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RealFilms Screening: Living with the Trinity

Presented by Documentary Alliance at Houston Community College - NW (Spring Branch/Town & Country Campus)

July 31, 2010

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RealFilms presents the documentary Living with the Trinity, Saturday, July 31st,  at Houston Community College, Spring Branch Campus, Performing Arts Theatre, 1010 W. Sam Houston Pkwy N. Houston, TX 77043. Directed by Rob Tranchin.

Living with the Trinity explores the conflict that developed in the early 1970s over plans to transform the entire length of the Trinity River into a barge canal linking Dallas and Fort Worth to the Gulf of Mexico. The controversy placed Texas in the national spotlight and spawned a lawsuit against a proposed dam at the mouth of the river near Houston that signaled a new era in environmental politics. The fate of the Trinity River was ultimately decided by a vote.

The film revisits the period from 1965 to 1973 when U.S. Congressman Jim Wright of Fort Worth, working with the Johnson Administration, was able to win Congressional approval of nearly $1 billion for what would become a highly controversial project. Seventeen counties in the river basin voted on a bond issue to supplement the federal funding. The bond issue failed by just 20,000 votes and the barge canal was never built.

Living with the Trinity includes interviews with former Fort Worth Congressman, U.S. Speaker of the House and canal proponent, Jim Wright, and Dallas businessman and former U.S. Congressman, Alan Steelman, who unseated four-term Congressman Earle Cabell in the 1972 election and rallied opposition to the project. Fort Worth Star-Telegram Columnist Bob Ray Sanders and Lee Cullum, host of KERA's business program CEO, offer insight from their perspectives as reporters who covered these issues for KERA-TV.

Producing station KERA has add new content to a related Web site at http://www.TrinityRiverTexas.org  where visitors can access educational materials and explore the geography, ecology and cultural history of the river. New videos, photographs and archival film footage update three major multimedia stories focusing on the river's history, flood prevention efforts and the latest developments regarding the environmental quality of the river. Additionally, online visitors will find new opportunities to participate in public discussions regarding Trinity River redevelopment projects planned for Fort Worth and Dallas.

About The Director
Rob Tranchin is a senior producer, writer and director of documentaries and outreach specials for KERA, where he also serves as executive producer for content. His national productions for PBS include Sweet Tornado: Margo Jones and the American Theater (co-written and produced with Kay Cattarulla), Roy Bedichek's Vanishing Frontier, Wildcatter (for American Experience), Who Cares about Kids? with poet and author Maya Angelou, For a Deaf Son, and Peacemaker.

In 1999, Tranchin won a national Emmy Award as writer and co-producer of KERA's four-part, nationally-televised PBS series The U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848). In 2000, Tranchin was nominated for another national Emmy Award as writer and co-producer of KERA's documentary Matisse & Picasso, a compelling portrait of two giants of 20th century art. He is a graduate of Harvard College and New York University, and has lived and travelled extensively in Japan, where he worked as an assistant director to the Japanese film director Imamura Shohei.