Watch the film, The Trip to Bountiful, closely, and you’ll see a scene where John Heard is sitting at a bus stop in 1940s Houston. That bus stop, in reality, was on Swiss Avenue, and this neighborhood showed up quite a bit in Horton Foote’s movie adaptation of his play. Director Peter Masterson thought his area, with its older homes, looked more like Houston than Houston did.
Foote’s death yesterday made me think about all of the films and TV shows that filmed here in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The biggest, perhaps, was Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July, which used lower Swiss Avenue and, so I’m told, Milo Butterfinger’s bar on Yale (as well as, more famously, Oak Cliff). I even had some sort of movie company flunky look at the fourplex where I was living, to see if it was suitable for the film. It wasn’t, which was just as well. I’ve never been a big Tom Cruise fan.
But the list of Hollywood efforts that used this area was extensive, including Chuck Norris’ Walker, Texas Ranger, and the first Problem Child movie. My favorite was Robocop, not only because it was a fine effort, but because there used to be a gas station on Ross just before downtown that got blown up in the movie. The clerk in the station was the great Spencer Prokop, a Dallas actor who was pals with a neighbor of mine.
