I learned to stop worrying and love Oak

A ‘lost’ Terry Southern film and all the best movies the Texas Theatre could find for this year’s Oak Cliff Film Festival

When Steven Soderbergh “basically badgered” Warner Bros. into releasing Terry Southern’s lost film on DVD last year, the Texas Theatre guys geeked out.

“It’s awesome,” says Oak Cliff Film Festival co-founder Barak Epstein. “It’s basically unseen.”

The film will be introduced by Southern’s son, Nile, at the Oak Cliff Film Festival this month.

“Lost” is a relative term. The film, “End of the Road,” was released in 1970 but did poorly at the box office because of a lack of publicity and an X rating (it is now rated R). Southern, a Sunset High School graduate, died in 1995 at age 71. But his son, who is working on a documentary about his fa-

Story by Rachel Stone

ther called “Dad Strangelove,” has always been intrigued by the movie. Soderbergh, a fan of Southern’s work on “Dr. Strangelove,” “Easy Rider,” “Barbarella” and other films, heard of the younger Southern’s fascination with the film and convinced Warner Bros. to release it last year.

It is an early, low-budget independent film, financed by Villager clothing company owner Max Raab, who allowed Southern full creative license. The film is adapted from a 1958 John Barth novel, and the story is about a recent college graduate who seeks the help of Dr. D, played by James Earl Jones, who advises him to teach college English.

“I thought … it needed to be seen,”

Soderbergh told Indiewire magazine last September.

The inaugural Oak Cliff Film Festival last year was a huge success, but making it happen was an epic task. For starters, “we had to convince people we were actually a film festival,” Epstein says.

That hasn’t been a problem this year, says co-founder Eric Steele.