Tower | |
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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 in 2006 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. 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 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 police officers. Whitman killed a total of sixteen people; the 16th victim died 35 years later from injuries sustained in the attack.
The Frank C. Erwin Jr. Center was a multi-purpose arena located on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin in Austin, Texas. It is also sometimes referred to as "The Drum" or "The Superdrum", owing to its round, drum-like appearance from outside.
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.
ITVS is a service in the United States which funds and presents documentaries on public television through distribution by PBS, American Public Television and NETA, new media projects on the Internet, and the weekly series Independent Lens on PBS. Aside from Independent Lens, ITVS funded and produced films for more than 40 television hours per year on the PBS series POV, Frontline, American Masters and American Experience. Some ITVS programs are produced along with organizations like Latino Public Broadcasting and KQED.
South by Southwest, abbreviated as SXSW and colloquially referred to as South By, 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, United States. 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, Texas; in both years there was a smaller online event instead.
The Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (TSBVI) is a Texas special public school, in the continuum of statewide placements for students who have a visual impairment. It is considered a statewide resource to parents of these children and professionals who serve them. Students, ages 6 through 21, who are blind, deafblind, or visually impaired, including those with additional disabilities, are eligible for consideration for services at TSBVI.
Benjamin Jeffrey Steinbauer is an American director, writer and producer, who is best known for directing the feature documentary Winnebago Man (2009). Steinbauer has directed other documentaries, including Chop & Steele (2022), which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, Brute Force (2012) and Heroes From The Storm (2017), as well as episodic television for the PBS show Stories of the Mind and the CBS show Pink Collar Crimes.
The Moody College of Communication is the communication college at The University of Texas at Austin. The college is home to top-ranked programs in advertising and public relations, communication studies, communication and leadership, speech, language and hearing sciences, journalism, and radio-television-film. The Moody College is nationally recognized for its faculty members, research and student media. It offers seven undergraduate degrees, including those in Journalism, Advertising, and Radio-Television-Film, and 17 graduate programs. The Moody College of Communication operates out of the Jesse H. Jones Communication Complex and the Dealey Center for New Media, which opened in November 2012.
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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 is being 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.
The Moody Pedestrian Bridge is a pedestrian bridge in Austin, Texas on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. It connects two buildings within the Moody College of Communication across a street.
Pamela Colloff is an American journalist. She has contributed to The New Yorker, but a majority of her work has been featured in Texas Monthly, where she was an executive editor. As of 2017, Colloff is a senior reporter at ProPublica and a writer-at-large at The New York Times Magazine.
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.
Taking Tiger Mountain is a 1983 American science fiction film directed by Tom Huckabee and Kent Smith, and starring Bill Paxton in one of his earliest on-screen acting roles. Originally conceived as an experimental art film inspired by Albert Camus's 1942 novel The Stranger and a poem by Smith, the film was initially directed by Smith and shot in Wales. Aside from Paxton, the film's cast is made up of townspeople from the areas in which shooting took place. It was filmed without sound, with the intention of adding dialogue in post-production.
Austin, Texas, reportedly confirmed its first cases on March 13, 2020, with the related onset of symptoms occurring as early as March 2, 2020. However, the disease may have reached the Austin area earlier. In an unconfirmed case, a 67 year old man in Bastrop, Tx, traveled to Clovis ,NM on December 21st. He was hospitalized in Clovis on December 23, 2019, then transported via ambulance to Lubbock where he was placed on a ventilator. He declined rapidly and passed away on January 2, 2020. Though there was no testing available at the time, he exhibited classic symptoms of COVID-19. The first fatality associated with the disease was reported on March 27, 2020. As of January 21, 2021, the City of Austin has reported over 50,000 cases of COVID-19, with 573 deaths associated with the disease.