Spot Light The Cinephile

cynthia thornton recalls the day at Daniel Webster Elementary in Oak Cliff when first-graders were asked to draw something that expressed beauty.

“My picture was of a movie director in a beret with a camera and an actor in front of it,” she recalls. And the director is yelling, ’”Beautiful!”’

Her teacher was dubious. Thornton was abashed. “I couldn’t draw very well,” she explains.

But her girlhood passion for the movies never cooled.

After graduating from SMU in 1991, she left Dallas to study law and acting, finally venturing home last year to lay plans for her first feature-length film, Three Girls in Love, which she shot this summer in Dallas.

Not only did Thornton write, direct, and produce the romantic drama, but she appears in it, too. Under her lawyer hat, Thornton created the limited partnership that owns the property. She also raised her own financing locally.

“I want to write, direct, and produce again,” she says. “I’m totally addicted. It gets in your blood. There’s no feeling like being on a film set.”