Westwood grad’s film wins SXSW award
On the screen, police officer Jim Arnaud stands at the front of a church at his mother’s funeral. For 10 uninterrupted minutes, he painfully struggles to articulate his memories of her.
Zack Parker, the film’s producer and a Westwood High School graduate, watched the scene unfold with his mother at the SXSW 2018 Film Festival last month. The scene opens “Thunder Road,” a movie Zack called a love note to his mother.
“It was so surreal,” he said of watching the film at the festival. “I was so happy to be there. We were still riding high from just getting the movie finished.”
The film tells the story of an officer from middle America who struggles with his mother’s death, his crumbling career and marriage, and raising his daughter. The film won the SXSW 2018 Grand Jury Prize for best narrative film and impressed critics with its authenticity and well-placed humor.
A hodgepodge of Parker’s family and friends who grew up with him, including his baseball coach at Westwood High, attended the screening.
“He set out to do something that a lot of people thought he was probably wasting his energy on,” said Parker’s younger brother, Joshua, who took off from work and drove from Dallas for the screening. “In his first try, he was very successful. I’m extremely proud.”
The award was special for Zack Parker for another reason. Two years prior, he watched the original version of “Thunder Road” at the SXSW 2016 Film Festival. The 12-minute short — shot in one take — won a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
“It blew me away,” Parker said of the original film. “I had sort of a breakdown. It affected me in a way that no art ever has.”
At the time, Parker was working in Los Angeles, but he tracked down Jim Cummings — who wrote, directed and starred in the original film — to propose making an extended version.
Parker left his job as a development executive at AMC Networks in June to pursue the film, investing some of his personal savings into the project.
“Jim and I were adamant we were going to make it the way we wanted it to be,” Parker said. “There were production companies and studios interested, but it was getting bogged down in the process of Hollywood.”
Zack Parker, who was drafted as a pitcher by the Colorado Rockies and later received a film degree from the University of Texas, now works out of Dallas, where he runs his production company and juggles a number of projects, including future projects with Cummings. They are in talks with distribution companies and soon hope to see “Thunder Road” available through a video streaming service.
“Hopefully this is the spark that lights the fuse for more movies and more storytelling — Texas-focused storytelling,” Parker said.