There are only two credible excuses for not having heard of Molly Ivins' writing: youth and illiteracy, though the latter is a dubious one. At the time of her death in 2007, more than 300 newspapers across the country were running her column, which she often expounded upon during regular television appearances. In the early 1980s, her line about U.S. Rep. Jim Collins, R-Dallas, "If his IQ slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day," stung both readers and advertisers. But her editors at the Dallas Times Herald rallied to her defense, renting billboards that read "Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?" The slogan became the title of her first book.
If, somehow, you really do remain unacquainted with Ivins as a cultural force and icon of left-wing Texas politics, you're in luck. Twelve years after her death, there's a new documentary out that tells the story of her life and career in 93 minutes. Having already screened at Sundance and South by Southwest, Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins is getting a nationwide release in September.
But you don't have to wait that long to see it: On Wednesday, Aug. 28, four Alamo Drafthouse theaters in D-FW are hosting sneak peek screenings. The theaters in Lake Highlands, Irving, North Richland Hills and Denton are also presenting a live-streamed Q&A with director Janice Engel, producer Carlisle Vandervoort, Texas Observer editor Andrea Valdez, Texas Tribune editor Emily Ramshaw and author Jim Hightower that same evening. Richard Linklater will moderate.
On Aug. 30, the movie will begin showing at theaters all across Texas in advance of the nationwide release.
Engel, the movie's director, is one of those poor out-of-staters who'd never heard of Ivins until after her death. The 2010 play Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins, starring Kathleen Turner, is what brought Ivins to Engel's attention a few years back.
"It was Molly. She was brilliant. And funny," Engel says. "And so, when I came home, rather than going to sleep, I went to Google and stayed up till 2 or 3 in the morning and watched Molly on C-SPAN." Afterward, Engel picked up the phone and called the friend who'd told her about the play in the first place. "Wow, how come I didn't know about her?" she said.
"Me, too!" he answered.
That friend, James Egan, became a co-producer on the film. After pulling together other personnel and doing some background reading (she mentions Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith's 2009 biography of Ivins in particular), Engel boarded a plane to Texas in August 2012 and began interviewing Ivins' contemporaries and collaborators: journalists Lou Dubose and Kaye Northcott, lawyer David Richards, and columnist Jim Hightower. They all show up in the movie, along with other Ivins associates like her brother, Andy (who died in 2013, not long after filming), her former personal assistant Betsy Moon, and former Texas governor Ann Richards. Ivins takes turns praising and mocking nearly all of them in the film. ("I've known Ann since she and Exxon were both humble.")
At times, it feels like a highlight reel of Ivins' best one-liners. "Molly's driving this bus," said Engel.
The movie unfolds as a classic biopic, beginning with Ivins' upbringing in Houston's elite River Oaks neighborhood where — surrounded by soon-to-be debutants and tyrannized by her conservative father — she says she had it rough. Being tall didn't help either. In her words, "I spent my girlhood as a Clydesdale among thoroughbreds."
The film follows her time at The Houston Chronicle, The Minneapolis Tribune, the Texas Observer, which she co-edited, and The New York Times, where her habit of going barefoot in the office and bringing in her dog — whose name was, no joke, S - - t — raised eyebrows. To make things worse, her edgy prose landed her in trouble with editors, who frequently watered it down. For instance, if she described something that "squawked like a $2 fiddle," the Times copy desk, she said, would change it to "an inexpensive instrument."
Then there's her final Texas homecoming, to work for the Dallas Times Herald and later, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. All throughout the film, amid a slew of Ivins-brand wisecracks, there's room for the serious stuff, too, as Ivins fights to be heard in male-dominated newsrooms, battles breast cancer and struggles with a drinking problem enabled by the, er... immersive reporting tactics she and her colleagues often employed. "They knew the state and the Lege in a way that will never be possible again, because they were often seeing it from the same end of an empty bottle as the people they wrote about," said one former journalist, who was familiar with Ivins' methods.
There's always some danger when a non-Texan takes interest in someone whose heart and soul was in this state. America, if you haven't noticed, is in love with Texas and its myths — it has been for a while — in a way that often blinds it to the reality of what's really going on here. Engel, the director, who's based in California, is liable to fall into this trap.
But she doesn't. What emerges from her film is a nuanced portrait of Ivins and the way she both embodied and pushed back on Texas stereotypes.
Engel distinguishes Ivins' genuine Texan pride from the amped-up persona she often put on to make fun of those she felt were a little too Texas. The difference is subtle. "I'm a Texan. I drive a pickup truck. I drink beer. I cuss. I hunt," says Ivins early in the movie. Square that with this paragraph she wrote for the Dallas Times Herald in 1985, parodying a ridiculous piece of legislation the state legislature passed that year:
Ivins was always proud to be a Texan, and especially proud to skewer those who, she thought, were doing it all wrong.
Details
Find details on upcoming screenings at mollyivinsfilm.com.
