Cody checks out a published screenplay about the making of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
I have been a massive fan of director Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre since I was a little kid. My first viewing of the movie came at an age when most kids wouldn’t be allowed to go anywhere near a movie like that. I don’t know what exactly the age was, but I remember thinking about my earliest viewing(s) of the film while sitting in my preschool class. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of my all-time favorites, and my interest in the film is boosted by the fact that it has some of the most fascinating behind-the-scenes “making of” stories I’ve ever heard. I’ve done a lot of obsessing over that movie as the decades have gone by... and clearly, so has filmmaker Christopher Garetano. He was so inspired by the “making of” stories that he decided to bring them to the screen as a film called South Texas Blues, which would be “one part fantasy, one part history, and one part insanity.” Garetano wrote the first draft of the script back in 2006, and I’ve been interested in the project ever since he let the world know he wanted to make this “behind the scenes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” movie. Bringing that project to the screen has been a rough road so far. Unable to secure funding for the movie, Garetano had a comic strip adaptation of part of the script published in the pages of Fangoria magazine, and also decided to turn the script into a three-part graphic novel... But only the first part of that adaptation was ever published. Now fans who have been interested in the story Garetano wants to tell with South Texas Blues have the chance to experience it in its entirety, as he has published the full screenplay.
The South Texas Blues book has a page count of 269, and 209 of those pages are taken up by the script. If you know much about the making of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you’ll recognize many of the scenes written up in the script. The casting of Gunnar Hansen as Leatherface. Edwin Neal’s inspiration for his performance as The Hitch-hiker. The horrendous experience of filming the dinner table sequence in one epic marathon session. Paul A. Partain (Franklin) taking his spill down the hill with his final paycheck in his shirt pocket. What art director Robert A. Burns did to fill the set with the rotting corpses of animals. The effort to preserve those corpses with formaldehyde, and the terrible decision to try to burn some of those corpses in the backyard of the farmhouse filming location. Hansen not being able to wash his wardrobe and spacing out while thinking, “Time has no meaning.” Pretty much every moment you’d want to see play out on the screen is there in Garetano’s writing.
At the center of the story is director and co-writer Tobe Hooper, a young man who is caught up in the art of filmmaking and goes on about it in narrative passages that were my least favorite aspect of the script. Some of this didn’t ring quite true for me. For example, it’s difficult to believe Hooper would say there shouldn’t be anything “goofy” in a horror movie when he himself saw elements of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as dark comedy – and then made the very goofy The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 in response to people not picking up on the comedy he included in the original. The opening scene is an interpretation of the story Hooper would tell about being inspired to make a “chainsaw massacre” movie when he spotted a chainsaw while making his way through a crowded department store. He figured starting up the chainsaw would be a sure way to get the place to empty out. Of course, in this interpretation, Hooper actually imagines carrying out a bit of a massacre. That’s fine, but when that imaginary sequence is closely followed by two more freaky imaginary sequences, it’s enough to make you wonder if the character is mentally unbalanced and prone to hallucinations. To my relief, there are no more monstrous hallucinations beyond the early section.
The best parts of South Texas Blues come when the story lets us just hang out with the ensemble of interesting people that were brought together to make The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and when we get to see them make their way through the endurance challenge that was that film’s production. I wanted to spend even more time in these scenarios – and now that Garetano is developing South Texas Blues as a limited series, I’m hoping that will allow him to include even more scenes of characters creating famous moments from the classic film they were working on.
The published screenplay is accompanied by storyboards that were drawn up for the opening department store chainsaw massacre sequence, as well as a foreword by former Fangoria editor-in-chief Chris Alexander and notes from Garetano himself.
South Texas Blues is highly recommended for fans of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as reading this script gives you the chance to imagine what it would be like if a movie (or limited series) were to be made about the making of that movie. It’s definitely a story worth telling, so hopefully we won’t be left to imagine it for much longer. After a seventeen year wait, it’s about time for South Texas Blues to go into production. In the meantime, it was nice to be able to read the script and satisfy the curiosity I’ve had about this project for years.
If you’re not familiar with the behind the scenes stories, seeing them / reading about them in South Texas Blues is bound to be a fun learning experience that might even give you a deeper appreciation for Hooper’s film. So whether you’re a Chainsaw fanatic or not, this book is worth a read.
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