SEAN PENNZOIL PLACE 
ZOMG! Actual footage of actual Houston locations occupied by actual movie stars shows up in short B-roll segments of Terrence Malick’s new square-jaw feature, The Tree of Life. Sorry, no Brad Pitt here, but Sean Penn plays a pensive Houston-ish designer type who mopes around an unattributed Downtown: “A location where the crew spent considerable time was the PageSoutherlandPage office at 1100 Louisiana. ‘Our office is very cool. It’s an old banking lobby about eight stories high, so it’s a pretty dramatic space,’ says Nancy Fleshman, the engineering and architecture firm’s director of research. ‘They made Penn an architect and he’s interacting with people in our office, going over drawings, talking with them. At one point Malick’s assistant asked me to go show Penn how to be an architect, what to do. I thought, “Well, I’m not an architect, but I can do that.”’” [Houston Chronicle] Image: Fox Searchlight
Sign up for the Newsletter
How funny, I can remember going there when my father’s company was there, and thought it was hokey then.
Did you show him how to dither and stamp his feet while wearing flesh-colored specs?
(and writing opaque ones…)
I would prefer to see him on the Katy Freeway, outbound….one way ticket.
“The location menu included Pennzoil Place, Wells Fargo Plaza and One Allen Center.”
Used to work at Pennzoil and now work in One Allen. Pretty neat!
Saw this movie this weekend. Downtown Houston looks absolutely gorgeous. It’s not often that filmmakers look at Houston as anything other than an industrial hellhole (e.g. Robocop); kudos to Terrence Malick for shining a beautiful lense on this city!