Eagle Pennell (r) and Kim Henkel

Legendary Texas filmmaker Eagle Pennell (pictured on the right) died in his sleep of heart failure on Saturday night while in Houston. A perennial fixture on the scene, Pennell was making movies in Texas back in the years before making movies in Texas was cool. His debut film in 1978, The Whole Shootin’ Match, and his 1983 follow-up, Last Night at the Alamo (co-written with Texas Chainsaw Massacre‘s Kim Henkel, pictured on the left), were both lauded at Sundance and remain, to this day, examples of independent and regional filmmaking at its finest. Pennell’s remaining output was slender, but the stories about him are legion — and so are the memories. R.I.P., Eagle. (See “Page Two,” for Louis Black’s reminiscences.)

This article appears in July 26 • 2002.

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Marjorie Baumgarten is a film critic and contributing writer at The Austin Chronicle, where she has worked in many capacities since the paper's founding in 1981. She served as the Chronicle's Film Reviews editor for 25 years.