The Whole Shootin' Match

　
1.

A few days before his fiftieth birthday, Eagle Pennell, the Texas film maker, died. He was, according to the obituary of his friend, Lewis Black, a "hopeless drunk." A few days before he died, Pennell was living under a freeway underpass in Houston, Texas, begging on the streets for beer money, and deriding those who sought help a Rehab Centers as "pussies." This is not surprising. When Roger Ebert went for a walk with Pennell at Telluride after a screening of The Whole Shootin’ Match, the critic, who was no stranger to the subject himself, told Pennell that the film was "about alcoholism". Pennell didn’t disagree with him.

　

2.

Pennell made two films that are now regarded as successful and moving: The Whole Shootin’ Match (1978) and Last Night at the Alamo (1984). Both movies involve drunks, the lead roles played in each picture, by Sonny Davis and Lou Perryman. The Whole Shootin’ Match involves Perryman and Davis as playing losers, somewhat like a boozing Laurel and Hardy. Their "get rich" schemes are failures and they seem always one step away from succumbing to hopelessness – at the end of the film, the character played with a perpetual grin by Sonny Davis tries to blow out his brains. He is unsuccessful, but, then, of course, he doesn’t do anything right. In Last Night at the Alamo, a low-end bar in Houston is threatened with demolition. The bar’s habitues gather to defend the bar and one of them, armed with a shotgun, tries to rally the men to fight the bulldozers scheduled to demolish the place in the morning. But, of course, the barflies just get hopelessly drunk instead. The poster for the film announced: Some face the future head on, at the Alamo, they’re facing the future dead drunk.

For yeas, Pennell tried to produce a script that he had written about the Texas historical figure, James Fannin. Fannin was the feckless commander who lost the battle at Coleto Creek with the result that he and 344 of his men were butchered by Santa Ana and his troops at Goliad. He’s the guy who didn’t send reinforcements to the Alamo.

　

3.

Eagle Pennell was born Glenn Irwin Pinnell in 1952. His father was an Aggie – he taught engineering at Texas A & M and Pennell was raised at College Station. Pinnell was a poor student. He took courses in radio, film and Tv at Texas A & M but dropped out in his junior year. For awhile, he worked producing sports highlight films for a company in Austin. Management of the company let Pinnell borrow its equipment to work on his own films on the weekend. He made a couple of short documentaries including one about rodeo riders. Sometime in his early twenties, Pinnell changed his name to "Eagle Pennell". People said that he had prominent nose like an eagle’s beak and he adopted the last name from a character in his favorite film, John Ford’s She wore a Yellow Ribbon – in that movie, there is a Lieutenant Pennell who doesn’t get the girl. (Lou Perryman on a commentary track says that the young man was a huge fan of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and also paid homage to that film maker with the name that he chose for himself.)

Pennell was friends with an eccentric and wealthy rare bookseller in Austin, John H. Jenkins. Jenkins, who specialized in rare books about Texas, financed most of The Whole Shootin’ Match. The movie was shot on weekends using borrowed 16 mm equipment from Pennell’s employer. One participant in the process said that the movie cost $6000 to make with any $25,000 spent post-production.

The Whole Shootin’ Match played at Park City, Utah at Robert Redford’s first film festival. Redford was so impressed with the movie that he formed the Sundance Foundation to support independent film making and, further, changed to mission of the Park City festival to premiering independently produced films. In this respect, The Whole Shootin’ Match, a film that no one has seen, is one of the most consequential movies ever produced in this country. The doors seemed to have blasted open for Pennell. But, true to form, he wasn’t able to exploit his success. Hollywood was interested in his screenplay about James Fannin, one of history’s ultimate losers. After a couple years trying to sell that idea, Pennell wrote a road-movie and went to New York City to pitch it to a production company. Unfortunately, Pennell got blind drunk, tried to grope the female executive assigned to the project, and, then, went home in disgrace.

