad, and one narrator’s search for evidence that any of it might have happened at all. “The past may be different any time you look/God could be rewriting something in his book.” This particular couplet I have carried with me since hearing it for the first time that evening at the Hole in the Wall.
From L-R: Zack Wiggs, Sam Graf, Alex Dupree, and Stephen Patterson on a porch in unincorporated Bastrop County. Photographed on a 1968 Canon TL on Ilford Delta 400 film.
Imagine my delight, then, when Alex told me he wanted to cut a live performance of “Fortunado” on 16mm film. We had worked together on a small project over the summer filming some Texas-centric B-roll to promote a tour, and I had managed to hook him on the format with our results. Not only that, he had been performing the song on the road with his quartet as part of a medley to open his shows, and he wanted to capture the entire medley, which starts solo with a tune called “Texas Doesn’t Care” and slowly builds as the band joins in. He sent me a voice memo of the band rehearsing the medley. It came in at about 8 minutes long.
When shooting on film, the duration of any single shot is limited by how much film can be loaded into the camera. For 16mm film, the maximum amount of film on a roll is 400 feet, or roughly 11 minutes of footage at 24 frames per second. You can buy film in 100ft or 400ft rolls. A small roll only gets you about three minutes, so I knew we’d need a big one to capture the whole medley. At a cost of roughly $500 per roll (to include developing and scanning), I also knew it wasn’t likely that Alex would want to buy more than one.
1x 400’ roll of Kodak Vision3 16mm film. Kodak is more or less the only supplier in the world of fresh motion picture film stock, and this is the exact same stuff used in the movie business. This length of film only gets you about 11 minutes of footage—including slates, false starts, mistakes, etc.
The Heat Is On
The nature of the tightrope walk was starting to take shape: four musicians must be able to perform an eight-minute piece (which includes two solos/improvisations) without making any mistakes or stopping. To preserve the integrity of the performance (and the sync of the sound to the image), it needs be captured by the camera in a single, non-stop take. If we stopped mid-take for any reason, there would not be enough film left to try again. The audio, too, should be captured professionally and at a high fidelity, which is to say the whole band needs to be mic’d up, but with a careful eye to making sure the image is not polluted by mic stands, cables, etc. all over the place. Oh, and the weather needs to cooperate, the sunlight will have to be perfectly positioned, and we’ll need somewhere to do it.
Rehearsing the music and camera movements.
We ended up at my neighbor Phil’s house on the afternoon of September 14, 2024. The porch on the backside of his hand-built, all-wood home was the perfect size for a small group of musicians, and crucially it faced toward the west.
Michael Landon came out from Estuary Recording (where the Workingman’s Guma record was cut) to capture the audio, and Bridgette as always helped me keep the loose ends organized—everything from keeping ice in the cooler to holding the gray card and slating our single take for the camera.
We practiced about four times over the course of the afternoon. The heat had been raging for the entire month, and as you can see from the picture above compared to the film, everyone came with a change of clothes. The band had been touring this material and knew it pretty well, but it was my only opportunity to plot out eight minutes’ worth of camera work. The previous day, I had set up a bunch of instruments in empty chairs on my own patio and practiced looking at them through the camera while I listened to Alex’s original voice memo.
Obviously a single, static shot would not be interesting enough. But traditional cameras are heavy, and handheld filming is 1000x more difficult than our supercomputer smartphones let on. There’s also the issue of focus, which must be done manually, by eye. Therefore, from a static tripod position, using a combination of only the basic camera movements (pan, tilt) and the zoom lens, the goal was to find a healthy number of interesting compositions—a master wide shot of the whole band, close up on one person, two people, three people—and also chart a course between all of those setups that hopefully corresponded to the movement and buildup of energy in the music without drawing any unnecessary attention to the presence of the camera (i.e. away from the band) through sloppy or choppy motion. I had to get it right on the first and only try.
