Legacy in Lights channels history, groundbreaking visuals into tale as big as Texas

John Franklin Rinehart grew up listening to the story of Come and Take It for years as a seventh-generation Texan and descendant of the men and women who struggled to help the Lone Star State gain its independence from Mexico. It was not just history to him; it became a formative part of his identity.

Years later, he has taken his passion for this subject matter and channeled it into the groundbreaking “Texas Legacy in Lights” project, which recently wrapped shooting at various locations in Gonzales County and will premiere on Oct. 2, 2025 — the 190th anniversary of the first shots fired in the Texas Revolution — with its inaugural projection against the backdrop of the Gonzales Memorial Museum.

Rinehart is the founder of Austin Film Crew, which is producing the state-of-the-art 3D projection mapping rendition through a partnership with Gonzales Main Street with a grant from the Gonzales Economic Development Corporation (GEDC) as well through private donations and sponsorships.

Creating Texas Legacy in Lights was a way for Rinehart to help his hometown communicate the importance Gonzales played in the genesis of Texas as a free, independent nation.

“When I was overseas, I became more of a Texan than I ever was when I was living here,” Rinehart said. “You want to be able to explain and to have people understand who you are and where you come from and why is it special. For this reason, having a unified message of being able to tell that story —it's like a childhood dream. It's not just the telling of a single story over a campfire. It's getting to tell it over and over and over again, every day, to many people.”

In the seminal film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” by John Ford, newspaperman Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young) tells Ransom Stoddard he won’t print the correct version of how Valance was killed because it would erase the legacy Stoddard had built afterwards. As Scott states, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Rinehart said great pains have been taken to be as accurate as possible historically when retelling story of the Battle of Gonzales, the fall of the Alamo and the Runaway Scrape, but noted that “when you’re doing something like this, I think you have to honor the legend.”

“Even if you don't tell the legend, you have to honor it,” Rinehart said. “I'll give you an example. One of the legends of the Come and Take It story is that (Green DeWitt colony organizers) threw down a sword and they marked the place where Gonzales stood with this sword so they could figure out where it was going to be built. Some people say it was a gun barrel instead of a sword.

“I can't find any first-party verifiable sources for that legend. However, it is a fantastic legend, so I include pieces of that in the film to honor the legend. That said, I think fact is far often more interesting than fiction because it’s far, far more personal and far more relatable.”

“I think it's important to find the people behind the legend, which then turns something that almost feels like allegory, or feels like it's something that I've heard a million times, into something that is appliable today, because I can relate to the person behind it,” Rinehart added. “History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes and I think sometimes when we move things all the way into legend, it loses the ability to rhyme with relatable history.

“I can’t reinvent an entire economy or an entire time, so you have to figure stuff out with what’s available for sourcing and available for now, but you can also get as close to those details as you possibly can.”
Rinehart said historians including local author Vicki Frenzel (whose “Gonzales: Hope, Heartbreak & Heroes” helped provide source material) have been “along with us from the beginning” to make sure the production is as accurate as possible.

Rinehart said the attention to detail even extends to the spurs that were worn by the Texians, which would have been more similar to the Spanish espuela grandes, or great spurs, that had a large elaborate rowel.

“Texans were known for wearing those throughout the United States even into the Civil War,” Rinehart said. “They could tell who was a Texan because they would be wearing the big spurs.”

Historians also noted that the Mexican army that would have come to Gonzales would have been lancers and not necessarily equipped in the traditional blue and red uniforms that were seen during the Battle of the Alamo, when regulars beseiged San Antonio de Bexar.

“We always kind of picture this kind of Mexican army that is very gallant coming in with full colors and very kind of rich and that wasn't really the case,” Rinehart said. “They were coming in, they were rag tag. They were at an outpost on the edge of the world as far as they were concerned and that makes them all the more interesting and all the more dangerous.

“We have letters from them asking, ‘Hey, Mom and Dad, can you please send me a shirt?’ Mexico didn't have enough stuff to supply them, so they were running around in a lot more of a Tejano rig than running around in full regalia uniforms. Adding those little bits of detail, I think, gives the story texture.”

“There's always going to be someone who's going to find something (to nitpick),” Rinehart said. “There's going to be someone who's going to be like, ‘Well, that's Johnson grass and Johnson grass wasn't around until such and such time.’ Okay, yes, but I didn't have a field full of buffalo grass so Johnson had to do. When you hand me a $400 million budget, I will make you a $400 million project, but right now, we're gonna shoot what we have.”

