Austin American-Statesman from Austin, Texas • 48

I Ente ainmen 1 Section Austin American-Statesman Thursday, May 8, 1986 Theater, C2 Jazz, C5 Television, C6 rt The arts 'Chainsaw IF filming begins at Cut Rite f- By Patrick Taggart American-Statesman Staff 'Given the pressures of our schedule, we're making excellent time. Today we even finished a little bit Scot Holton Thirteen years and $50 million later, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has finally given birth to the inevitable sequel. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II went into production in Austin this week, with original Chainsaw director and Austin native Tobe Hooper at the helm of the $2.5 million project. Produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus for their distribution company, Cannon Films, the movie is scheduled to be in production for seven weeks and is hoped to have an Aug. 13 opening date.

Filming began Monday at the Cut Rite chainsaw store on West Fifth Street. The principal location for Chainsaw II will be The Matterhorn, the abandoned amusement park on Interstate 35, 40 miles north of Austin. Much of the interior shooting will take place and actor Jim Siedow. The cast is headed by Dennis Hopper, the director, co-author and co-star of the influen- tial 1969 film, Easy Rider. Hopper plays De- tective Enright in the Chainsaw screenplay written by associate producer L.

M. Kit Carson. Enright is a retired police offi- cer who is the uncle of two of the victims of the original massacre. He has spent the vening years trying to find the bizarre "Chainsaw" family, who are now in the cater- ing business. The character of Stretch, the female lead, See Sequel, C6 In the old American-Statesman building at 308 Guadalupe St.

Although original cast members are not featured in the sequel, the production features Austin talent in important capacities. Appearing as Leatherface, the masked murderer and poet of the Poulan, is local theater and film actor Bill Johnson. Johnson has appeared in several Austin-produced short films and theatrical productions, including the Hyde Park Showplace production of Colonel Mustard. The director of photography is Richard Kooris of Austin; other Austin participants in key positions include art director Cary White Chainsaw II culminates Tobe Hooper's three-picture deal with Cannon films. A listener first, a player second George Winston shares music while developing self-discipline I 1 iib- .1 The arts is a guide to select fine arts activities today through Sunday.

Free concert The Austin Symphonic Band will perform a program of traditional marches, themes from Walt Disney movies and a suite of works by Robert Russell Bennett. Under the direction of Dick Floyd, the symphonic band will present its first outdoor concert of the season at 3 p.m. Sunday at the Zilker Park Hillside Theater. Admission is free. Call 926-6999 I for more information.

A mother's dance Sharir Dance Company member Leticia Rodriguez has created Paloma, a new piece that was inspired by her 7-month-old baby. The work will be presented Mother's Day with another Rodriguez piece, Solo No. 4, and Modern Mythologies, a work-in-progress that will be performed by New Dance Ensemble, modern dance choreographer Diana Prechter's newly formed dance I troupe. The program will begin at 4 p.m. Sunday at Hancock I Recreation Center.

Tickets are $3. Music for mom The Great Organ Series concludes with two Mother's Day concerts by Thomas Murray, a concert pianist, recording artist and faculty member at Yale University. Murray will perform at 1:30 and 4 p.m. Sunday in UT's Bates Recital Hall, at 25th Street and East Campus Drive. Tickets are $6.

Call 471-1444 for more information. Keith Dannemiller and Michael I Young are exhibiting more than I 30 photographs documenting the Piedras Negras Boys' Club. The show, titled "Translations," opens tonight at the Arts Warehouse, 300 San Antonio with a reception from 6-10 p.m. Dannemiller's work is in color and reflects the ritual of Mexican life; Young's black-and-white photographs explore street life in Mexican cities. The exhibit continues through May 31.

For more information call 476-1558 or 473- 2505. 'Out All Night' Austin-based writer and performer Terry Galloway will perform her one-woman play, Out All Night and Lost My Shoes, at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at Chameleon's Coffeehouse, which recently moved to 4006 S. Lamar Blvd. Galloway is a co-founder and original cast member of the Austin comedy troupe, Esther's Follies.

In 1984, Galloway was awarded the prestigious Dobie-Paisano fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters. Tickets are $5. 'The Fox' Allan Miller's The Fox, an adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's classic novella, is a chilling drama about two women and the man who invades their insular world. Set in 1918 on a farm in the English countryside, sisters Jill and Nellie create a life away from the influence of society and men.

Their world changes when a soldier comes to stay and help with chores. The Live Oak Theatre production of The Fox, which was directed by Richard Sodders, will be presented at 8 tonight through Sunday at Live Oak Theatre, 311 Nueces St. Call 472-7134 for more information. Debi Martin Photo by Dennis Oda George Winston has concentrated on giving concerts and studying the work of other musicians. studying the music of other musicians.

