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The kiss between the young man and woman was sweet - a friendly peck, really. But it didn't sound right. Needed more smack. The actors weren't around anymore; filming had wrapped up months ago, and they'd flown to other movie sets. No problem: Sound editor Mark Menza pushed up his sleeve, leaned into a microphone, and kissed the inside of his forearm,getting just the right smooching sound.

"I don't know if anybody needs to know that," he said about the scene in Fort Worth filmmaker Tom Huckabee's latest movie, Carried Away.

Menza and Huckabee were at the tail end of an eight-hour mixing session, meticulously looping dialogue and adding hundreds of other sound effects - footsteps, wind, car doors - to the audio track. Every second of film requires many minutes, sometimes hours, of work to get the sound just right. It's one of the last steps in a movie's long production process, so Huckabee was thrilled to kill a gorgeous Sunday holed up in a dark studio. It meant he was one step closer to reaching a goal.

Carried Away is a dream project, the movie he always wanted to make during his long Hollywood career. But La La Land can be a callous temptress, stringing people and their projects along for years before dropping them cold. Huckabee spent most of his time working on other people's projects and overlooked his own aspirations along the way.

"Tom has always been a booster for other people's art," said actor and director Bill Paxton, who grew up in Fort Worth and made amateur films with Huckabee before finding fame in Apollo 13, Twister, Mighty Joe Young, and, currently, HBO's Big Love.

"Tom was a huge advocate for me," he said. "I've gone to the bank with his genius. I've never seen anybody with so much loyalty."

In turn, Paxton's own loyalty led him to work alongside artistic director Huckabee at Fort Worth's inaugural Lone Star International Film Festival in 2007 - and that same loyalty made Paxton shun the festival after his friend was fired. Huckabee said he was shocked by his dismissal and "hadn't seen it coming" but refuses to diss the festival or the board members who shoved him out the door. He's moved on.

A heaping helping of personal tragedy has left him thoughtful and grounded in his mid-50s. He watched his wife of 23 years die after a long, debilitating illness. Barbara Cohen followed him from Austin to Hollywood, married him in 1983, and flourished as a successful casting director before breast cancer tortured her for years, then stole her away completely in 2006.

"I don't fret about small stuff like I used to," Huckabee said. "I feel like nothing else in my life can be as bad as that. She had a horrible death. I've never seen suffering like that - mental, emotional, physical."

Their Hollywood house didn't feel like home afterward. So when Huckabee's mother died in Fort Worth six months later, he moved back to his hometown to help his siblings look after their father, who has Alzheimer's.

Before long, Huckabee decided to do something in Fort Worth that had eluded him for a quarter century in Hollywood - write and direct an independently financed feature film using a local cast and crew. He poured his life savings and proceeds from the sale of his Hollywood home into Carried Away's $275,000 production costs, betting on himself to make it triumphant and profitable. The movie might be described as Harold and Maude meets Rain Man, with plenty of local footage included in a road-trip flick whose action stretches from Fort Worth to California.

Huckabee is submitting Carried Away to film festivals and anticipates a release in limited theaters and on DVD. Meanwhile, he's planning a local exhibition of his digital paintings next year in Fort Worth and is dipping his toe somewhat awkwardly into the dating pool.

The role of the returning prodigal son is one that fits Huckabee comfortably these days. Life is good. Making the movie was the perfect antidote for what had been a very tough decade.

As he put the final touches on the sound edits, Huckabee said something about his movie that rings true for his life in general.

"It's like building a Lego castle - one piece at a time."

A frantic woman and her shady-looking accomplice grab Jim Morrison's feet and drag him across the floor toward a bathtub. They'd spiked his drink with poison, and the Doors frontman had writhed in agony before dying on the floor.

Suddenly the scene flutters. The vintage VCR sitting on the floor of Huckabee's cluttered living room floor had been providing an impromptu theater venue, and we were watching the first movie he made while attending the University of Texas at Austin's film school in the late 1970s. The murder scene in The Death of Jim Morrison diverges greatly from popular theories surrounding the singer's death, and the movie angered Doors insiders after Huckabee sent them copies, trying to secure music rights for a soundtrack.

Huckabee was recalling a tense exchange from that time when the tape began to stutter and then froze up completely, as if the Lizard King's ghost had intervened.

Causing shock and anger was par for the course with some of Huckabee's early movies. Pushing people's buttons made life interesting.

Wedgewood Middle School in the late 1960s wasn't exactly a mecca for budding filmmakers, but Huckabee was hooked after he discovered a 16mm Bell & Howell movie camera in his father's closet. He and a school chum decided to make movie magic. "It still had film in it," Huckabee said. "We went and shot it and then got it developed."

His father had used the camera only twice in a decade, and the first part of the developed film showed footage of Huckabee as a 4-year-old opening Christmas presents. The earlier footage had remained in the camera so long that the images were faded. The film developer thought he'd made a mistake and offered Huckabee some free film. Huckabee and his buddy used the free film to shoot a Western tale of poker players, card cheating, and murder.

"We read the manual wrong and set the exposure wrong, and it came out black," he said. "But it gave me an identity. I was the guy who made movies."