Series on HBO explores ‘landscape of modern Texas’
3-part documentary dives into death penalty, border culture, oil industry
Virtually everyone, it seems, has a strong opinion about Texas.
“Texas is such a polarizing subject,” said Austin-based writer Lawrence Wright. “The whole country, maybe the whole world, either loves or hates Texas. As a Texan, you’re running into this all the time. And that’s troublesome. When things get to be really polarized like that, it helps to have journalists go in and create shades of gray.”
The Pulitzer Prize winner did that himself in his thoughtful 2018 book “God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State.” And now the book has inspired “God Save Texas,” a threepart documentary series premiering on HBO and streaming on MAX starting Tuesday.
Wright served as executive producer alongside Alex Gibney and Richard Linklater.
Linklater, who also directed the series kickoff “Hometown Prison,” was the first director who signed on for the project, Wright said, but he was only up for making one film.
“That opened up the opportunity to find other directors with personal stories that would unveil the landscape of modern Texas,” he said. “And that’s what led to us finding Alex Stapleton and Iliana Sosa, which adds an authenticity
to the series that we couldn’t have had. Rick would have done a wonderful job, but having other directors with their own perspective made such a huge difference.”
The three directors didn’t just interview others. Each also appears on camera, weaving their personal family stories into the narrative.
“Hometown Prison” explores life in Huntsville through the lens of the criminal justice system. Stapleton directed “The Price of Oil,” which deals with the health and economic impacts of the industry on Black communities on the Gulf Coast. And Sosa, whose film “What We Leave Behind” was screened during Cinefestival in 2022, made “La Frontera,” which is about the complexities of life in her native El Paso.
A lot of Linklater’s work is set in Texas, including the films “Dazed and Confused,” “Bernie” and “Boyhood.” “Hometown Prison” is his first documentary.
It focuses largely on the death penalty, raising questions about, among other things, the human toll of the punishment on those who carry it out. Linklater also shares his family’s connections to the criminal justice system. One of his stepdads was a prison guard; another did time. And his late mother founded a nonprofit that greets former convicts with coffee, doughnuts and conversation after they are released.
In Sosa’s contribution to the series, she talks about the deep ties between El Paso and Juarez, the sprawling Mexican city just across the Rio Grande. On a personal level, she talks about the complicated identity that comes with having roots on both sides of the border, something she and her mother, who grew up in Mexico, experience in different ways.
“La Frontera” also touches on the 2019 Walmart shooting that left 23 people dead, a crime that still impacts many in the city. And it includes powerful footage from Hugs Not Walls, the once-a-year event in which the border fence is opened and families who have been separated because of their immigration status are permitted to make their way along a temporary walkway to a platform in the middle of the Rio Grande, where they can have five-minute inperson reunions.
Sosa hopes that “La Frontera” gives viewers a deeper understanding of what goes on along the border.
“I hope that they see the complexity of this region, that it’s a community living there that has had to adapt to border policies, that has had to live with each other despite the fence, that it’s a community where families are still living and raising their children, and this complex identify is part of their everyday lives,” she said. “I hope that people get a glimpse of that and just think of the frontera in a different way.”
Stapleton, whose recent documentary about baseball legend Reggie Jackson, “Reggie,” is streaming on Amazon Prime, felt similarly about having the chance to share a story about life in Houston. She read Wright’s book when it came out and connected with his take on the state, she said, which reflected her own love-hate feelings. So when she learned about the film project, she wanted in.
“Larry was really the person who was the gatekeeper,” she said. “We talked and we hit it off. He really wanted to do an oil story. I think his version of what the oil story was going to be was very different than what my story turned out to be.”
Stapleton’s family history, which goes back to slavery, is woven throughout “The Price of Oil.” In it, she talks to family members about their jobs in oil and gas, including a cousin who drives around the state as part of his job, something that can be frightening at times for a Black man.
She also explores what it meant to her family members and other Black people to be able to own homes in a planned neighborhood. Over time, though, as the oil and gas industry spread out, chemical plants and similar ventures ended up backing up against those neighborhoods. That has created ongoing health problems, including asthma and other ailments.
“When we talk on a national level about the price of oil and fence-line communities, I don’t think people realize or understand what that means,” she said. “So I hope that the film pulls back the layers so that you can actually see that these communities weren’t just thrown there after industry’s presence but superseded being there.”
Working on “God Save Texas” changed Stapleton’s life. After 20 years in New York and California, she decided to come back to Texas, settling in Houston with her son and starting her own production company, House of Nonfiction.
“I didn’t want to just make this film and go, ‘OK, that was a cool little chapter of my life,’” she said. “I really want to stay here and to fight and to promote more stories that are authentic to this area and to be a part of what I hope is really positive change for the state and for the Gulf Coast.”
As for “God Save Texas,” for now, it’s a three-part series. But if it does well and HBO is open to continuing it, Wright has ideas.
“We’ve got more directors and more stories,” he said. “And I’d like to go down that path.”