"Tom was one of those people who created a family around himself all the time," says friend and fellow filmmaker Michael Cain, a film producer who started the EarthX and Deep Ellum Film Festivals who worked with Huckabee on several film projects and intiatives like the Dallas International Film Festival. "He would do anything for them and vice versa, they would go to the ends of the world for Tom. He was somebody who really believed that great stories could affect people and that it was important to him to entertain people."
Huckabee is one of those who helped build Fort Worth's independent film community with his work on and off set and through events such as the annual Lone Star Film Festival. Huckabee also gave one of the city's most famous faces, Bill Paxton, his first start in film.
Huckabee's love for storytelling seemed to grow out of his unique capacity for kindness even at a young age.
"He was always encouraging," Tom's younger sister, Susan Roche, said at a special memorial for Huckabee on Saturday at Scat Jazz Lounge in Fort Worth. "He never put me down. He was good to all of his family and friends."
One of his key friendship developed during Huckabee's high school years when he met Paxton who went on to star in classic films Aliens, Apollo 13, Titanic and Tombstone and acclaimed TV series such as the HBO drama Big Love. Paxton died suddenly at 61 in 2017 following complications from a surgery.
Huckabee told the Observer that year that he first met Paxton during a school trip to London and struck up a friendship over their mutual love for film and stories. Huckabee says the two of them made a pact to make a film together. They would sneak into places back in their hometown shooting full films guerilla style, not waiting for permission to pursue their visions. Their shared and daring drive occasionally got them in trouble. For their school history project movie Victory in Auschwitz, they snuck into a trainyard with realistic looking military props. Paxton did his own stunts and "really fucked himself up" but insisted they kept filming because "we didn't have any fake blood."
People started to notice the production and their filmmaking attracted a crowd that eventually brought out Fort Worth police, armed with weapons drawn.
"They jumped out of the cars, and 10 cops leveled guns at us and said, 'Drop your guns!' and we froze," Huckabee said. "Then the cops recognized one of the actors as a rookie cop and was like 'Scott, what are you doing?' and he said, 'We're making a movie' and the cop said, 'Man, we almost blew all of you away' and they actually let us finish the movie."
One of the first full-length features they produced together was a 1982 dystopian sci-fi film called Taking Tiger Mountain starring Paxton and directed by Huckabee and Kent Smith, which movie media publisher Vinegar Syndrome released on DVD and Blu-Ray two years after Paxton's death.
Trailer | Taking Tiger Mountain Revisited from Gold Alchemy on Vimeo.
"He never had any entitlement," Huckabee said in 2017 about his friend Paxton. "He had good breeding but he didn't have any sense of entitlement and that served him incredibly well when he went to Los Angeles because that doesn't play well in [Los Angeles] if you just drove in off the hay truck from Texas."Paxton and Huckabee went off to Austin and eventually L.A. to pursue their careers. The two continued to work together as Huckabee would help punch up Paxton's dialogue on some of his famous films. Then while in Austin, Huckabee met his future wife Barbara Cohen who would become a casting director for some of the industry's most beloved films including Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, Wes Anderson's Rushmore and Shane Black's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
The trio produced award-winning films and helped launch the careers of many notable film and TV actors such as Xander Berkeley, John Hawks and Sarah Clarke.
Cain says he first met Cohen on a flight and noticed her reading a magazine with a picture of the poster for the film Frailty, a 2001 crime drama starring Paxton and Matthew McConaughey in which Huckabee served as an executive producer and also fulfilled Paxton and Huckabee's teenage pact to make a feature length film. Cain loved the movie and arranged to have its premiere at his Deep Ellum Film Festival.
"I describe him as the TV character Columbo or Matlock where you underestimate him but you realize he may have the upper hand because he's very intelligent and is just waiting for the right moment to take the lead," Cain says.
Huckabee and Cohen were married for 22 years until Cohen's death at 53 from cancer.
Actor and film and TV producer Gabriel Horn says he first met Huckabee in L.A. at a restaurant opening just two weeks after Cohen's death.
"He was frail and looked very sickly," Horn says of Huckabee. "It looked like he was carrying so much grief on his shoulders that I couldn't believe he was out being social. I'm glad he was and now that I know him, that's what he lived for, putting himself in high energy, creative talent with inspirational people and that's what he taught me to do as well."
Huckabee moved back to Fort Worth after losing his wife and continued to focus on filmmaking as well as strengthening his hometown's film industry with events like the Lone Star Film Festival, which he founded with Paxton. Huckabee also started a screenwriting conservatorship that became part of the Fort Worth Writers' Boot Camp.
"I think Tom challenged everybody to take risks with their material, not to do cookie cutter but think outside the box," Horn says, adding that Paxton had a lifelong collaboration with Huckabee and often called on him to rewrite dialogue and improve concepts creatively.
"He was a master screenwriter," he says of Huckabee.
Carried Away: Movie Trailer from EC Films on Vimeo.
Huckabee produced his most personal work with his award-winning, 2009 independent film Carried Away in which a Fort Worth native returns from L.A. for Christmas to find that the family he left is tearing apart at the seams. Then he discovers his grandmother has been placed in a nursing home and decides to bring her back for Christmas against his family's wishes."It didn't matter if it was a documentary or a narrative film," Cain says. "He was always about story structure and what's at the heart of this. What does he want his audience to feel when they walk out of that story. He was a mentor to so many filmmakers who helped them to understand the importance of it."
Huckabee didn't stop creating once he or a film's director yelled cut. He produced music throughout his life. During his early days in Austin, he played as the drummer for the incendiary, groundbreaking punk band The Huns. He drew, painted and took up photography up until his final days. There were "no boundaries to his creativity," Cain says.
"He's one of these characters who was always making art," Horn says. "If he wasn't working on a script or a film set, he was drawing. He was dying of cancer and for the rest of his life, he spent two effing days doing a painting of me and my girlfriend. That always impressed me, that he was always creating."
