The video you see above was made by Michael Marco on behalf of Tracy Locke on behalf of Downtown Dallas Inc., which had intended to show downtown's makeover at its annual meeting held at the Omni a couple of weeks ago. Alas, it got trimmed for time. But Marco posted the short-short this week, no doubt in the hopes that someone other than no one would see the film DDI wants to use in its efforts to rebrand the Central Business District.

The timing's certainly good: Downtown Dallas Inc. also just posted to its website its 32-page annual report, which looks back at 2011 ("a year full of celebration as cranes began to fly high once again in Downtown Dallas"), gets even giddier about the year ahead ("Downtown will rise to a new summit in 2012") and keeps its fingers crossed that those proposed downtown building redos are more than pretty renderings.

When we joined, which is to say "stumbled," into Erykah Badu and the Rebirth Brass Band's 407-foot-long drive-n-dance down Main Street a few weeks ago, we noted the many cameras on hand to film the brief trek; word was, per Badu's business partner Paul Levatino, they were there for a doc-in-progress about Tim Headington's ever-expanding efforts to remake Main in his image. So, then: Not sure if this freshly posted short-short, which is short some Rebirth Brass Band funk and uses instead as its soundtrack "The Healer" off 2008's New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War, is an excerpt from that or something else. But whatever it is, it's nicely done.

Nancy Brinker's among those interviewed in director Léa Pool's documentary Pink Ribbons, Inc., based on the book of the same name

​Amidst all the ruckus, resignations and double-talking over Susan G. Komen for the Cure's politically charged move to pull its breast-cancer screening funding from Planned Parenthood, you should also be aware: Dallas-based Komen's actually the subject of a documentary that opens in Canada today that takes a very dim view of Nancy Brinker's efforts to turn the foundation into a corporation fueled by a shiny pink PR campaign. As John Anderson wrote in his Variety review in September, when director Léa Pool's Pink Ribbons, Inc. (based on Samantha King's 2008 book) debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival:

Along with such commentators as author and cancer survivor Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickled and Dimed), Dr. Susan Love, Nancy Brinker of Susan G. Komen for the Cure (which has funneled $1.9 billion into fighting breast cancer and, as several people ask, for what?), the film also turns the spotlight over to ordinary cancer victims, one of whom puts the public-relations spin into very clear perspective. "The message," she says, "is that if you just try really hard, you can beat it. Just try really hard." Those who die, she adds, "weren't trying very hard."

Right now there are no U.S. screenings or release dates scheduled. This morning I asked Jennifer Mair, a publicist for the National Film Board of Canada based out of Toronto, if this week's uproar surrounding the LBJ Freeway-HQ'd Komen has changed their distribution plans. She says the film will be released in the U.S. through New York-based First Run Features. I spoke to someone there this morning, and, no, there are no firm dates for U.S. release. Not yet. "But it's coming up -- later this year, spring or early summer." The trailer's below.

Update at 10:15 a.m.: Komen just issued this statement apologizing for "recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women's lives." It also says it "will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities."

Update at 10:45 a.m.: Also, this just in -- a statement from Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the daughter of the late Texas governor Ann Richards. It's below, but says, in short: "We are enormously grateful that the Komen Foundation has clarified its grantmaking criteria, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Komen partners, leaders and volunteers."More >>

Like Oz. But real.

​Back in November the Dallas County Commissioners signed off on part2 Productions' pitch to shoot a season's worth of Hard Time in the Dallas County Jail on behalf of the National Geographic Channel, which would have taken some 120 days and netted the county upward of $120,000. Alas, we find out via the briefing agenda for commissioners court tomorrow that deal's off -- "due to scheduling conflicts."

Which works out well: As you'll see below Electric Sky Productions, a British production company that brought its 3D equipment into the county jail for a look-inside tentatively called Outsiders, is ready to come back and stick around for a while. Per the pitch:

The planned production is a ten (10) part documentary series exploring life inside Dallas County Jail. The production would also follow inmates through the court process. In each episode, the cameras would catch the real day-lo-day experiences, challenges and the pressures officers face dealing with a variety of unpredictable inmates from new arrestees to maximum security. The series would allow the public to be immersed into the reality of life inside jail and the courthouse to help viewers understand the issues involved in running such a facility.

