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The Dallas model, prominent in the South and Southwest, sees a growing population as a sign of urban health. Cities liberally permit housing construction to accommodate new residents. The Los Angeles model, common on the West Coast and in the Northeast Corridor, discourages growth by limiting new housing.
I quit it because at the end of seven years in an ensemble show with one leader, I thought: 'I will be known as 'Dallas' starring Larry Hagman and the cast.' And at this point in my career - I was in my mid to late 30s - I thought, 'Now is the time when it's hottest for me to go out and establish my thing.'
The last episode of Dallas was in '1991.' Unfortunately, it was a terrible episode to end the show on: it was a sort of 'It's a Wonderful Life' with Larry as the Jimmy Stewart character. In that episode, I was an ineffectual-schlep kind of brother, who got divorced three or four times and was a Las Vegas reject.
Even though my mom was talented and had a college degree, she lived in the era when the conventional wisdom in Dallas was that my dad worked, she was supposed to stay home and take care of the kids, and that was that. There really weren't other opportunities for her, and most of them were volunteer opportunities.
If the air quality is terrible in Los Angeles, if a particular university is unusually expensive, if crime is on the rise in Dallas, or if a company has a lot of recalled toys, transparency can spur change. Whenever public or private institutions have to answer to the public, their performance is likely to improve.
'Mamma Mia' and 'Dallas' have proved to me that the things you dream about can happen. I don't ask myself, 'How did I get here?' but instead, 'I deserve to be here. I was right to think this would happen.' I'm a firm believer in the power we have in our minds to want something and pursue it in a sane and focused way.
What's hurtful is when you have portrayals like, you know, when you have someone like Jared Leto who accepts an award for 'Dallas Buyers Club,' after playing a trans woman, standing in a full beard and looking fully cis male: it is communicating to our audiences that underneath all of that, it's still a man under that.
I believe history will come to view 9/11 as an event on par with November 22, 1963, the date on which John F. Kennedy was murdered, cutting short a presidency that was growing ever more promising. Dreams died that day in Dallas; it is easy to imagine the 1960s turning out rather differently had President Kennedy lived.
I went back to Dallas for a little while to finish my short film 'Rusty Forkblade.' It was not the instant success I thought it was going to be. There's a false narrative that if you make a short film right after senior year, you'll be plucked out to make a feature length film, and the rest is history. I didn't do that.
I personally never thought that 'Dallas' would resurrect itself because I didn't think anybody knew how to do it. And it was proven to me on the few attempts that were made. The movie that was going to be done, I read that script, it was atrocious. It was just awful. And I just didn't think anybody understood it anymore.
I'm not the type to pat myself on the back and all that, but somebody has to be lucky, right? When I got to Dallas, I was struggling - sleeping on the floor with six guys in a three-bedroom apartment. I used to drive around, look at the big houses, and imagine what it would be like to live there and use that as motivation.
When I was on 'Dallas,' I was known to audiences of the '80s. And then when my sons, who are in their 30s now, were going to college, 'Dallas' was the cult thing to watch because it was being done on the soap channels, so a whole new generation saw it. And then I have the young fans that knew me from 'Step By Step' in the '90s.
'Dallas' hit a chord back in the late Seventies and Eighties because it was the age of greed: here you have this unapologetic character who is mean and nasty and ruthless and does it all with an evil grin. I think people related to JR back then because we all have someone we know exactly like him. Everyone in the world knows a JR.
Sure, I've felt racism. I think everybody has prejudice. When I was growing up, the dark Mexican kids weren't allowed in the public swimming pool in Dallas. My light-skinned friend got in, and he laughed at us. It didn't seem like a big deal, because we didn't know any different. So I never ran into anything that actually scarred me.
I was 3 and a half, and there was an open call for a Coca-Cola commercial. We were living around Dallas, and my mom took me. I think they were calling for 16-year-olds that could ride horses and swing a rope, and for whatever reason, my mom took me up there when I was 3. But I always had a rope, and I was a little cowboy at that age.
I grew up in the D.C. suburbs, and what I like about that place is that there's not a strong regional affect in the cultural imagination like there is in Dallas or San Francisco or New York City. You have a little more freedom as a novelist this way. The suburbs become a generic idea, and the place doesn't intrude into the narrative.
Back when I was 15 or 16, in Dallas there was a department store called Sanger-Harris. One holiday season, I got a job as a gift wrapper there. The others were all experts who did that job every year, and I was by far the youngest person, who was totally inexperienced. In those days, department stores around Christmastime were a total frenzy.
