On the penultimate day of the Lone Star Film Festival, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth played host to the festival's annual awards gala where three Texas filmmakers were honored.
Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke both received the Larry McMurtry award, named in honor of the Texas literary icon.
"I feel so honored to sit beneath [his name] because he's such an inspiration," Hawke said of McMurtry. "Just hearing a little bit of his life it's such an inspirational story, how to grow old, and how to keep changing."
Linklater also went on to discuss his admiration for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, discussing the message he felt McMurtry was often trying to convey: "To me, what he (McMurtry) was always saying [was] 'Texas can be a lot of things to your Texas,'" Linklater said.
Further elaborating on the stereotypical classic Texas westerns that most imagine when the state's movie history comes to mind, Linklater said McMurty's aforementioned message always "bristled" with him.
"I'm going to be punk rock Texas, [like] Slacker there's no hats and boots in that. I'm more urban, I grew up in Houston and Huntsville so I always liked showing different parts of the state."
Linklater, the co-founder of the Austin Film Society is a former Sam Houston State Bearkat and Texas native. After starting his career writing, directing, and acting in his own independent movies shot on shoestring budgets in Austin such as Slacker, he has gone on to create, amongst many others, the Before trilogy, Boyhood, and School of Rock.
Hawke, an acclaimed actor, director, screenwriter, and novelist out of Austin has been a familiar face on both stage and the silver screen since the mid-1980s. He has appeared in movies such as Dead Poets Society, Training Day, as well as the Before trilogy and Boyhood, while also directing movies such as Blaze - in which Linklater appeared.
Meanwhile, Fort Worth director Channing Godfrey Peoples won the Spotlight Award. Godfrey Peoples is best known for her 2020 directorial debut Miss Juneteenth, shot in Fort Worth, for which she won the Louis Black "Lone Star" Award at South by Southwest last year.
"As a Fort Worth native this is truly lovely to be recognized at home and I have to say to be recognized for a film that chronicles a community that I was raised in," Godfrey Peoples said. "The Southside of Fort Worth Texas is so very special to me."
"Miss Juneteenth is about my community, it's about the importance of Juneteenth that was instilled in me as a child, it's about myself, and it's especially inspired by my determined and passionate mother who I watched navigate raising children and going after her own dreams with both grit and grace."
Hawke later added that: "It was so wonderful to see Fort Worth in a movie. I was there at the Sundance Film Festival and I saw it and I see Fort Worth here, this beautiful story being told, I mean that's the goal."
The fourth and final honoree was singer-songwriter Michael Martin Murphey who received the Stephen Bruton Award. A native of Oak Cliff, Murphey is a multiple-time Grammy nominee, executive producer, and music supervisor.
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