Wes Anderson's Houston: Rushmore & the Hometown Auteur

Wes Anderson grew up in Houston, and his 1998 breakout Rushmore is a Houston film to its bones — shot around the city over fifty days in the winter of 1997–98, with locations chosen from the geography of his own childhood. The story of Max Fischer, a scholarship prodigy at an elite prep school, plays out on the class divide between private and public education that Anderson knew firsthand: his own alma mater, St. John's School, became the fictional Rushmore Academy. This driving loop threads the real buildings the cameras used — the ivied prep school, the public high school Max is banished to, the grand old hotel where a heartbroken tycoon holes up, and the leafy Museum District that anchors the film's world. Several are working schools and a functioning hotel, so keep to public streets and lobbies and be a respectful visitor. It's a tour of a filmmaker discovering his voice in the city that shaped it.