Things To Do in Dallas Tonight: May 11

Non sequitur question of the week: When’s the last time you picked up and played with a dead squirrel? Right, never. Ew.

Tonight brings together a couple of events that I really like, and luckily, they’re both at the Texas Theatre. Last month FrontRow reported that the Oak Cliff movie theater was interested in producing films as well as screening them, and now they’re hosting an eight week script development series that starts this evening. It’s co-run by the Dallas Screenwriters Association and led by a guy named Kelly Davis, who happens to be fairly new in town.

I was curious about Davis, so I called him up and found out that he’s a University of Chicago film school drop out (lest you forget, Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese didn’t finish, either). He got a grant to make a film in Tokyo, and stayed there for eight years, working as a screenwriter and a script consultant for Fox Japan and the BBC. He returned to the States to work as a concept developer for HBO in New York, but after only three months on the job, he visited his mother in Fort Worth. And while he was here, he met a girl. Romance, people, it’s alive and well. Anyway, if you’ve been harboring an idea for a movie or you’re just looking for a creative outlet, finally putting it out there is incredibly satisfying. There are still a few spots open for tonight’s class.

On a more somber note, the late photographer Tim Hetherington, who was killed in April covering the conflict in Libya, was supposed to speak at this evening’s screening of his Afghan war documentary, Restrepo. Instead, the Texas Theatre will hold the screening in his honor in conjunction with the art exhibit XXI: Conflicts in a New Century, which features some of Hetherington’s still portraiture. Peter has more details on FrontRow. It’s free to attend, and all you have to do is make a reservation.

For more things to do tonight, go here.