CinemaTexas program notes

CinemaTexas was a film society run by graduate students in the University of Texas at Austin's Radio-Television-Film department. It screened films four nights a week to accompany RTF classes, and every screening came with a set of program notes that the Austin Chronicle later described as carefully researched. Students wrote the notes, and work-study staff produced them on a mimeograph. Marjorie Baumgarten, who handled that job and the box office, later called it the best job she ever had. Ed Lowry, an RTF doctoral student, ran the society for a time, and Olive Graham was among the note writers.

The program notes trained a group of writers who went on to shape Austin's film press. Baumgarten, Nick Barbaro, Louis Black and Lowry met at CinemaTexas, and Baumgarten recalled the office as a hub for planning The Austin Chronicle. Barbaro and Black launched the paper in September 1981 with Lowry on its first editorial board, and Black wrote in 2003 that many Chronicle staffers came out of the CinemaTexas graduate program. By his account the society had closed by 1985.

The name survived in Cinematexas, a festival of shorts and student work held at venues around Austin. Its 2002 edition, covered by Baumgarten in the Chronicle, featured silent shorts selected by Terrence Malick, an in-person program of nonfiction films by Werner Herzog and a showcase of Cuban director Santiago Alvarez. This research did not find a documented founding year for the original society or a public archive of the program notes.