Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino ran two features through one Austin studio in five months.
Updated: Oct 4
TEXAS TOP 50; #47 Grindhouse (2007)
If you are looking for where Grindhouse was filmed, the answer is Austin, and the more useful answer is that both halves were built out of one studio. Robert Rodriguez shot Planet Terror at Troublemaker Studios from May 31 to July 17, 2006. Quentin Tarantino started Death Proof there on August 14 and wrapped October 30. Two features, one base, five months, per the Texas Film Commission’s own filmography.
That is the production story worth keeping. The double bill was a nostalgia exercise about exploitation cinema, and it was made the way exploitation cinema actually got made, which is to say fast, in one place, with the same people.
What was shot where.
The Austin locations are specific and most of them are still standing. The Austin Film Commission’s own film tourism guide names three.
Guero’s Taco Bar, 1412 South Congress Avenue. Where Jungle Julia, Arlene and Shanna meet and plan the evening that Death Proof spends the next hour ending.
The Texas Chili Parlor, 1409 Lavaca Street. The prologue. The Commission’s guide is precise about how it was done: the real building for the exteriors, and an exact replica set for the interiors. Tarantino plays Warren the bartender and pours the Chartreuse.
Zedler Mill, 1170 South Laurel in Luling. It works twice. Bone Shack BBQ in Planet Terror, and Jasper’s farm in Death Proof, where the Dodge Challenger is up for sale.
Two more, from the location record kept at movie-locations.com: the Omelettry, then at 4811 Burnet Road, for the Vanishing Point conversation, and the Circle A convenience store at 12226 Ranch Road 620 North, an empty store the production dressed with invented product brands.
The replica set is the detail a producer should notice. A working bar on Lavaca Street will sell you an exterior for a night. It will not hand you its dining room for a week of dialogue coverage with a camera car parked out front. Building the inside of a real place on a stage you already control is not a luxury on a schedule like this one. It is the only way the schedule exists.
The one sequence that had to leave.
Death Proof ends on a chase, and the chase is not in Texas. The final run, the part the film is remembered for, was shot on the central California backroads around Buellton, Los Olivos, Lompoc and Solvang, standing in for Tennessee.
Everything else stayed. That is a clean split, and it is worth saying plainly because this series counts films by where principal photography actually happened. Both features were based at Troublemaker. One sequence travelled.
Who made it.
Rodriguez wrote and directed Planet Terror and shot it himself. Tarantino wrote and directed Death Proof and also shot it himself, his first cinematography credit. Elizabeth Avellán, Erica Steinberg, Rodriguez and Tarantino produced. Rodriguez cut Planet Terror with Ethan Maniquis; Sally Menke cut Death Proof, as she cut everything of Tarantino’s until her death in 2010.
Rose McGowan is in both halves, as Cherry Darling and then as Pam. Kurt Russell is Stuntman Mike. Freddy Rodriguez, Josh Brolin, Marley Shelton, Michael Biehn, Jeff Fahey, Bruce Willis and Michael Parks fill out Planet Terror. Rosario Dawson, Vanessa Ferlito, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Tracie Thoms, Jordan Ladd, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Zoë Bell carry Death Proof.
Four fake trailers ran between the features: Machete, directed by Rodriguez, Werewolf Women of the SS by Rob Zombie, Don’t by Edgar Wright, and Thanksgiving by Eli Roth. Canadian prints carried a fifth, Hobo with a Shotgun, which Jason Eisener made after winning a contest Rodriguez ran at SXSW. Three of the five later became features. Machete came back to Texas to do it.
The money.
The production budget is reported at $53 million to $67 million, and the sources do not agree, so take the range rather than a number. Box Office Mojo puts the domestic run of the double bill at $25.4 million, off an $11.5 million opening weekend, on an April 6, 2007 release through Dimension Films at 191 minutes.
