Movies

A map in the Prison Break production office shows where the television fugitives have ended up around the country, but it's likely they need a second, smaller map of North Texas to track the production itself. That's good news for local cast and crew awaiting the fallout of a potential writers strike.

For the currently filming third season, Prison Break is packing up and shooting more outside of the area, but the show's second season was almost entirely shot here, and the producers have included a little North Texas love letter on the season two DVD box set via a featurette called "Turning Dallas Into America."

"We knew we had to play a number of different locales across the country," executive producer and writer Paul Scheuring says in the featurette. "We needed to have desert, a big city and a bayou. We needed to have wide-open plains and also parts of Latin America and New Mexico."

Show producer Garry Brown, who knew Dallas from working on Walker, Texas Ranger, suggested taking a look at North Texas. "My first thought was Dallas has only one look," Mr. Scheuring says on the DVD. "It's like J.R. and people with tall hats. I was quite wrong."

The kicker was the ability to travel 30 to 45 minutes in any direction and find the right look, even Panama, which was accomplished by taking a set used to portray Iraq in the television film Saving Private Lynch and adding some palm trees.

However, third-season filming may halt if the Writers Guild of America decides to go on strike Nov. 1 when its latest contract expires. The last time a strike occurred was in 1988. The WGA threatened a similar strike in 2004, teaming up with the Screen Actors Guild (whose contract expires in July 2008). This led to a flurry of filming followed by a lull and a glut of unscripted reality-television programs. Many believe the WGA will delay a strike, if it occurs at all, until January or later to pull in SAG again. But the threat is enough to send the film-television industry scurrying.

Janis Burklund, head of the Dallas Film Commission, is courting a lot of film projects aiming at January starts, but she expects the strike could lead to more North Texas reality shoots. "Those folks tend to like Dallas," she says of reality producers, "but we won't know for a while."

North Texas shoots are nothing new. Proof is "The Bride of It Came From Dallas - 3rd Time's the Charm," a program from the Dallas Producers Association of "films that drove the drive-ins into extinction." It screens Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Studio Movie Grill in Addison. This year's program of clips compiled by film historian Gordon Smith includes the Dallas-shot movies Logan's Run (1976), which won the Oscar for special effects that now are decidedly dated, and the even campier Bloodsucker From Outer Space (1984). The event benefits the Texas Motion Picture Alliance. A suggested donation of $10 will get you in; head to www.dallasproducers.org for more information.

Bonus footage: The thriller By the Devil's Hand recently wrapped in Fort Worth. It features an all-local cast, including Susana Gibb, Reece Rios, Arianne Martin, Sean Teague, Jason Skeen and Marc Jeffreys....Oliver Stone headlines the Austin Film Festival, which begins today. More at www.austinfilmfestival.com.