He talks about performing in terms of sharing music and as a means of developing self-discipline. "What can I do to make it so I'm If I'm not how can I make it so it sounds competent so people will think I am 'on' anyway even though I may not be enjoying it as much as I could?" said Winston. "The ultimate thing is to learn how to get 'on. It's very much like the rest of life and other jobs. I don't think of it as a job when I'm doing it, but when I'm not doing it I think of it as my job." Winston is in no rush to record his new material.

"I like to monkey with it until it's right. It takes me a long time to 'write a so to speak. Autumn, December and Winter into Spring were all conceived about 1973, so these other projects Enchanted Forest, Outer Space and Summer were thought up later. If it takes decades, then that's fine. Right now the concert is the place for my new songs; the live performance is more valid than a record.

Records are two-dimensional, but they are very good as a doorway to something else." Financial success has allowed Winston to expose artists like Professor Longhair, guitarist Bola Sete and others who have influenced him on his own Dancing Cat Label. Winston, who considers himself a listener first and a player second, studies the music of Steve Reich and Floyd Cramer along with a lot of jazz, blues and folk music that falls in between. At a time when it has become fashionable to mix African music, big-band jazz and '60s psychedelia, there is little trace of Winston's diverse interests on his own work. By Jerry Young Special to the American-Statesman For George Winston, success has been something of an intrusion. His albums Autumn and December were first acquisitions for millions of fans of what has come to be called "New Age Music." He balks at the name and clearly chafes under the yoke of being considered one of the head gurus of the genre.

Born in Michigan in 1949, Winston became attracted to pop in-strumentals around 1960, but did not start playing organ and electric piano until 1967. After hearing Fats Waller records, he devoted his attention exclusively to piano and recorded his first album, Ballads and Blues, in 1972. Winston quit playing in 1977 and took various jobs in California, but an encounter two years later with the music of New Orleans rhythm and blues pianist Professor Longhair coaxed him back to the keyboard and eventually into the studios of Windham Hill Records. That association has brought both Winston and Windham Hill a success that still has Winston nonplussed. "I don't know why those records sold and why Ballads and Blues didn't sell in the '70s.

It just happened," said Winston. Winston maintains a healthy skepticism about his sudden popularity. "I hate to put a value judgment on the 'success that it's good, but it's happening. That's a temporary thing," said Winston. "If you've got a song down you've got it.

That's a kind of absolute thing. About popularity, well what is that? How long will it last? It's made of air, it's not really reality." Since the phenomenal success of his last solo album, December, recorded in 1982, Winston has concentrated on giving concerts and "I'm not learning the pieces note for note, I'm learning the language. Maybe it will become my language one of these days, maybe it won't. I don't care. "I used to play modern jazz and that's how I know that I'm not jazz.

I tend to improvise on a constant and simpler chord structure in the middle of a piece rather than go through the chord changes of jazz." Winston's interest in making the most out of only a couple of chords perhaps explains his attraction to the music of Steve Reich. "He writes beautiful music. It's so vast. I don't know why they call him a minimalist, it's about as minimal as New York City is minimal. I'm sure he hates that tag.

Some people call me 'New This isn't 'New it's just songs. These aren't songs for meditation or anything. If someone wants to do it, ed to the early, less commercial recordings of artists like Cramer. One senses his concern for not letting his own success dilute his musical intentions and run the risk of offending his muses. "It doesn't matter if people say they only liked my early stuff as long as I'm true to my own reality," said Winston.

"If my reality changes for reasons other than commercial ones, then that's fine, but if I said, 'Well, I'll cash in and do Autumn completely off the mark. I'm going to do whatever I was going to do as if I never recorded before. I have no desire to push that concept on anybody else, but it's right for me." Pianist George Winston will perform at 8 p.m. Sunday at the Performing Arts Center Concert Hall. The Capital Area Food Bank will be collecting non-perishable food at the concert.

fine; but that's the last thing on my mind. I happen to be the kind of musician who wants to stretch the audience a bit but I also want to give them something they like." Winston said that when he was growing up, he used to turn on the radio right before the news, because that was always when they would play instrumentals by the Ventures or Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. "Commercial music is valid, too. The hormonal changes and the radio are like natural drugs when you are a teenager. I noticed it, but since I was more into instrumentals, I didn't get too involved.