The number needs a footnote, and this series uses Box Office Mojo throughout, so here is the footnote. Grindhouse played as one ticket in North America and was then split in two overseas. Released separately abroad, Death Proof took $30.7 million and Planet Terror $10.9 million, which is why The Numbers carries a combined figure around $50 million. The $25.4 million is the double bill. The larger figure is the same footage sold twice.
Death Proof also went to Cannes. An extended 127 minute cut screened in competition for the Palme d’Or at the 60th festival in 2007, about 27 minutes longer than the American theatrical version, which replaced that material with a missing reel card.
The runtime was a distribution decision.
Before anyone calls $25.4 million a verdict on the movie, do the exhibitor’s arithmetic, because it is the arithmetic that decided the number.
Grindhouse ran 191 minutes. Add trailers and turnover and a single showing occupies roughly three and a half hours of a screen. A theatre running noon to midnight has about 720 minutes to sell, which gets you three showings, maybe four if the house is disciplined. A 100 minute feature in the same room gets six or seven. Same screen, same weekend, roughly half the inventory.
So a double bill has to do close to double the business per show to match a normal release, and it has to do it on a premise that asks an audience to commit an entire evening. The overseas distributors looked at the same math and split the films in two, which is exactly why the international figures are reported separately and why the combined number floating around is larger than the double bill ever took in North America.
The lesson generalizes past 2007. Running time is a business term, not just a creative one, and it gets negotiated with the people selling seats whether or not anyone tells the director.
The damage was built in.
The other production decision worth flagging is that both features were deliberately finished to look like worn prints: scratches, splices, jumps, faded reels, and in Death Proof an entire missing reel replaced with a title card. That is post work, and it costs money, and it is the rare case of a budget line spent to make a picture look worse on purpose.
It is also the cleanest example on this list of a film whose whole premise lives in finishing rather than production. Nothing about the shoot in Austin made these look like 1970s grindhouse prints. The shoot made two clean features. Everything that sells the conceit happened after.
The stuntwoman is the point.
The last twenty minutes of Death Proof work because of Zoë Bell, and Bell is not an actor playing a stunt performer. She is a professional stuntwoman, Uma Thurman’s double on Kill Bill, playing herself under her own name. Monica Staggs, also a stuntwoman, plays Lanna Frank.
That casting decision is a production decision before it is a creative one. When the person on the hood of the car is the person qualified to be on the hood of the car, the camera can stay wide and stay on her, and the sequence stops being a cutting problem. You are not hiding a double. You are shooting the work.
My read.
This is a movie made by two guys who love badass movies, and they led with that. You can feel it in every choice. Nobody was protecting a quadrant.
What gets me is the open road. The vastness. The sense of being stranded in the middle of nowhere with somebody who means you harm. Texas gives you that geography for free, and both halves of this thing use it.
And the action is real. The car work at the end of Death Proof is some of the best I have seen, and the reason it plays is that the woman on the hood does that for a living and is doing it in front of the lens. You cannot fake that. You can only hire it, and then shoot it in a way that lets an audience see what they are actually looking at.
If you are basing a picture here.
The lesson of this shoot is not the studio. It is the ratio. Two features, one facility, one crew, five months, and the only thing that left the state was a sequence that needed a road Texas was not going to provide. That is what a base of operations is for, and it is the argument for stage space in Texas on almost any picture with a long schedule.
A production doing this today has tests to clear that a 2006 shoot did not. The Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Program is a cash grant paid after completion and verification, not a credit you can sell or borrow against. It asks that 60 percent of the production be completed in Texas. On a film or television project it asks separately that 35 percent of paid crew and 35 percent of paid cast including extras be Texas residents, and that residency figure steps to 40 percent on September 1, 2027, keyed to the date a project begins principal photography. Verified against the Commission’s pages in September 2026. Every interpretive question about the program belongs with the Texas Film Commission at 512-463-9200, not with me.
Where a location cannot give you what the schedule needs, what Texas doubles for is the next question, and it is usually cheaper than the plane tickets. If you are weighing a Texas base for something with a long build, that is the conversation to have.
Previous in the countdown: #48, Leap of Faith. Next: number 46 The Alamo...
Comments