The project has had its share of challenges, including a crazy amount of rain on the first day of shooting that caused cast and crew to pivot in what was being shot.

“Film is never about how smooth things run. It's always about how do you pivot,” Rinehart said. “That is the joy and the pain of filmmaking is being with a group of people that can pivot with you. That's just what you do.”

There has also been a lot of criticism from some within the community of the money being spent on the production and whether the return on investment will be worth it as well as whether Rinehart and his crew have the bona fides to produce a project that will make Gonzaleans proud.

“There's been a lot of questions and yet, when people I feel like get a handle on what we're actually doing, I feel like the support blossoms,” he said. “One of the people I think had a lot of questions for me at the beginning and perhaps wasn’t very sure about me or what we were doing and was questioning everything has now become perhaps my biggest advocate and I probably couldn’t have pulled off this entire project without her. I think that just speaks to the story that we're telling, and we're trying to tell it really honestly, and we're not trying to change it, because this is our story.”
Rinehart said there are “always people who don't like what you're doing and there's always someone looking for you to fail.”

“It doesn't necessarily take away the hurt from people coming after you who've never met you. However, if I choose to focus on them and not on what we're actually trying to do, then I negate the reason why I'm trying to do this,” Rinehart said.

“There is the statement I use over and over again, because it's kind of become a mantra of what I do, which is, ‘I dig for gold because dirt is easy to find.’ I think I'm almost to the point where I've done maybe almost 8,000 interviews, not where I'm sitting here, but where I'm sitting on the other side, where I prefer to be — you know what I've gotten really good at is finding the truth line and following it, and in this case, I get to do that with a community.

“There are rare occasions where you get to do that, and that's bigger than self, that's bigger than ego. That is calling people and calling communities to who they are and who they could be,” Rinehart added. “This community has a lot to offer. They have a lot to offer each other. It's about remembering that I'm here to call that out and not the other stuff. The other stuff is here. Bad behavior is here. Bad behavior is everywhere, and most of the time, that's all we ever hear about. It's usually it makes me angry, but I'd rather pull something deeper out there.”

Helping him dig for gold and sift through the dirt is a cast and crew of fellow Texans whose skills precede them and who came to Gonzales not to get rich, but for “the story.”

“They came because of what this means to them,” Rinehart said. “Every person here on my cast and crew is a Texan, and that was a deliberate choice. We've turned down other people that have wanted to come from Atlanta and New York and LA. I'm happy that they wanted to be part of the project, but there came this point where I was like, ‘I think we can, again, call something out a little bit deeper,’ which is why I wanted them to be from Texas.

“Is there enough people? Are there good enough people? And there was — there was so many people. There was just amazing and amazing people; when we were casting, I think we had over 2,000 people apply for the part of Evaline DeWitt, which is crazy, and then I think we did like 600 auditions just for her. When I found Sam (Plumb), I hired her on the spot.”

“Peggy (Schott, who played Sarah DeWitt) — I actually had my eye on her before she reached out,” he added. “And I was just hoping that she was going to see something and she did, and she reached out, and I was like, ‘Oh, thank God!’ Lukcy, who helped write the script with me — she saw me do a happy dance.

“When you have talent — talent attracts other talent. It just starts becoming this snowball effect; that's kind of the beauty of it. ‘You have this person. Well, I want to work with them.’It keeps bubbling and and our crew — gosh, some of these guys I've worked with for years, and others we've just met, but they are absolutely fantastic at what they do. Allison (Freer, the lead costumer) — she is beyond with the amount of research and study and work that she has put in to make this come together. The costumes are absolutely stunning. You can't really ask for more than that.”

After taking time off for the Fourth of July holiday and to recharge his batteries, Rinehart figures he will have about 3,000 man-hours of work left to finish up the post-production work, or just about 1,000 man-hours per month.

“There's the pre-production part which no one gets to see. There's the production part which everyone gets to see. And then there's the post-production part and each part has an army behind them,” he said.

The thought that the show will be projected twice a day, six days a week, for at least 15 years and perhaps more to come brings home the name “Legacy in Lights,” Rinehart said.

“It's part of what makes it art, and not just content. Content is cheap, and a lot of films and TV shows now do become kind of just content. It's almost the stuff that you would just flip through, and we've lost the event aspect of media and production, and this tries to claw some of that.

“It's also groundbreaking,” he added. “We've never done anything like this. No one has, and it's rare to be able to get to do a world first, so that attracts the crazy to come along with me.”