Bidding a Fond Farewell to Producing Great Polly Platt, Who Shot Off Bottle Rocket
Categories: From the RTF Dept.
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| Criterion Collection |
| Bob Musgrave and Luke and Owen Wilson shooting Bottle Rocket in 1995 |
For the whole story, I'd recommend the Criterion Collection Bottle Rocket, which contains a making-of doc in which Platt talks about her love for the movie and how hard it was to get Anderson and Owen Wilson to sit still long enough to finish the screenplay once they'd gone from Dallas to Hollywood. But in his 1995 cover story about the film, Matt Zoller Seitz summed it up thusly: L.M. "Kit" Carson and Cynthia Hargrave, who'd shepherded the short, passed it to two friends in Los Angeles, producers Barbara Boyle and Michael Taylor. They, in turn, sent it to Platt, then in semiretirement. She too fell in love with Bottle Rocket. Wrote Matt:
Reading it conjured a nostalgic excitement she hadn't felt in a long time. Everything about it felt right: the storyline, the tone, the humor, the unknown filmmakers and actors attached to it -- and especially the script's Texas roots. She even told Premiere magazine she thought Bottle Rocket was another Last Picture Show.In an essay accompanying the Criterion release, Brooks writes that Platt "championed it to me and urged me to go down to Texas to meet with the boys." As Bob writes this afternoon: "That movie wouldn't have happened without her." So happens you can see it tonight: Bottle Rocket screens at the Kessler as part of D's "Dallas, Outlaws, and the American Dream" series.
In March 1993, Platt visited the set of James L. Brooks' latest movie as a writer-director and showed him Bottle Rocket over lunch. "Jim sat there and watched," Platt said, "and when it was over, he was quiet for a minute. Then he looked up at me and said, 'We have to make a deal with these guys.'"
On May 1st, 1993 -- Wes Anderson's 24th birthday -- Brooks and Platt came to Dallas.
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