“Well, we’re ready to do it on your call,” Alex said for the second time as the clock ran past 6pm, our estimated “best light scenario.” A large, bulbous cloud had moved in front of the setting sun, and the light was flat for the moment. The band was in position on the porch, and Michael was secreted away inside, monitoring the audio recording. It was still over 90F, we had a half hour of usable daylight left, and we had not begun shooting yet. Zack, the steel player, had a gig that evening and had to get on the road no later than 7. About five minutes later, Alex said again, “Just waiting on your call.” I took one last look at the searing edge of the cloud and turned to face the group. “OK, let’s do it. Roll sound. Camera is… rolling! Marker, Bridgette, and… action, Alex.” I put my eye up to the viewfinder, and dappled sunlight flared up on the porch wall just as he started to sing.
Roughly eight minutes passed, all of it caught on camera. We had about 80 feet of film left at the end of our single take to get extra footage of Phil’s place. I ran wildly across his property holding the 24-lb. Arriflex on my shoulder and grabbing as much as I could before twilight set in. With the camera next to your head, you can hear the mechanism as well as the film being pulled through it, and in the middle of a shot (in fact, the handheld panning shot that opens the film), I heard the end of the roll pass through the camera’s gate and zip up to the other side.
Having these extra images (plus the B-roll from earlier in the summer) to use as stitches meant that even within the parameters of my single take, I was able to plan some important inserts (like the closeup on Zack during his pedal steel solo) and cuts (like using the B-roll to hide the brief moment where I tore the camera off the tripod and ran over to him) that keep the whole piece engaging and entertaining, even as it starts slow, close-up, and direct—just like the music does.
I tapped our mutual music friend and sometime poster doodler Eamon Fogarty to draw title cards for all of the credits. One of the organizing ideas that Alex kept returning to throughout this process was of obscure or lost documentary footage, something that looks like it was ripped out of a larger film about who knows what. It certainly helps that 16mm innately looks like old documentaries (a strong reference point for this project visually, musically, and geographically was of course Heartworn Highways). Small touches like the hand-drawn titles—or even just adding another collaborator to the mix at all—help to further the kind of mythology that we are laying out. As I’ve written before on this newsletter, I believe a sense of the mythological—some greater energy or force that encapsulates, positions, and stretches beyond the artist—is imperative to breathing life into contemporary art. Call it mythology, “timelessness,” or something else; if it’s absent, you’re just looking at “content.”
You can see more technical information and BTS photos, as well as view the film, all on the Gumaverse website. Or head to alexdupree.com to watch it there and support Alex’s music. He makes (and sells) great records.
What Am I Watching?
It’s true: the man is dead. And while 2025 began for many by celebrating classics like Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, or any of a plethora of iconic interview clips from the last forty years, there’s a film in David Lynch’s oeuvre that is just so far out that it is routinely (and unfairly) elided from conversations about the master. In the tiny-but-mighty club of directors who have had entire styles named after them while they were still alive, can anything be described as less “Lynchian” than a G-rated film released by the Walt Disney Company? And how is it that the very same film could be described by its director as “the most experimental film” he ever made?
The Straight Story (1999) is based on the true story of Alvin Straight, who, upon learning that his estranged brother had suffered a stroke, decided to patch things up. At 73 and suffering from diabetes and emphysema, unable to hold a driver license, his only recourse to see his brother was to ride a 1966 John Deere lawn mower some 240 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit him. It took him six weeks. There is not much to this story other than this unbelievable frame on which it rests. And yet at the same time it’s profoundly American—that is to say Lynchian. What could be more representative of that strange brand of American ingenuity than a geriatric, sick man with no license deciding to strike out on the shoulder of one of this country’s interstate highways, refusing assistance and defying explanation for over a month to take a trip that anyone else could have made in an afternoon? Alvin Straight is played here by veteran character actor Richard Farnsworth in his final role; the film is all the more moving knowing that he was terminally ill with bone cancer at the time of shooting, in immense pain, and would commit palliative suicide the following year.
Fans of Lynch will be unable not to see his fingerprints on everything, including Sissy Spacek’s poignant (and often cringe-worthy) take on Straight’s developmentally disabled daughter, and the inclusion of Harry Dean Stanton at all. But there is not a whiff of irony to be found here, no wink at the audience, no cynical expectation of dark, amoral underlayment: this is a bona-fide, family-friendly, G-rated film from Disney. It’s heartwarming. It’s beautiful. It’s a good cry. Always remember David Lynch (1946-2025).