TFPF Tour '08: Denton

I got outta town a little too late yesterday and was concerned I would get stuck in Ft. Worth rush-hour traffic on my way to do my workshop in Denton, a town I have a long history with. My Dad owned the Treasure Aisles bookstore for 15 years, a reader's paradise right in the heart of the Fry St. area. This was my first time seeing it gone, gone, gone. It was smashed down along with a number of other well-established businesses on the storied block at Fry St & Hickory St, just off the University of North Texas campus. Places like The Tomato, Bagheri's, Mr. Chopsticks, TJ's Pizza, all gone. The bar Cool Beans remains but now it's just surrounded by graded dirt. A whole shiny new shopping complex was supposed to go in, but apparently now that may not even happen. It was certainly a sad and shocking sight to pass by on my way to Denton's Square, where the beautiful Denton County Courthouse sits surrounded by coffeeshops, restaurants, bookstores, clothing stores, and old movie palaces that now constitute the new (and old) cultural center of the city. The Square was mostly boarded up back when I was coming to Denton regularly, and it's great to see it hoppin and vital.

One of the best places to hang out and get a slice on the Square is J & J's Pizza, which also happened to be where I did my TFPF workshop (the first onethat's been done in Denton, as far as I know). A grant workshop at a pizza place, really? Sounds weird, but they actually have a really cool basement space that's mostly used for bands coming through town. It's got somewhat of a speak-easy feel, with exposed brick and dim lighting. Seating is mostly church pews, to make you feel a little guilty for enjoying yourself. And besides the fact that you could hear every squeaking footstep from the employees and customers upstairs, it was an ideal informal venue.

Joshua Butler of Denton's Texas Filmmakers got me the space and brought a screen, and brought a good number of folks out for the workshop, more than I expected. His non-profit group is a small but ambitious and vibrant organization, not only putting out their own yearly grant to Texas filmmakers, but also putting on a yearly film festival on the Square, the Thin Line Film Festival. Did I mention he's a filmmaker, too?

In addition to the folks that Joshua brought out, Ben Levin, the Director of Graduate Studies for the documentary MFA at UNT, was nice enough to postpone his Thursday night class and tell all of his students to come to the workshop. So, we had in excess of 30 people grouped together in the basement, more than enough to justify Denton as a current and future stop on the TFPF tour.

Doc filmmaker Scott P. Harris came up from Flower Mound to be my celebrity guest and we went through his 2006 application for his documentary THE PHYSICS TEACHER, which got a TFPF grant that year and screened as a Doc-in-Progress in 2007. After we wrapped up the workshop, Joshua shared some beers with Scott & I and we got into a heated but healthy conversation about mockumentaries, docu-fictions and reality television and the moral quandaries they all bring up. Pretty heady convo for the basement of a pizza joint, but that's Denton for you. Two big universities (UNT & Texas Women's University) provide at least half of the town's population, making it one of the more intelluctually-minded small Texas cities out there.

I'm up in the Metroplex area for a few more days, doing workshops in Fort Worth Saturday and Dallas on Monday, and trying to catch up with as many DFW friends as I can. Might even go to some museums, too.