The Rushmore Academy

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Icon Thoughtstyle, September/October 1998

Backed by some big Hollywood players, Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson have two movies, a house in California, and the same life they had in Texas.
by Philip Zabriskie

In high school, Houston-native Wes Anderson directed shorts on a cable-access station and wrote plays, “real crowd pleasers, stuff designed to get a big audience reaction,” says the 29-year-old. “We did a play, The Alamo, that was just like a big war scene. We did one called The Five Maseratis, that all took place in these Maseratis. When I look back, it seems kind of static, because everybody was just sitting in these cars. I always cast myself as the hero. Maybe that was the reason I wanted to do them.”

“I didn’t know what I was going to do, maybe…advertising?” says Dallas-native Owen Wilson, also 29. “I guess movies seemed impossible. It seemed so far away and so difficult to break into.” Anderson and Wilson met at the University of Texas. Anderson was not wearing a monocle, as Wilson claims, but they shared prep-school backgrounds and a similar sense of humor. And, Anderson says, just as “we might think the same things are funny, we might think the same things are sad.”

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Texas Monthly, May 1998

They’re not yet thirty, but they’re playing with the big boys.
by Pamela Colloff

On an overcast afternoon this past winter, a crowd of autograph hounds and hangers-on stood in silent reverence outside Don’s barbershop in Houston, craning for a view of the star rumored to be shooting a film inside. Across the street, while traffic crawled past the white trailers and frenzied production assistants cluttered the sidewalk, gawkers stood on the hoods of their cars, squinting under the white-hot floodlights. But it wasn’t comedian Bill Murray at the center of the disarray; unbeknownst to the crowd, he had already shot his scenes and flown back to New York. Rather, it was Wes Anderson, the gangly 29-year-old director and co-writer of Rushmore, who was pacing the barbershop floor and running his pale hands through his unruly thatch of hair. Wearing a slouchy green cardigan, faded corduroys, and Converse All-Stars, he looked more like a distracted graduate student who had wandered onto the set than someone shooting his second feature for a major studio.

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