I’m from Houston.
Not “I went to school in Houston” or “I’ve been to Houston a couple times.” From here. Born here, raised here, still here. I got a season pass to Astroworld for like $30 cuz I brought coke cans to Kroger. I remember Luv Ya Blue. I’ve eaten at Ninfa’s on Navigation. I have opinions about the Galleria that I will not be sharing at this time.
Hanna-Barbera Land, Astroworld · 1984
Houston is the fourth-largest city in the United States and the most diverse. One hundred and forty-five languages spoken within city limits. No zoning laws, which is why you’ll find a nail salon next to a Michelin-star restaurant next to a transmission shop, and somehow it works. It always works.
The city is named after Sam Houston. Six foot six, President of the Republic of Texas, Governor of Tennessee AND Texas. The only man in American history to serve as governor of two different states. He opposed secession when it was career suicide to do so. He was complicated and brilliant and outsized in every sense. Good name for a city.
I’ve been filming family stories here for more than a decade. Heritage Films was built in this city, on the stories of the people who built this city.
And the ones who built it before that.
I’ve sat across from a man who grew up in a shotgun rent house in the Heights during World War II. Twenty-five dollars a month. His mother worked for the draft board, his father for the railroad. As kids they saved tin foil for bullets and used ration books for butter and coffee. Lucky Strike cigarettes changed their packaging and his whole neighborhood noticed because that’s how close to the war they were. On weekends he walked miles to the Heights Theater and the Yale Theater. The whole city was a walking city then. A neighborhood city.
I’ve filmed a woman whose grandfather was one of the original founders of Bel Air, Texas in 1903. She grew up on a dairy farm that later became Rice Avenue. Learned the cash register at six, standing on a milk crate. Pulled real shifts by twelve. The neighborhood still had the Dinky, a little trolley that took you downtown Houston. She wore skirts her mother sewed from the fabric that came on cattle feed sacks, with rickrack trim. That’s Houston in the 1940s. Resourceful and practical and beautiful in ways nobody photographed.
I’ve filmed a kid who grew up on Houston’s East Side running a junk wagon, literally a plywood box on a wagon, hollering his own chant through the streets: “Lady, you got any old newspapers, magazines, telephone books, coat hangers, bottles, or rags?” He raised homing pigeons and smuggled strings of fifty perch onto the seven-cent bus. He grew up three houses from Pete Fountain. Ice men delivered fifty-pound blocks daily. Horse-drawn garbage trucks ran the streets. A waffle man came through in a decorated circus wagon with a racetrack bugle, serving waffles in butcher paper with powdered sugar.
I’ve filmed a man who grew up literally living in a railroad camp car. His mother had one hour to pack everything when the engine came to move them. That man went on to dig the dirt under Minute Maid Park and Reliant Stadium.
That is Houston. Layer after layer after layer. You just have to ask.
About one-fourth of the projects we have filmed have been in and around H-Town.
Here’s what I want you to understand about this city geographically.
Houston is the center of everything. I am twenty minutes from George Bush Intercontinental Airport if I have a 5AM flight. Noon flight I am still within an hour and a half. Not bad. IAH runs direct flights to over 150 destinations worldwide. London, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Mexico City, Doha. United Airlines hub. International is not a trip from here. International is a walk in the cake, to borrow a line from Dikembe.
The Port of Houston is one of the busiest in the Western Hemisphere. The Texas Medical Center is the largest medical complex in the world. Johnson Space Center is twenty-five miles south. We are simultaneously the energy capital of the world, a space city, and a port city.
And we have the best food in the country.
I will fight anyone who says otherwise. I’ve been everywhere, man. I mean that literally. I’ve traveled for this work to more cities and towns than I can count. I’ve eaten everywhere.
Tex-Mex. Vietnamese pho on Bellaire that will make you reconsider your life choices. Crawfish boils that Louisianans attend respectfully and quietly. BBQ from pitmasters who have been at it since before you were born. Ninfa’s on Navigation, where Mama Ninfa Laurenzo put fajitas on the map and changed what Americans eat. The Houston restaurant scene is what happens when 145 languages of people all decide to cook their best food in the same city.
what can i say i was a suburb kid
I built Heritage Films here because the stories were here.
They still are. Hundreds upon hundreds of Houston films and I am nowhere near the bottom of this city. Every shoot I do, somewhere around hour two, someone mentions a Houston landmark that’s been gone for thirty years and the whole room gets a look on their face. That particular mix of pride and grief that only locals understand.
This city has been underestimated its entire existence. Too hot. Too flat. Too sprawling. No zoning. No mountains. No charm.
They’re wrong. They’ve always been wrong.
Houston is the Hollywood of the Gulf Coast. Not because of the glamour. Because of the stories. Because every person I’ve ever filmed here has lived three lives’ worth of material and is still going. Because the city is young enough to have been built by people who are still alive, and old enough that their grandchildren are filming the films.
I’m from here. I’m staying here. And I’m not done yet.
Heritage Films has been telling Houston stories for over twenty years. If you’ve got one, or you know someone who does, we’d be glad to talk.