I didn't expect civic boosterism to be this shallow
Visit Fort Worth's hollow remake of "The Unexpected City" discards everything that made the original interesting.
Here’s my mildly dystopic prediction for the year 2049.
To celebrate Fort Worth’s bicentennial, city officials roll out a special marketing campaign. The centerpiece is a cinematic video that takes viewers on a tour of the sparkling mid-century cityscape. It’s got slick visuals, with plenty of Stockyards footage and maybe some drone shots of the star-shaped Juneteenth museum, which is cool.
What’s not so cool is the synthetic, AI-generated version of actor Jimmy Stewart that provides the voiceover. This rather unsettling reconstruction of Stewart’s stumbling drawl praises how much Cowtown has grown since “his” day but remarks that no other city has managed to keep so much of a small-town feel. It's something no one would’ve expected of this little town of 1.5 million perched on the edge of the prairie, but by golly they pulled it off.
“After all, this is Fort Worth, Texas — the unexpected city,” says Jimmy GPT.
This scenario sounds, at worst, moderately jarring and maybe even pretty good for a dystopia. But we at Lost in Panther City are idealistic dreamers, and we won’t settle for a slightly disturbing future just because it’s not as bad as it could be. The Fort Worth cinematic universe can be better. It can find a new and original way to lure tourists that doesn’t mimic the Hollywood model of endless reboots with digitally reconstructed famous actors meant to exploit your nostalgia.
We’re not there yet. But the city is at least two-thirds of the way down that path.
Perhaps you’ve already seen Visit Fort Worth’s new marketing campaign, which was unveiled at last month’s annual meeting and takes its name from a 1977 short film, “Fort Worth: The Unexpected City.” If you haven’t, here’s the gist: The campaign centers on a commercial shot with footage of modern-day Fort Worth plus a modified and drastically condensed version of Jimmy Stewart's narration from the original film — essentially a greatest hits version of quotes mixed with a generic orchestral score meant to make you feel things.
I wrote about the original “Unexpected City” film a few months ago. Here’s some of what I said then:
What exactly is “unexpected” about Fort Worth, according to First National Bank? Well, the film’s narrator, Hollywood superstar and stalwart everyman Jimmy Stewart, emphasizes the “unexpected sophistication of this town perched on the edge of the prairie.” Stewart tells us: “I don’t know of another town — and I’ve seen quite a few — where you could enjoy great art on one side of the street and take in a cattle auction on the other.”
In other words: Cowboys and Culture.
The 16-minute film is such a striking snapshot of the “schizophrenic city” coming into being. It reflects clear insecurities among the people who donated to Fort Worth art museums and bought season tickets to the Fort Worth Opera, an uneasy sense among affluent types that the refined cosmopolitan elites of New York and London were snickering at them. “Fort Worth? You mean that place where they trade cows?”
And:
The film was described by the bank as “a gift to the people of Fort Worth” and is viewed now as a “love letter” to the city, but newspaper reports at the time suggest other motives. It “would be useful for the travel industry and for corporations seeking to hire executives or other employees from out of state,” according to an executive of the public relations firm behind the film who spoke to the Star-Telegram in 1977. From this perspective, “Fort Worth: The Unexpected City” was an ingenious marketing ploy, not only for First National Bank but for Fort Worth’s business sector as a whole.
Despite my complaints, I actually like the original “Unexpected City” film. Yes, it was propaganda produced by a bank to attract tourists. But it was interesting propaganda. It captured a genuinely complex portrait of the city, even if it was colored by the anxieties of rich socialites who didn’t like their city being nicknamed “Cowtown.”
Visit Fort Worth’s commercial lacks the same charm. When Jimmy Stewart’s words are lifted from a slow, meandering, grainy film and grafted instead onto an over-edited, rapid-fire sequence of shiny images, the effect is unnerving. The undeniable warmth of his voice evaporates, leaving behind a flat, affectless, almost robotic residue.
The new commercial also steals the rhetoric of the original film without seeming to understand the point it was trying to make or the particular historical moment in which it was created. The 1977 film was produced at a time of transition, as part of a concerted effort to transform Fort Worth’s public image into the city of cowboys and culture. But cowboys and culture has been the dominant story the city tells about itself for nearly half a century now — due, in part, to the original film’s influence.
Unfortunately, the Brooklyn-based film company responsible for the new spot — self-styled “documentarian thought-provokers, independent truth-seekers, and non-profit do-gooders” — decided to run with the same aging slogan. Here’s what the commercial’s director said to the publication Ad Age:
Trey Nelson of Smartypants directed the film. He told Ad Age that he was raised in Dallas in the ’80s, but never spent much time in Fort Worth growing up.
“So, when I visited the city in the early stages of [the campaign’s] development, the experience was rooted in seeing everything for the first time,” he said. “I was struck by the seemingly impossible worlds that made Fort Worth unexpected—cowboys and culture.”
As a result, one thing the new commercial lacks is any indication of what makes Fort Worth “unexpected” today. Of the attractions that appear in the spot, the Stockyards, a rodeo, and the Cultural District’s museums get the most attention. All are reasons why tourists already come to Fort Worth. These are the things they expect.
The original film had the decency to admit that Fort Worth has much that won’t surprise you, like its Old West iconography or an iconic Tex-Mex restaurant. And that’s okay! What gave the city its personality, according to Jimmy Stewart, was the way Fort Worth seemed to strike a balance between its roots as a nineteenth-century cattle town and the relative novelty of a prestigious arts culture. In his words:
It’s got lots of things that you’d expect it to have, and other things that you’d never dreamed it had. The old and the new together in an unexpected blend — that’s Fort Worth, Texas, the unexpected city.
This sense of self-awareness is entirely lacking in the new commercial. It’d be one thing if Visit Fort Worth had just offered a new, more diverse version of the same old thing and called it a day. But our city boosters want Fort Worth to be “The Unexpected City” again. Sounds great! So let’s showcase things about the city that people would actually be surprised to learn.
If Fort Worth’s most well-known tourist attractions still surprise outsiders in the year of our lord 2023, that seems like clear evidence that the city’s nearly 50 years of cowboys and culture propaganda has failed. Why would we need more?
