Film News

Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston in a Texas 'tree'

While Brad Pitt is busy filming Terrence Malick's Tree of Life in Smithville and his current mate, Angelina Jolie, and he spend downtime in a 300-acre ranch they are said to have purchased near there, his former paparazzi-dodging partner Jennifer Aniston is also eyeing Texas. According to Variety, her production company, Echo Films, has The Alamo director John Lee Hancock giving a rewrite to The Goree Girls, an adaptation of a Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth about a falsely convicted Texas inmate who, back in the Forties, gets the other gals in the prison to form a country & western band. Aniston hopes to star... Back in Smithville, Malick has apparently found the young boy he has been looking for for almost two years as part of casting calls crisscrossing the state for an until recently hush-hush "Hollywood family film." A Wichita Falls Times Record News article says it's a boy from that area, whose family has been required to sign a confidentiality agreement, of course.

Texas TV lives and dies after strike

As we told you last time, Friday Night Lights is back on the NBC schedule for a third year under a deal that has satellite provider DirecTV in the mix. What we didn't tell you is it's for only 13 episodes, and DirecTV gets them all first, beginning Oct. 1, on its channel the 101. The show won't air on NBC until 2009. Will we see lots of bootlegs flying around the Web in the intervening months? Expect filming in Austin to commence this summer... Meanwhile, count HBO's Dallas-set (and partially filmed) 12 Miles of Bad Road as an official casualty of the Writers Guild strike. Even with episodes in the can at a reported cost of $25 million, HBO has nixed the series from Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and Harry Thomason (Designing Women). The pair sent out copies of the episodes to critics (hey, where's mine?) in an effort to revive the show, which stars Lily Tomlin as a Dallas real estate agent. HBO execs apparently had post-strike second thoughts about a show set in Texas. Oh, and still no word if the Austin-set and titled CW medical show pilot Austin Golden Hour will actually shoot here.

And the rest ...

Missed the premiere of Jacob Vaughan and Bryan Poyser's The Cassidy Kids on IFC this past Sunday? You can catch it again throughout this month. The schedule is at www.bside.com/about/choiceindies... Filmmaker Kat Candler (jumping off bridges) is teaching Script to Screen and Teen Filmmaking classes starting in May at the Austin School of Film. More at www.austinfilmschool.org... Reel Women is seeking crew for the soon-to-shoot short "The Listmaker," based on Indiana Adams' winning script in the group's recent contest.

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