The next year, Pennell turned up in Saudi Arabia where he made industrial films. He saved enough money to partially finance Closing Night at the Alamo (1984). The picture was released at the Berliln Film Festival where it won a number of awards and the movie was highly regarded by critics. But Pennell subverted his success by heavy drinking. Nonetheless, he managed to direct three more feature films. Ice House (1989) was a crime film vehicle for Melissa Gilbert, the child star of Little House on the Prairie produced by her then-husband – the picture sank like a stone. House full of Soul (1990) and Doc’s Full Service (1994) are said to be films about losers struggling with alcoholism. Elements of these films seem to be surreal but these effects are, generally, the result of Pennell’s incompetence in the way the pictures are shot and edited. None of these pictures is available to be seen. Last Night at the Alamo exists on VHS – copies cost 180 dollars.

After the failure of Doc’s Full Service in 1994 (the film was shown at South by Southwest in Austin but nowhere else), Pennell devoted his time to drinking himself to death. He accomplished this task in 2002. At the time of his death, a script that he had written, My Dog bit Elvis, has been accepted by the Independent Television studio and, in fact, had been funded.

　

4.

Pennell was a determined man. There is a story about how the final scenes in The Whole Shootin’ Match were produced. The film was shot in chronological sequence and Pennell was running out of money. He took his cast and crew early on Saturday morning to Balcones Canyons National Wildlife Reserve and they shot the last rolls of their film on a foggy afternoon and early evening several miles down one of the trails in the park. Pennell’s cast and crew all had jobs to which they had to return to on Monday and he was afraid that if he didn’t get the end of the film in the can that weekend, the picture would never be finished.

Pennell persuaded everyone to wait for him as he made a desperate effort to get enough film to finish the movie. He knew that his financier, the rare book dealer John Jenkins was at a soiree at the LBJ library about 40 miles away. Pennell drove to the library, met with Jenkins, got some additional cash, and, then, drove to Austin to pick six or seven 100 foot rolls of film. He got back to Balcones where his cast and crew had spent a miserable night shivering and cold, although half-drunk, on the mountain called the Devil’s Backbone. Everyone sat around until the morning fog and light matched the evening fog and light and Pennell got his last shots which are the final shots in the movie.

All of the locations in the film were places that were loaned to Pennell for his production. The scenes involving the belligerent old man in the wheelchair were shot at the J. Frank Dobie ranch, at a cottage that is offered to Texas writers who need solitude to complete their work. (Dobie was the doyenne of Texas historical writers and a friend of Jenkins.)

Jenkins was shot in the back of the head in April 1989. He was writing a biography of one of the Republic of Texas’ presidents, Edward Burleson. The murder was covered-up as a suicide – to shoot himself the right-handed Jenkins would have had to fire the gun with his left hand, muzzle pressed to the back of his skull. Further, after dead, he would have had to hidden the gun so successfully that it was never again found. (Weird things happened in Jenkins life – his book warehouse burned in 1985 resulting in the loss of millions of dollars worth of irreplaceable rare books. Jenkins, then, became a professional poker player while continuing to write about Texas history and about a publishing house as well.) Jenkins can be seen around the edges of some of scenes in the film, particularly those in the Scoot Inn.

　

5.

The Whole Shootin’ Match is not a flawless film by any means. Scenes shot in allegedly moving trucks at night are theatrical and either charming or clueless depending upon your perspective. (Pennell never developed, or sought to develop, much technical proficiency). The middle of the film sags, particularly the dream sequence that is, then, followed by footage that exactly recapitulates the dream – it’s not clear why Pennell shot the dream twice and the scenes are amateurish in all respect. The dream sequence follows a scene inexplicable even to the people who were in the movie – this is a scene in which Eagle Pennell with his girlfriend at the time and a third actor watch a Dallas Cowboy’s game and mug outrageously at the screen. (About this sequence, Lou Perryman asked: "What was he trying to show?" And "who the hell was running the camera?") Perryman and Davis both admit on the commentary track on the 2006 DVD revival and restoration of the film that they began the picture as rank amateurs and ended acting very proficiently.

