Interview:
Mark Lambert Bristol,
director,
Julie B. Denny,
screenwriter,
"Chocolate Lizards"
Based on the 1999 novel by Cole Thompson, and shot in Austin and Bartlett, the Texas oil industry dramedy Chocolate Lizards finds a struggling young actor offered the role of lifetime by a veteran driller in desperate need of locating an untapped oil reserve. Fired after an on-set incident, Erwin Vandeveer (Rudy Pankow) breaks down in the small Texas town of Buffalo Gap while en route from Louisiana to California. While waiting for his car to be repaired, Erwin crosses paths with oil driller Merle Luskey (Thomas Haden Church). Merle recruits Erwin to play his “landman” in a bid to prevent a bank from calling in his loan. While Erwin may not know anything about the oil industry, the time he spent studying business at Harvard proves so beneficial to Merle that he persuades Erwin to remain his “front man” for another month as he searches in and around Buffalo Gap for oil. Chocolate Lizards costars Carrie-Anne Moss as local diner owner and Merle’s love interest Faye and Bruce Dern as a farmer whose land may or may not contain an oil reserve. Directed by Mark Lambert Bristol, Chocolate Lizards will screen at 7 p.m. June 3 at the Historic Nimitz Ballroom during the Hill Country Film Festival in Fredericksburg. Raised in Austin, Mark Lambert Bristol (pictured, right) previously directed the 1999 David Carradine thriller Natural Selection and an episode of the Rooster Teeth live-action series Day One. He is also a sought-after storyboard artist who has worked on such locally shot films and TV series as Dazed & Confused, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, Secondhand Lions, The Tree of Life, My All-American, RWBY, The Leftovers, and Fear the Walking Dead as well as Memento, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Saving Mr. Banks, Despicable Me 3, and the upcoming Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1 and Part 2. Chocolate Lizards represents the Abilene-based Julie B. Denny’s (pictured, left) first produced screenplay.
Aired: May 30, 2023. Web site: http://markbristol.squarespace.com/ http://www.hillcountryff.com/ |
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