Getting Weird on the Back Nine With Austin Comedy The Salamander King (2025)

Like the endangered amphibians from which it takes its name, Austin-made comedy The Salamander King is linked to one habitat. “It’s a love letter to a place,” said director Austin Nichols, and that place is the city's golf courses.

Debuting this weekend at the Dallas International Film Festival, the Austin-made comedy stars Ryan Hansen (Fantasy Island, Friday the 13th, Veronica Mars,) as Ray Mueller, a happy-go-lucky golf pro at the fictional Austin Municipal Golf Course, aka Austin Muny, who must save the course from the business-minded intentions of city consultant Samantha Lambert (Adrianne Palicki, Quasi, John Wick). Originally conceived by writer Drew Mackintosh as a TV show, it’s not the film that Nichols saw himself making. “I always thought I’d make some dark, crazy, weird drama for festivals,” he said, “but this was the one that happened first. This is the one where the money and the people showed up.”

The difference between this project and everything he’d tried to get made before was Mackintosh’s script, which drew on the writer’s own experiences around the city’s public course, the people he’d met there, and the universal emotion of “caring about a place, whether its your city or your house.”

Or, in this case, your favorite golf club.

Based on the fight around the very real Lions Municipal Golf Course, the big threat to the film’s Austin Muny here is out-of-town developers and complicit elected officials. Yet Nichols made sure that this isn’t just an anti-Californian diatribe, but a reminder of what makes Austin so special. “There is something attractive and magical about this place. People want to come here, people who have visited here talk about it and how much they like it.” Indeed, both Samantha and Palicki are examples of how transplants can end up part of what makes Austin, well, Austin. “Adrianne came here to do Friday Night Lights and fell in love with Austin and she stayed.”

Austin and its culture is what sets The Salamander King apart from other golf comedies. Films like Caddyshack, and Nichols’ personal favorite, Tin Cup, generally follow a similar plot of a bunch of rebels subverting the stuffy norm of the country club set. While The Salamander King does have a class struggle component, the difference is that the course belongs to the weirdos. Nichols was taught to swing a club by his grandfather, and still tees up every month or so, and recognizes that there’s golf and then there’s Austin golf, where your handicap is less important than your ability to remember the cooler. Visiting golfers have been known to lament the lay of the green on some courses, and while the Hancock nine may be the oldest public course in Texas, it’s also been dubbed the worst course in the South. Yet that hasn't stopped it winning a reader's Best of Austin for Best Public Golf Course within these very pages. Nichols said, “It’s small, it’s not well taken care of, but people love it anyway, and I feel like that with all the muni courses here. There’s this charm to it. I can take my dog with me and he can walk the course. You can ride your bike and jog on the course. You can wear what you want.”

Aside from the Muny, the film is packed with locales and locations that will be familiar to Austin residents and regulars. There are no obligatory shots of the Capitol or the Continental Club: Instead, it’s Dreamers and Mama Dearest. The biggest challenge for Nichols came in balancing how many iconic locations he could get away with including. He said, “Early on in the script I was worried that it was too specific and too much about Austin, so we had lot of conversations about that because I want people in Ohio or Japan to care about this movie. So we talked about that, we trimmed some back. In editing I took way more out and then we put some back because I felt I was losing too much.” He even crammed in one new shot of The O.G. Austinite: that’s the name of Luis Angulo's mural of a Barton Springs Salamander on Barton Springs. “We couldn’t get that during shooting – we didn’t have time, we didn’t have a permit, we didn’t have anything – so I went and got that with Ryan with an iPhone.”

The unconventional choices came by a mix of luck and necessity. For example, there are several key scenes in a water hole, and Nichols initially planned to go to the ever-popular Barton Springs – until he realized that would be a terrible idea. Having already shot his 2014 short film “Stroker” there, “I knew it would not be easy. … My gut was telling me, ‘The sound’s going to be a nightmare, we’re not going to be able to clear the park out, so we’ll be sharing it with all these people,’ all this stuff.” So, instead, he picked the lesser-known and less crowded Krause Springs. While it lacked the instant recognizability of Barton Springs and its crystal-clear waters, “it’s beautiful, it has a waterfall, and it’s such a cool place.”

He also pulled off a first in Austin cinema history. Whether it be Planet Terror or Friday night Lights, historically whenever filmmakers have wanted a strip joint, they shot out at the Landing Strip near the airport (one director noted that, not only were they film-friendly, but it was the only men’s club in town where the seating gave enough space to lay track for a camera cart). But Nichols and his crew managed to get their cameras inside the Yellow Rose on Burnet. He noted that the club “is notorious for not letting anyone film there, and we got lucky because a friend of ours, who has a special thanks in the credits, made a call. I don’t know how he did it, but we got in there because of a favor.”

That favor says something about Austin's sense of community, and that reflects the message in the comedy of The Salamander King about the importance of retaining a city’s soul in the face of seemingly untrammeled growth. Nichols has seen that it can be done. He took a bicycle holiday around France last year and saw towns that have both preserved their traditions and remained vibrant. “They decided to protect their place, and they can. Everyone just has to get together and decide.”

The Salamander King gets its world premiere 7pm, Friday, April 25 at Cinépolis Victory Park as part of the Dallas International Film Festival. Tickets and info at diffdallas.org.