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Burning Celluloid
The folks at Walden Media were having a helluva time finding the right Texas band to play a small performance bit in one of their upcoming movies, a film called Will, being shot in Austin and starring Friends’ Lisa Kudrow, High School Musical’s Vanessa Hudgens, and one yet-to-be-determined half of the blonde tweener pop duo Aly & AJ. Somehow, the music supervisor and Fort Worth’s Burning Hotels got connected. Walden wanted a band with a “European look,” recalled Cory Bergen, whose management company handles the Hotels and Austin’s Otis. An interview was set up in Austin, and “it was love at first sight,” Bergen said. The Hotels will play themselves in a club scene and perform their raucous indie-hit “Stuck in the Middle.” Shooting will begin soon. The movie will be released in 2009. Holes, Because of Winn-Dixie, and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe are just three of about a dozen theatrical features that Walden has put out. (Another upcoming Walden release is Nim’s Island, starring Academy-Award-winner Jodie Foster and Little Miss Sunshine herself, Abigail Breslin.) The band hopes that “Stuck in the Middle,” after being made FCC-friendly, will appear on the Will soundtrack. “The exposure, and with all the teen stars, and the amount of time [the Hotels] will have on screen — they’re obviously excited,” Bergen said. None of the band members has ever acted in front of a camera before. “We get to be ourselves,” Bergen said. “Which is a good thing.” The band also will be in Austin for SXSW, the annual music festival, conference, and drinkfest that goes off every March. They have a couple of shows scheduled, including stops at the Whisky Bar on Thursday, Mar. 13, and on Saturday, the 15th, at a clothing retailer on South Congress called Parts and Labor. Visit www.myspace.com/theburninghotels. ... I’ve only heard a few rough cuts of Calhoun’s new album, but — and I’m going out on a limb here — I highly recommend the band’s CD release show on Saturday at the Aardvark, with rowdy youths the Frontier Brothers, pop-rock singer-songwriter Sean Russell, and One Lone Car. What I’ve heard was severely dynamic, more dynamic than most of the band’s previous tuneage, which is saying something, at the very least, because Calhoun’s previous tuneage was intensely dynamic, a lot of curves, edges, and moving parts but never anything less than solid and clearly defined. The old music, oddly enough, helped the band land a showcase at SXSW. The show at the Aardvark (2905 W. Berry St., 817-926-7814) also will be a homecoming of sorts. Songwriter-in-chief Tim Locke and deputy songwriter Jordan Roberts have celebrated the releases of a dozens different CDs at the ’vark while playing in a dozen different bands, going all the way back to the club’s humble beginnings, lo, these — nine? 10? 11? — years ago. Funny that now, after countless hours of shows and hard time spent in studios and touring vans, the band reportedly has on its hands a defining rock document, a new template of sorts. Visit www.myspace.com/calhoun.
Contact HearSay at hearsay@fwweekly.com.
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