The earlier short will air on Discovery Channels' 3Net in the spring. Not sure when or where the tentatively titled Inside Dallas Jail will air, only that Electric Sky's getting a price break: Where part2 was to pay $1,000 a day, the Brits are only on the hook for $750. All the details are below. Shooting starts February 13. Pardon ... filming begins February 13. So we're clear. Long story short: Get tossed in county jail in the coming months, and chances are you'll be asked to go on TV. Which is better than appearing in Electric Sky's other Dallas-based doc: The Castration Cure.More >>

While browsing this morning's list of Academy Award nominees, I came across one very familiar name: Brandon Oldenburg, beneath the heading Short Film (Animated). For years, of course, he was best known as one of the bright young minds behind Deep Ellum-based Reel FX. Then he became known as the man who, with Brad Oldham, decorated Deep Ellum with the Traveling Man sculptures. But this morning, he's an Oscar nominee ... with a short film rejected by the USA Film Festival.

Oldenburg and William Joyce, a longtime collaborator, have been nominated for their remarkable short The Fantastic Flying Books Of Mr. Morris Lessmore, an interactive children's book that doubles as an iPad app. It has played Dallas but once: at the Dallas Video Festival in the fall. But fret not: Some time today, Oldenburg tells Unfair Park, it will be available on Vimeo. As soon as Oldenburg shoots me the film, I will replace the trailer above with the whole film.

Brad Oldham, left, and Oldenburg before they took their Traveling Man to Deep Ellum

​"This is amazing," he says this morning when reached at Moonbot Studios' HQ in Shreveport. Oldenburg moved to Louisiana in the fall of 2009, no easy decision.

It was, he says now, just "a wacky dream" and a giant risk. He didn't want to leave Dallas, but his collaborators told him: "The train is leaving the station." Much of New Orleans's film-making community had decamped for film-friendly Shreveport following Katrina; the town was rich with tax incentives. Oldenburg could not resist the call. And now, this.

"We are freaking out," he says. "It's so rad. It's such affirmation for making such a crazy decision to move to Shreveport. But we have an amazing crew here and never doubted it for a second. Years of building the studio in Dallas, it was a hard decision." He's here often, with family in Fort Worth and friends in Dallas. "But we started all over."More >>

The trailer to Archway Pictures' loooooong-awaited doc on the 1978 Texxas Jam was just (like, just) posted to YouTube, along with the note "Release Date: Summer 2012." Which, fingers crossed, answers the follow-up question I get from time to time following last summer's item in which Archway's president, Bedford-born former Belafonte frontman Brian Hedenberg, detailed the hold-up over its release, which at one point had been planned for July 2011.

I asked Hedenberg via email for more specifics; he would only say details are forthcoming and that he "will have more info soon"; you'll be the first to know. When I asked in a follow-up if it'd be a DVD release, or perhaps even a VH1 broadcast as he'd previously mentioned, he again asked for patience. The reason: Details are being hammered out, and he doesn't "want to release info that could change or isn't true." At least we have the video.

While awaiting some return calls I was browsing through Vimeo when I came across this freshly posted -- and quite lovely -- short about the late, great Metro Diner on Gaston. Owner Wayne Adams locked the door for the last (and damned near the first) time at 2 p.m. April 10 to make way for more Baylor parking. I drove by the diner only a few days ago, and it was heartbreaking to see the place stripped of its neon, its windows replaced with wood. This was made well before its demise was imminent.

Update: In the comments, a Friend of Unfair Park says this looks like a YouPlusDallas video. Yes, yes it was -- from July 2010. But the score was different. I like the new one much, much better.

From Robert Edsel's Rescuing Da Vinci: Hitler and the Nazis Stole Europe's Great Art - America and Her Allies Recovered It, the book companion to his documentary The Rape of Europa

​I've got a call out to Robert Edsel -- founder of the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art, which honors those who've spent decades scouring the globe for art stolen by Hitler and the Nazis -- about news that hit The Los Angeles Times yesterday: George Clooney told the paper he's going to co-write, direct and star in a big-screen adaptation of the St. Mark's and SMU grad's 2010 tome The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History. Said Clooney at the the Palm Springs Film Festival, "It's a fun movie because it could be big entertainment. It's a big budget, you can't do it small -- it's landing in Normandy."

