H-Town goes Tinseltown

On the set for rare Houston movie making: Filming Puncture in the Heights

On the set: a Heights bungalow turned temporary movie location
Photo by Sarah Rufca
With a closed set inside, crew including production assistants, key grips andthe sound editor listen and kill time on the front lawn.
Photo by Sarah Rufca
A fraction of the equipment trucked in for the 5-day shoot at the house.
Photo by Sarah Rufca
The only actor I met: an iguana
Photo by Sarah Rufca
A view of "Africa"
Photo by Sarah Rufca
Extra camera tripods
Photo by Sarah Rufca

With the exception of the series of sparkling white trailers parked on the corner of 17th Street and Durham, there's no evidence that a quirky green bungalow on a small block of 18th Street in the Heights has been the site of a movie shoot for the past week.

Puncture (currently listed on IMDB as Safety Point) has been filming in and around Houston for over a month. It's based on the true story of Houston lawyer Michael Weiss as he fought medical supply companies to establish use of retracting safety needles in a struggle to save lives in the age of AIDS — all while fighting his own inner demons.

When I showed up at 5 p.m., about an hour after the beginning of a 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. shoot, rehearsals were talking place in a closed set in an upstairs bedroom. Co-producer Jordan Foley still showed me around where he could, including the kitchen, staged as a disaster for a party scene, and a corner of the backyard set up to represent Africa in a vignette. Apparently Africa = pile of trash.

Even though I couldn't watch the actors in their emotionally heavy (and naked) scene, I learned a lot just by talking to the crew, who were set up mostly on the lawn and in the garage. Here are ten interesting Houston tidbits about Puncture, the shoot, and the cast and crew:

1. The last day of shooting was set to be a quick transition scene at Hobby airport on Monday, which would represent Reagan Airport in Washington, D.C., but while I was there Foley and production supervisor Erin Charles were weighing the benefits of sending a skeleton crew to do a half-day of shooting in D.C. instead. "A shot of the airport looking onto the Potomac, a shot of the capitol, and boom, you're in D.C.," Charles said.

2. Production Designer Christopher Stull had his first film job as an assistant art director on Reality Bites, which has probably the most iconic images of Houston in film to date. "The house we found was on Dallas, I think, and it was this great shot with the downtown skyline set over the street. But that's disappeared now, they built an apartment complex there or something."

3. Many scenes in Puncture take place in a courtroom or a hospital. Court scenes were shot in a real Harris County Civil Court, and the production was given several floors by Park Plaza Hospital. "We were literally filming and through the doors in the next room was a working emergency room. It was crazy," Foley said.

4. To portray the home of a big-shot lawyer, the crew filmed at Mark and Becky Lanier's opulent mansion. Lanier also appears in the film in a small role — as himself. "Actually he was playing an actor playing Mark Lanier. He did a great job," Charles said.

5. Those looking for recognizable pieces of Houston in the film should keep their eyes peeled for Irma's Tex-Mex joint downtown as well as some popular taco trucks.

6. The non-local cast and crew were set up in condos at Post Midtown Square, and named their favorite off-shoot hangouts as Cyclone Anaya's and Front Porch Pub.

7. When I was there a wrangler was watching a huge iguana and an incredibly sweet golden retriever. I was told I missed by a day four more animal actors: Two boa constrictors and two crocodiles.

8. Set designer Stull went out of his way to include items from the real Michael Weiss in the movie. The desk in the home office once belonged to the real Weiss. Stull found a gallery director who remembered Weiss and the art pieces he'd bought, so Stull could get similar styles to be placed around the house set.

9. The 18th Street house set-up was scheduled to be four days, but was shortened to three when the owner accidentally locked them out for a day. The interior is essentially removed of all personal objects — even painted — rendering the space almost unrecognizable. But contracts require the crew take copious pictures and return everything to it's original state "as if we were never here," Foley said.

10. Foley's last film, The Open Road, was also shot partially in Houston, while directors Adam and Mark Kassen's last film, Bernard and Doris (for which they served as executive producers) earned Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. Other notable actors in Puncture include The Fantastic Four's Chris Evans as Mike Weiss, Law & Order's Jesse L. Martin and Vinessa Shaw.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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