Robert Altman shot Dr. T & the Women in Dallas, and cast the city.
Updated: 1 day ago
TEXAS TOP 50; #49 Dr. T & the Women (1999)
If you are looking for where Dr. T & the Women was filmed, the answer is Dallas, for nine of its ten weeks. Robert Altman put the production up in the city from mid-November 1999 and worked through early February 2000, then took one more week in the desert for the ending.
What separates it from every other studio picture that has passed through Dallas is that Altman was not using the city to play somewhere else. He was making a film about Dallas, with a Texan writing it, and the locations carry the argument.
What was shot where.
The Dallas Arboretum's A Woman's Garden holds the wedding sequence, the set piece the whole film builds toward. It is a real public garden on White Rock Lake, and it is still the location the Arboretum gets asked about.
NorthPark Center is the other landmark, and the film uses it specifically rather than generically. Kate, played by Farrah Fawcett, moves through the stores near the Neiman Marcus court, then ends up in the fountain by the Dillard's court, in the scene everyone remembers. If you have walked that mall you know exactly which fountain.
The Conspiracy Museum appears in the studio's own production notes as a setting. Beyond that the production worked across the city rather than concentrating in one district.
One thing to get right: the film was not shot entirely in Texas. The production notes describe nine weeks in Dallas and then a one week shoot in the desert, replicating a scrappy Mexican village, for the closing sequence. The location is not named in anything I can find.
The Texan who wrote it.
Anne Rapp is the reason this film knows the city, and her path into it is the best production story attached to the picture.
She grew up in Estelline, a Panhandle town of about three hundred people, the third of four children of a cotton farmer and a schoolteacher. She took a mathematics degree from Wayland Baptist College in Plainview. She worked as a travel agent in Austin and at a recording studio in Dallas. Then she spent fifteen years as a script supervisor, on Tender Mercies and on Places in the Heart among others, which is to say she spent fifteen years standing next to directors watching how films actually get made.
Altman read a short story she published called In Case of Fire and signed her to a three year writing contract. She wrote an episode of his series Gun, then Cookie's Fortune, then this. The studio's notes describe her as a native Texan and former Dallasite, and quote her directly: "What Bob and I were trying to show was a way of life, a world in Dallas that's really like no other." And: "I've got a lot of Dallas woman in me."
A script supervisor from a Panhandle cotton town wrote a Robert Altman film about Highland Park society. That is a Texas film career, and it is not the shape anyone would draw on purpose.
Farrah Fawcett came home for it.
Fawcett was born in Corpus Christi on February 2, 1947. She went to the University of Texas at Austin from 1965 to 1968, started in microbiology, switched her major to art, and studied under the sculptor Charles Umlauf, whose studio and garden are still open in Austin.
Dr. T was effectively her last major studio film. She made one more feature, The Cookout, in 2004, and otherwise worked in television: Spin City, then The Guardian, which brought her a third Emmy nomination. A Texas actress, thirty-odd years out from the UT art department, in a Texas director's film about Texas women.
Who else is in it.
Richard Gere plays Dr. Sullivan Travis, a Dallas gynecologist adored by his patients and overwhelmed by them. Helen Hunt is the golf pro. Laura Dern, Shelley Long, Kate Hudson, Liv Tyler and Tara Reid fill out an ensemble that is doing the thing Altman ensembles do, which is talk over each other in a way that sounds like a real room.
Reid is worth a note on timing. American Pie had opened on July 9, 1999, four months before this production started, and she arrived in Dallas as one of the most recognizable young faces in the country.
Altman produced alongside James McLindon. Anne Rapp wrote it. Lyle Lovett, a Texan, scored it.
What critics praised.
Roger Ebert wrote that Altman "is more interested in women than any other great director, with the exception of Ingmar Bergman," and that here he "creates a galaxy of Dallas women, old, young, wonderful, crabby, infatuated, independent." He called it Gere's nicest role, and read the film as ironic and satirical rather than hateful toward its subject.
Screen International called it "one of the strangest and, in one way, most extreme of Altman's satires of contemporary America," singled out Helen Hunt, and called Altman "one of the greatest American satirists since Mark Twain."
The money.
Artisan released it on October 13, 2000. Box Office Mojo records $13.1 million domestic and $9.7 million international, for $22.8 million worldwide against a reported $23 million budget. That places it at forty-nine.
My read.
Dallas plays a character here, and it influences all the others you see on screen. That is rarer than it sounds. Most films that shoot in a Texas city are renting its geometry, and the city is interchangeable with three others. Altman was doing the opposite.
The producer's note is Altman's use of the Arboretum, the Women's Garden and NorthPark as crucial locations rather than as backdrops. Those are working public institutions. A garden that hosts real weddings and a mall that has to keep trading do not shut down for a film crew casually, and getting a set piece the size of that wedding into a public garden is a negotiation, not a booking.
If you are working in North Texas, that is the transferable part. The landmark locations here are all somebody's operating business, and the schedule bends to them rather than the other way around.
If you are shooting in Dallas.
North Texas has the crew base, the stage space and the landmark locations to carry a studio picture, and it has had them since long before this film. What it does not have is a shortcut through the institutions that own the good locations.
I have written about where Texas doubles for somewhere else and about stage space in Texas. If you are scoping something in Dallas and want a straight answer about what it takes, start here.
Next in the countdown: number 48.
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