Robert Edsel

​Edsel, as you'll no doubt recall, made Big News back in '09, when he found two paintings hanging in SMU's Meadows Museum that he discovered were stolen from the Rothschild family in Paris in 1941. He and I chatted here about why it took SMU more than two years to acknowledge their provenance.

Concerning the Clooney film, this morning Edsel noted on his Facebook page: "I am so proud to share this news, and for people around the world to know more about the heroism of these men and women, the Monuments Men!"

It's still very early in the film-making process: The movie's a go at Sony, but save for Clooney there's no cast. As for how it'll turn out, well, that too depends: Says The Descendants star and Ides of March director and, with Grant Heslov, co-writer, "I'm not opposed to doing a commercial film, I'm just opposed to doing a commercial film that doesn't feel organic to me. So if we're going to do a commercial film we thought, 'Let's do something that seems fun and actually have something to say.'" And as you may recall, Edsel's already made an extraordinary documentary on the subject of the Monuments Men: The Rape of Europa.

Warner Horizon/TNT

Cynthia Cidre and Patrick Duffy on the set of TNT's coming-this-summer Dallas reboot

​I'll be honest with you: I don't know squat about Dallas. Or rather, I don't know squat about Dallas, the long-running, oil-drenched, big-haired, family-feuding epic that may still color how a lot of outsiders think about our city. When I found out some eight months ago that I'd landed this job and would be moving here, a lot of people immediately suggested I watch the whole damn series, all 13 years of it, to "get ready." Kind of like the way you get ready to be an astronaut by watching Mars Attacks. Somehow, Dallas never quite made it to the top of my Netflix queue. I just wasn't interested. (Although Larry Hagman's recent, delightful, drug-tinged New York Times magazine interview almost made me reconsider.)

Cynthia Cidre's ready for people like me. She's the creator, executive producer and head writer of the brand-new Dallas, which, as you surely must be aware by now, started shooting here in October and will premiere on TNT this June. She spoke Friday night at the KD College, at the monthly meeting of the Dallas Screenwriters Association. She took questions about a whole host of things, chief among them making the show relevant for a new audience while at the same time trying to bring back the original show's devotees.

Cidre too was never a huge Dallas fan before beginning work on the new series, she said. "I had seen maybe five episodes total," she told the audience, and found it "somewhat campy," especially the later seasons. It couldn't have been further from the work she'd done before; most of her career, she'd been writing "action movie and cop shows." So she found it "peculiar," she said, to be asked to write the pilot for the new Dallas, which is conceived of as a continuation of the show: The original characters have aged, and their current lives, and those of their now-grown children, make up the new story lines.

Cidre found her inspiration not in the increasingly overblown later years of the show, she said, but at its very beginning. "If you watch early Dallas, it was just a really solid family drama," she said. "It didn't go campy till years later. That really spoke to me."
But I had to ask: Why should ignoramuses like me give a damn about any of the characters, old or new? Cidre smiled. "TNT thinks the young people in it will be interesting and attractive enough" to draw audiences, she said. The word 'Dallas' she said, is "a brand, like Levi Jeans or Stetson is. ... If you have a show called Des Moines, nothing against Des Moines, but people aren't as likely to watch."

More >>

TNT/Warner Horizon

Larry Hagman and director Michael Robin on the set of Dallas

​Twice in November the Dallas County Commissioners Court approved requests from reality-TV crews to film inside the county jail -- first from Brits bearing 3D cams, then from the National Geographic Channel. But tomorrow, Dallas comes to Dallas County: Per the commissioners court agenda Warner Horizon Television, which is behind that next-gen Dallas reboot set to bow on TNT this summer, is asking the county commissioners for their OK to shoot on county property. In return, Horizon will fork over a $25,000 security deposit and $1,000 for every day camera roll and cast John Wiley Price as J.R.'s long-lost son. Or, perhaps, not.

As you may recall, the city council OK'd spending $235,000 last summer to finish out Jack Matthews's South Lamar warehouse; council was told Horizon would go elsewhere without a proper facility. Principal photography began in October, with the expectation that they'd be here till "the end of January." Per the contract, Horizon wants to shoot on county property early this month. And where? "Locations could potentially include unoccupied jails, court space, and general office buildings." Too bad they weren't here June 27.