Here’s what’s coming up on Texas Standard for Monday, December 28, 2020. Listen on your Texas public radio station, or ask your smart speaker to play Texas Standard. We’ll have full posts for each story, including audio, a little later today.
Two Texas-Centric Streamers
The Standard highlights how the cancellation of SXSW kicked off a rough year for the entertainment industry and two streaming picks: Netflix’ “Selena: The Series,” and the annual Texas high school boys gathering known as “Boys State” which was captured by documentary filmmakers.
The Standard’s interview with the director of the documentary “Mucho Mucho Amor,” which chronicles the life of beloved Puerto Rican television personality and astrologer Walter Mercado.
The Sounds of Texas: Anne Rapp on Horton Foote
Quarantine Vogue and Paris, Texas
DJ Pierce, famously known as drag superstar Shangela was nominated for an Emmy this year for cohosting her reality TV series “We’re Here.” When the pandemic meant that the awards show did not include the regular red carpet, Pierce let the red carpet come to her in Paris, Texas. The Standard talked to Shangela back in September, and asked her about her hometown.
Actor Danny Trejo is not a Texan himself but very Texas-adjacent considering several of his big films have been made with Austin-based writer and director Robert Rodriguez.
The Sounds of Texas: Annie Silverstein on “Bull”
Annie Silverstein wrote and directed “Bull” — which tells the story of a Texas rodeo bullfighter.
The 2005 film “Walk the Line” focused primarily on singer Johnny Cash’s relationship with fellow country music icon June Carter. The film doesn’t focus as much on Cash’s first wife Vivian Liberto, the mother of his four daughters. Liberto was a Texan, raised around San Antonio. Her story was finally told in the documentary, “My Darling Vivian.” The film’s director, Matt Riddlehoover, talks to the Standard.
In early 1917, the U.S. Army’s 24th infantry regiment, a unit of Black soldiers, arrived in Houston to guard an Army encampment under construction. For months, the soldiers faced open harassment and hostility in Jim Crow Texas. By late summer, a rumor spread through the regiment that one of their fellow soldiers had been killed, and that a mob of white Houstonians was coming to the camp. Over 100 soldiers took their weapons, and went into town. By morning, 15 white Houstonians and four Black soldiers would be killed in the violence. The tragedy is captured in a film called “The 24th.” Its director, Kevin Wilmott, talks to the Standard.
All this and Texas News Roundup, plus Social Media Editor Wells Dunbar with the talk of Texas.
