Colin Marshall digs up Wes Anderson’s first short film, the 13-minute Bottle Rocket:

In the late nineties, Anderson and his collaborators found themselves in a position to make their beloved breakthrough Rushmore on the strength of its predecessor Bottle Rocket, their 1996 feature debut. But even that film, a now-appreciated but then little-seen story of three deeply amateur criminals on the run through the green open spaces of Texas starring now-famous acting brothers Owen and Luke Wilson, followed another. Four years earlier, Anderson and Owen Wilson, who’d met in a playwriting class at the University of Texas, Austin, put together the thirteen-minute short you see here. It tries out the concept of thieves in training, albeit in a very different style from the one we’ve come to regard, over twenty years later, as Andersonian.

Marshall adds:

Wes, if you read this, know that I’d like to see you do something in black-and-white again. With a jazz score.

But better acting.