The bar scenes were shot with real barflies at the Scoot Inn, an Austin dive. Pennell shot in the bar very early in the morning so as not to disturb the actual clientele to the greatest extent possible. Davis recalls that the owner of the bar was an inveterate drunk and very prone to seizures in the morning. Davis recalls finding him on his back in the toilet flopping around and foaming at the mouth. He had been incontinent and tiles were wet and stained with shit. "He’s just havin’ another one of his strokes," the bar owner’s wife said, dismissing the whole thing as unimportant.

　

6.

Browning wrote that "Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. Or else what’s a heaven for." The context for this famous quote is Browning’s dramatic monologue: "Andrea del Sarto." It may seem odd for me to reference a Victorian poem (1855) in the context of Eagle Pennell’s picaresque film about two alcoholic losers in Texas around 1975. But there is a connection. Andrea del Sarto is not well-known today (or in Browning’s time) because his art is, often, accused of being soulless, spiritually empty – his reach exceeded his gap. Pennell portrays two hapless bar-flies impelled by the hope of striking it rich. Their reach perpetually exceeds their grasp, but their heroism resides in being undeterred by this fact. They are frontiersman on a frontier that is now closed and has no need for their ingenuity, fierce independence, and their general cussedness. (Frederick Jackson Turner, a Wisconsin professor, declared that the frontier, an idea more than a place, that had dominated the American imagination for two centuries closed in 1891 – Turner presented this thesis in 1893. On the frontier, hope outstripped reality: anyone could strike it rich, or by cutting the sod with a plow bring rain to an arid land and turn the desert into realm of exquisite beauty and fruitfulness – all you needed was hard-work and courage and you could make the desert bloom. This open land, a territory of immense promise and possibility, closed in 1891, but the hard-scrabble heroes or anti-heroes in Pennell’s film never got the memo. They remain dreamers, endlessly scheming to grasp a treasure that remains forever outside their reach.) Pennell’s film about these men is also a film about the new frontier of independent movie-making – a man with a camera and some friends working on weekends could make a movie that would enthrall millions and earn him untold riches, the love of beautiful women, and monstrous piles of ice-white cocaine. The dreams of wealth that the figures in his film express are, also, the dream that a movie shot for $6000 could make six million dollars. Hollywood is the new Sutter’s Mill, the new Klondike – Easy Rider made for fifty-thousand dollars grossed a thousand times what it cost; later, Richard Linklater with Dazed and Confused, another Texas movie made with Texas actors would come to rule Hollywood. Who says lightning can’t strike? It strikes all the time. And, so, the dream of quick and easy wealth expressed by Pennell’s dreamers is a version of the same lunge toward fame and fortune that the film itself represents.

　

7.

Does crudeness guarantee authenticity?

　

8.

The King of Texas is a documentary about Eagle Pennell, premiered by SXSW in Austin in 2007. The film was directed by Rene Pinnell, Eagle’s nephew (and the son of his brother Charles Pinnell). In the movie, Charles Pinnell recalls that his brother showed-up at his house in the middle of the night dead-drunk and pounded on his door. Charles talked to his brother for awhile. Eagle was an unpredictable mean drunk and so Charles wouldn’t let him in the house. He recalls Eagle staggering away in the darkness.

Eagle died two months later. After his burial, Charles Pinnell had a nightmare. Eagle had come to his house and was standing outside. Charles let him inside and Eagle went to the bathroom to take a shower. He was trying to wash the mortician’s make-up and rouge off his face. The whole house smelled of death. The corpse was decomposing. Charles told Eagle: "You have to go. You’re dead now." Eagle wouldn’t leave. The stench got worse. "I don’t want to be dead," Eagle said. And he began to cry.