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The Texas Round-Up
Notes from working in Texas film.


The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was shot on 16mm reversal stock in a Round Rock farmhouse in August.
Former UT film students made it near Round Rock in the summer of 1973 for about $140,000, on 16mm stock rated ISO 25 and a very small lighting package.


Blank Check’s castle is a real Austin house, and it started life as a water tower.
Blank Check is set in Indiana and was shot in central Texas: an Austin castle, a San Antonio bank hall and theme park, and a Dallas fountain.


Shorts was shot at Robert Rodriguez’s own stages in a decommissioned Austin airport.
Rodriguez took eight credits on one studio picture and made it at his own stages in a decommissioned Austin airport. The locations and the cost model.


The Best Performing Movies Shot in Texas; just the numbers.
Shot in Texas: the 50 ranks every feature with more than half its principal photography in Texas by worldwide gross, counting down from 50 to 1 through August 2027.


The Alamo built the largest film set in North America outside Austin, and then lost the release.
Fifty-one acres and seventy structures near Dripping Springs, a January to June 2003 shoot, and what the record actually says about why the picture did not find its audience.


Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino ran two features through one Austin studio in five months.
Planet Terror and Death Proof were shot back to back at Troublemaker Studios in 2006. The locations, the dates, and the one sequence that had to leave Texas.


Austin and Central Texas: every independent screen a filmmaker can book.
Twelve rooms between Waco and Kerrville that will program or rent to a filmmaker, four more to call first, with the path in, the format they take, and what changed this year.


Man of the House got something no other film has gotten from the University of Texas.
Man of the House shot on the University of Texas campus in late 2003, using the actual UT name, stadium, band and cheerleaders. The locations, the access it took, and what a live game day costs a schedule.


What's shooting in Texas: September 2026.
September's ledger of what's actually shooting in Texas, by region, with a named source on every line. Plus two corrections to the August edition.


Where Texas doubles for somewhere else; foreign and domestic.
The Davis Mountains for the Rockies, the Hill Country for Provence, Palo Duro for the Outback, Caddo Lake for the Amazon, and four European villages that shouldn't exist here. With the honest limits.


Stage space in Texas, honestly.
What actually exists, who runs it, and what's still a rendering. Austin, Fort Worth, Dallas, Midlothian, Bastrop, San Marcos, Mansfield, sorted honestly, no rates.
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