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“Slouching toward Hollywood” {archive}

“Slouching toward Hollywood”
September 7, 1995 – Dallas Observer
By Matt Zoller Seitz

Can four young Dallas filmmakers sell their dream-and still keep their souls? Matt Zoller Seitz follows the trail of Bottle Rocket.

Jimmy Caaaaaaan!

Luke Wilson was thrilled. It was November 1994, and the star of The Godfather, Thief, and Misery, icon to two generations of aspiring young actors and a walking template of life’s rougher passages, was jogging beside him on train tracks near a downtown Dallas factory.

A film crew was gathered nearby. They were shooting a scene for the new movie Bottle Rocket. In it, Luke Wilson played a younger thief taken under the wing of an older heist expert–Mr. Henry–played by Caan.

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Lost In Filmland? These Guys Sure Found a Way {archive}

November 7, 1993 – Los Angeles Times
By Jeffrey Wells

Watchers of raw talent, take note: 24-year-old Texas filmmakers Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson hit town Monday. But unlike many Hollywood neophyte arrivals, this duo has already locked a big-studio deal. With James L. Brooks and Columbia Pictures, no less.

Last month, the pair completed a deal with Brooks (“Broadcast News,” and the forthcoming “I’ll Do Anything”) and the studio to back their co-written debut film, “Bottle Rocket,” a dryly comic, low-key drama about a trio of middle-class goofballs who embark on a life of crime. The $5-million-or-so venture, to be directed by Anderson and produced by Brooks, Polly Platt and Cynthia Hargrave, will roll in Dallas sometime in mid-’94, and go out theatrically and in other media through Columbia. The Columbia-Brooks launch sets Anderson and Wilson apart from other young filmmakers — the Hudlin brothers (“Boomerang”), Robert Rodriguez (“El Mariachi”), the Hughes brothers (“Menace II Society”) — who came up hardscrabble-style through independent or self-financed ranks. In fact, the Texas duo had a little help: screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson (“Breathless”), who discovered the pair in late 1991, godfathered the development of the “Bottle Rocket” script and provided the Tinseltown connections.

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