TEXARKANA A Film Studio by Leilah Weinraub

A Permanent Studio
TEXARKANA is a permanent film studio based in New York.

It makes narrative films through long-term collaboration, rehearsal, performance, and continuous production.

The studio exists to build an evolving body of work rather than a series of isolated productions. Each film contributes to the next. Actors, writers, artists, editors, producers, and friends return over years. Conversations become interviews. Interviews become performances. Rehearsals become films. Films become installations. Nothing begins from zero.

Why It Exists
Most filmmaking begins from the beginning.

Every project assembles a new team, searches for financing, develops for years, and dissolves when production ends. The relationships, knowledge, and momentum built by one film rarely become the foundation for the next.

TEXARKANA was created to work differently.

It is an attempt to build continuity inside an industry organized around interruption.

IMAGE

A large photograph of rehearsal or production.

How the Studio Was Built
The studio developed through the making of Shakedown.

Over fifteen years of filming inside a Black lesbian strip club in Los Angeles, I learned that remarkable work cannot be rushed. Trust, repetition, and intimacy became the conditions that made the film possible.

Later, Hood By Air taught me something different. Culture is not produced by isolated moments. It is built through sustained collaboration, shared language, performance, and infrastructure.

Hollywood development taught me a third lesson: extraordinary films often lose momentum because every production must rebuild its entire system from the beginning.

TEXARKANA is my answer to those experiences.

IMAGE SEQUENCE

Shakedown

Hood By Air

Current rehearsal

Two Places
The studio operates between two locations only a short walk apart.

Bond Street functions as a rehearsal laboratory where films are developed through repeated performance, writing, and production.

Roman Glass functions as the public side of the studio: a screening room, library, editing space, meeting place, and exhibition space where completed work and works in progress are experienced through conversation.

Together they create a neighborhood rather than an institution.

TWO LARGE PHOTOGRAPHS

Bond Street.

Roman Glass.

Story
The center of TEXARKANA is story.

The world does not suffer from a lack of images.

It suffers from a lack of stories capable of holding complexity.

Stories remain one of the few forms capable of allowing people to understand one another across difference without reducing contradiction or simplifying experience.

Every project begins differently.

Some begin with an interview.

Others with an actor.

Others with an archive.

Others with a friendship.

Others with a single conversation that refuses to disappear.

There is no single method except sustained attention.

IMAGE STRIP

Notebook.

Interview.

Script.

Rehearsal.

Camera.

Editing.

Actors
Actors are central to the studio.

They are not brought in after a screenplay has been completed.

They participate in discovering the story itself.

Rehearsal is not preparation for production.

It is production.

Performances deepen over time, and the strongest films emerge from relationships that have been allowed to mature across years.

ONE LARGE PORTRAIT

A rehearsal still.

The Work
The current body of work includes:

CINDY

A two-channel film built from an extended conversation with Cindy Sherman.

Bad Liquor for Bag Ladies

A fiction feature written by Ottessa Moshfegh starring Chloë Sevigny.

The Kids

A feature-length narrative project that grew from a play commissioned by the Hammer Museum and first performed at New Theater Hollywood.

Seek No Favor

A narrative short currently expanding into a feature.

Shakedown

A continuing body of work extending from documentary into narrative cinema.

Each project has its own form.

Together they become one body of work.

FIVE STILLS

One from each project.

The Studio
TEXARKANA is not organized around individual productions.

It is organized around continuity.

The same collaborators return.

The same questions return.

The same spaces return.

The same methods return.

Over time, the films begin speaking to one another.

The studio becomes visible through the accumulation of those relationships.

LARGE IMAGE

A gathering at Roman Glass.

Participation
Support for TEXARKANA does not fund a single film.

It builds the conditions that allow many films to exist.

Support sustains rehearsal, production, editing, actor development, research, exhibitions, screenings, and the continuing life of the studio itself.

Rather than financing isolated productions, participation helps build an environment where multiple films can emerge over decades.

Enter the Studio
The website presents only a portion of the work.

The studio is experienced most fully in person.

Roman Glass regularly hosts screenings, rehearsals, conversations, and studio visits with collaborators, patrons, artists, and friends.

If this way of working resonates with you, I would be delighted to invite you to visit.

Read the Studio Book.

Watch the films.

Visit Roman Glass.

The conversation begins there.

SHOW ME THE WORDS THAT WILL REORDER THE WORLD, OR ELSE KEEP SILENT

SHOW ME THE WORDS THAT WILL
REORDER THE WORLD, OR ELSE KEEP SILENT