JIM BOWEN

President of Texas Crew LLC / Director of Photography

Jim has been in the video business ever since Macaroni invented the cathode ray tube.

Jim began his career shooting everything in black in the early days before they invented white. “Black was so much more expressive” before they insisted on our using white in the same scenes.

After excepting black and white as the new norm, Jim moved on to experimenting with single color Technicolor. “The single color at first was blue”, but that proved problematic with space movies featuring little green people. The industry settled on aqua as the standard single color, right after Elvis shot Blue Hawaii.

Jim got his first big break on the set of the Alamo with John Wayne. Although Bowen was just 8 years old at the time, Mr Wayne had Bowen clean the inside of the giant canon the Mexicans had in the movie. Bowen used his tiny hands to polish the inside of the canon while Wayne watched. “Best job done by hand” Wayne would exclaim.

After making a fortune cleaning the top canon for the Alamo, Bowen invested his discretionary income in his new restaurant, The Head On Rabbit. The restaurant featured fur and head on rabbit, and freshly cut fish fins. MGM ending up buying the restaurant, and Bowen was back in the movie business again.

Bowen was almost killed by the MGM lion when trying to clean the cat’s toenails with the same solution he used on the Mexican canon.

MGM let Bowen go, since there was only one lion, and there were tons of folks like Bowen.

Jim then joined KVUE TV in Austin, and started processing color film for the daily news reel. The tainted air from the film chemicals were so strong, Bowen’s looks began to change. He lost 10 inches in height and most of all his hair.

Going from 6’4” to 5’6” helped Bowen to be a more stealthy photographer. He now could get under most press scrums, and make even short reporters look tall. Since most of these vertically challenged TV anchors need to feel big, he was quite successful in this bubble-headed bleach blond business.

The rest is just history.