The film “What is called Love” (1993) by Peter Bogdanovich has a difficult fate. Due to the fact that The Thing Called Love is about country music, the film was released only in the southern United States, but then shelved because the film company did not dare to promote it, fearing accusations of profiting from the actor’s death. After all, River Phoenix died of an overdose on the sidewalk at the Viper Club in Hollywood without seeing the premiere, and Samantha Mathis was with him that night. So a good movie with its budget of 14 million collected only 430 thousand dollars. “The last movie show”, only 20+ years later.
The story is as old as the world, “Yellow Rose” and “Wild Rose” are almost all about it. Girly girls from the periphery (yes, for the continental country capital NY, this is also the periphery!) They come to become stars, and it’s good if they become at least the little stars of Tennessee. At least for one evening on a small stage. Nashville, where even taxi drivers and cops write songs, has not yet become the setting for mainstream TV series, and the tinsel of overdressed pop stars has not yet emerged from the Country Music Awards stage.
"The City of Music! I'm here and I'm not going anywhere!"
Samantha Mathis as Miranda Presley (no relation) is very natural. But River Phoenix, playing the role of James Wright, is furiously overdoing it on stage. It’s not clear why you twitch and grimace so much while singing? Apparently, this is his thing. Dermot Mulroney’s restrained Kyle Davidson turned out to be much smarter and more correct.
And it’s not the performers who are here, it’s the songwriters, they have much deeper and more complicated things. Bogdanovich even insisted that the actors write their own songs. Phoenix composed and sang “Lone Star State of Mind”, and Mulroney wrote “Someone Else’s Used Guitar”. Even Sandra Bullock wrote the song “Heaven Knocked on My Door”:
“My character was supposed to have an expectedly bad song. And they paid talented songwriters to write stuff like that. And I said, if you need a bad song, you can pay me and I’ll write you a terrible song!”
Miranda shows off her Elvis
In The Thing Called Love, we have a love triangle, and it’s unclear who gets Presley’s love. Miranda had a good relationship with her father, who loved country music, and now she’s looking for the same thing in men. There is also the “story of the green and red king”, who fight every year for the lady in white.
Linda Lou Linden is a strange “southern girl” from Alabama who takes on a lot and doesn’t know what she wants. But he knows exactly what he doesn’t want. Naive, touchy, but kind. She may suddenly decide at the final of the competition that she does not want to work as a beauty queen and fake a loss of consciousness.
Scarlet O'Hara- is she Miss Nashville?
Everyone in the closet has their own complicated family relationships. James is a young bitter romantic, but not without a sense of humor, a guy with sudden actions, ready to get down on his knees and ask for a hand in a couple of days of romance. He takes a girl to Graceland and makes an offer at the supermarket. She gets her hair cut by the barber who cut Presley’s hair (and here’s Presley-in-his-chair again!). He chased her from Austin to Nashville. She sat in a cafe for a song and blew her bus back home. He’s an egocentric, arrogant musician who locks himself in a room for three days and won’t let his wife in. She won’t wash and iron his shirts, and she won’t wait at home alone for months.
We got married in a fever
– I’ll pay you back in a week, even though it hasn’t even been a week!
– Did you write a check for a narcissistic, hot-tempered idiot?!
– They’ll cash it for you!
Or maybe all these young people rush headlong into adventures and feelings so that they have material for songs? And after chatting in unsuccessful novels, experiencing charm and disappointment, they gain experience such that now it’s time to sing not just country music, but even blues. But this is not England, and the bet is on really white folk music.
James Intveld – Standing On A Rock
There are also young rockabilly and country musicians here: Dale Watson as a guitarist, James Intveld as a backing vocalist and bass guitarist. They’re not even in the credits, just extras! So let’s drink to the musicians who are not mentioned in the credits. Because they are not actors, and they can only play themselves. And thank God!
