Tower | |
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![]() Theatrical release poster | |
Directed by | Keith Maitland |
Based on | "96 Minutes" by Pamela Colloff |
Produced by |
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Cinematography |
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Edited by | Austin Reedy |
Music by | Ossei Essed |
Production companies |
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Distributed by | Kino Lorber |
Release dates |
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Running time | 82 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Box office | $101,987 [1] |
Tower is a 2016 American mostly-animated documentary film about the 1966 shootings at the University of Texas at Austin directed and produced by Keith Maitland. [2]
The film follows the shooting from the perspectives of several survivors, recreating their recounts via actors filmed and later animated in rotoscoping. [3] The film premiered on March 13, 2016, at South by Southwest, before receiving a limited release by Kino Lorber in the United States on September 28, 2016. [4] [1] It was later aired on television on the PBS series Independent Lens.
On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman rode the elevator to the top floor of the University of Texas Tower in Austin, Texas and opened fire, holding the campus hostage for 96 minutes. When the gunshots were finally silenced, the toll included 16 dead, three dozen wounded, and a shaken nation left trying to understand what had happened. Archival footage [5] [6] is combined with rotoscopic animation in a dynamic, never-before-seen way to illustrate the action-packed untold stories of the witnesses, heroes and survivors. [7]
The film is based on a 2006 Texas Monthly article by Pamela Colloff, "96 Minutes." [4] Maitland originated from New Jersey and attended UT Austin. [8] Maitland read the article and asked Colloff to have lunch with him. He suggested making a film about the incident during the meeting. [9] Colloff became one of the executive producers of the film. [4] Various University of Texas students worked on the film as interns. [9]
To finance the film the creators opened an Indiegogo, generating almost $70,000 from over 330 people in six weeks. [9] In the final few days alumni of UT offered up a matching grant. [10]
Early on, Maitland realized that he and his team likely would not be able to film reenactments on the University campus, so they instead decided to opt for an animated aesthetic "to show the geography of the campus." [11] Footage was mostly shot in Maitland's backyard and then animated by production company Minnow Mountain who was aided by pictures Maitland had shot around campus. [12] Over 100 people were interviewed including at-the-time media members, police, students, and faculty, who had witnessed the events, but a few selective interviews were used. [9]
On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 99% based on 100 reviews, with an average rating of 8.5/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Tower probes into a painful chapter of American history with sensitivity and grace -- and revisits its events from a valuable new perspective." [13] Justin Chang of Variety wrote that the film is "a uniquely cinematic memorial that will be in demand from programmers and buyers as the 50th anniversary of the shootings approaches." [14]
It also won numerous Best Documentary awards, including at the 2016 Austin Film Critics Association [15] [16] [17] and the 2018 News & Documentary Emmy Awards. [18]
The University of Texas at Austin is a public research university in Austin, Texas. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 52,384 students as of Fall 2022, it is also the largest institution in the system.
Charles Joseph Whitman was an American mass murderer and Marine veteran who became known as the "Texas Tower Sniper". On August 1, 1966, Whitman used knives to kill his mother and his wife in their respective homes, then went to the University of Texas at Austin with multiple firearms and began indiscriminately shooting at people. He fatally shot three people inside UT Austin's Main Building, then accessed the 28th-floor observation deck on the building's clock tower. There, he fired at random people for 96 minutes, killing an additional eleven people and wounding 31 others before he was shot dead by Austin Texas law enforcement. Whitman killed a total of seventeen people; the 17th victim died 35 years later from injuries sustained in the attack.
KLRU, branded on-air as Austin PBS, is a PBS member television station in Austin, Texas, United States, owned by the Capital of Texas Public Telecommunications Council. In 2022, KLRU moved into its "Austin Media Center" studios located on the Austin Community College Highland Campus, which was redeveloped from the former Highland Mall. KLRU occupies 45,000 square feet (4,181 m2) in what was previously the mall's Dillard's department store. The station's transmitter is located in the West Austin Antenna Farm in unincorporated Travis County. In addition to airing program content from PBS, it produces original programming including the national music series Austin City Limits.
The University of Texas at Austin was originally conceived in 1827 under an article in the Constitución de Coahuila y Texas to open a public university in the state of Texas. The Constitution of 1876 also called for the creation of a "university of the first class." Thus, they created "The University of Texas." Since the school's opening in 1883, the University of Texas has expanded greatly with the Austin institution remaining the flagship university of the University of Texas System. By the late 1990s, the university had the largest enrollment in the country and contained many of the country's top programs in the areas of law, architecture, film, engineering, and business.
The Main Building is a structure at the center of the University of Texas at Austin campus in Downtown Austin, Texas, United States. The Main Building's 307-foot (94 m) tower has 27 floors and is one of the most recognizable symbols of the university and the city.
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South by Southwest (SXSW) is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and conferences organized jointly that take place in mid-March in Austin, Texas. It began in 1987 and has continued growing in both scope and size every year. In 2017, the conference lasted for 10 days with the interactive track lasting for five days, music for seven days, and film for nine days. There was no in-person event in 2020 and 2021 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in Austin; in both years there was a smaller online event instead.
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The murders of John Forest "Johnny" Goosey and Stacy Marie Barnett occurred on July 21, 2009, in the West Campus area of Austin, Texas, when a man, who had two accomplices, shot to death two recent graduates from the University of Texas at Austin who originated from the Greater Houston area. This event is sometimes called the West Campus murders. Police stated that the murder was the result of a drug deal debt. The murder resulted in media attention on the marijuana trade among young, college-educated people.
Geoff Marslett is an American film director, writer, producer, animator and actor. His early career started with the animated short Monkey vs. Robot which was distributed internationally by Spike and Mike's Classic Festival of Animation on video and Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation in theatres. More recently he directed several successful narrative feature films including MARS, as well as producing and acting in the experimental documentary Yakona. He appears onscreen in Josephine Decker's Thou Wast Mild and Lovely which was released theatrically in 2014. He currently resides in Austin, Texas and splits his time between filmmaking and teaching at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
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The University of Texas tower shooting was an act of mass murder which occurred on August 1, 1966, at the University of Texas at Austin. The perpetrator, 25-year-old Marine veteran Charles Whitman, indiscriminately fired at members of the public both within the Main Building tower and from the tower's observation deck. He shot and killed 15 people, including an unborn child, and injured 31 others before he was killed by two Austin Police Department officers approximately 96 minutes after first opening fire from the observation deck.
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