I was pretty much by myself in that area," said Winston. "I think Lasr Date by Floyd Cramer is a fantastic piece. The fact that he had to do it in two minutes makes it a good piece." Winston admits to being attract Quirky, diverse work distinguishes 'Talent' By Mel McCombie Special to the American-Statesman Roviov Coming Friday I 1 1 'H 1 i 4 Redford to make Austin appearance i for film premiere Actordirector Robert Redford will appear at Austin's Paramount Theatre for the Performing Arts next month to introduce the Southwest premiere of his latest film, Legal Eagles. The June 18 premiere will benefit the Paramount Theatre and the Sundance Institute for Film and Television, the national organization founded by Redford in 1980 to sponsor emerging American film artists. Legal Eagles is the new comedy from Ivan Reitman, director of Ghost-busters.

Redford co-stars with Debra Winger and Darryl Hannah. In the film, Tom Logan (Redford) has a law partner who puts a dog on the witness stand, a client who can't enter a room without a crime being committed and a case that could turn out to be the murder of the year. Redford's visit to Austin was ar- ranged by Austin businessman Jack Crosby, a member of the executive committee of Sundance, and his wife Joanne Crosby, a former Paramount board member. In addition to introducing the film from the stage of the Paramount, Redford will participate in several events surrounding the premiere, including a post-screening dinner for which a limit- ed number of tickets will be sold. More information about times and ticket prices will be announced later.

Tickets are scheduled to go on sale by May 27. 1 1 Most large group shows in Austin have a certain sameness. Their characteristic profile consists of a few works of art that really stand out, a broad spectrum of decent but un-astonishing pieces and a few real dogs. The Texas Fine Arts Association's "New American Talent 1986" is distinguished for breaking the usual mold. First, it is much more varied in media than the standard roll call of paintings, works on paper and a few sculptures.

Many pieces in "New American Talent" are three dimensional, and there are a large number of exe-ceptional photographs. Second, "New American Talent" has a smaller mid-stratum of decent but unexceptional works, and more unusual pieces. There are also some choices that are so quirky, that go so much against the grain of what usually gets into these shows that it suggests a reassessment of the preponderant neo-expressionist direction of art today. One of the big prize winners was Betsy Belcher's Garden, a vertically-oriented painting dominated by a lush gardenlike field of blues and greens. It is a dynamic painting, unlike the calm one usually associates with gardens; that, along with its vertical orientation, sets up a tension between what it suggests and how it is presented.

Another award winner was Kevin Sloan's painting The Next Place. It is as soft as Belcher's is crisp, and depicts a mysterious overgrown setting with a house. Spatial relationships are ambiguous things look right at first but a bit of looking shows them to be shifting and unclear. Some of the best works in the show fall into the non-painterly realm. Peter Levinson's like dollhouse furniture except that each is constructed so as to be deliberately useless.

There are two sculptures in the wonderfully gruesome category that really work. One is Betty Gray's Mating Call from Mummy, a ceramic, sexually charged image of a mummy playing a long pipe. It's a shameless pun that even Freud wouldn't touch. The other is Austinite Carolyn Ottmer's Man Giving His Right Arm, a cast bronze abstracted figure holding out his severed and enlarged right arm with his left. Among the photographs most of which are in color and are very good Eric Johnson's pictures are remarkable.

Johnson photographs Southern Californian commercial buildings lit with neon in such a way that they appear glowingly real and also create strong abstract compositions. Leonard Balish's far more romantic photograph of a waterlily, To The Light, exploits shallow depth of field and theatrical lighting to create a lush image. Now for the clinkers. A few works slipped in that are skillfully made but partake of the aesthetics of craft shows. Jeffrey Keith's garishly painted RMM16 is just the kind of thing one might find in a slick decorator's showroom, with flashy brushwork and candy colors.

Gerry Trilling's two fiber wall-hangings, especially one titled Monument, are funky, earnest, well-intentioned and utterly boring. The Texas Fine Arts Association's "New American Talent 1986" is on view at the Laguna Gloria Art Museum through May 18. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m.

to 9 p.m. Thursday and 1-5 p.m. Sunday. Flock to films Patrick Taggart looks at four films opening this weekend, including Short Circuit with Ally Sheedy and Steve Guttenberg. Arts Entertainment Also.

The Austin Symphony performs a Pops program this weekend at Palmer Auditorium. Kenneth B. Giles III discusses the Friday gig at the Ritz Theatre, Flex and The Judy's. Betsy Belcher's Garden is dominated by a gardenlike field of blues and greens. three untitled plywood cutouts mounted on the wall are direct and unaffected.

Levinson cuts the plywood into simple shapes with a jigsaw and paints the pieces a matte black. The nicks and chips of the wood are allowed to remain, not cleaned up or made pretty. It's the kind of deceptively simple artwork that makes one come back and keep looking. AI Harris' tiny untitled wood sculptures are in much the same vein, perfectly simple and direct in use of materials. Harris pieces look.