Nashville at 50, The Belcourt at 100
In 1975, American moviegoers saw Keith Carradine’s Tom Frank on the Exit/In stage, plucking the melancholy ballad “I’m Easy.” During his character’s time in town, the nomadic lothario not only bedded an LA interloper (Shelley Duvall) and a grating BBC correspondent (Geraldine Chaplin), but his bandmate, Mary (Cristina Raines). As if that weren’t enough, he’s trying to make it with Linnea (Lily Tomlin), a married gospel singer.
All four of the women are in the audience tonight, and they all soak in the song they think Tom has dedicated to them. It’s the pivotal scene in Robert Altman’s Nashville, the one that’s made that nearly three-hour dramatic epic one of the most lauded films of all time. And last Sunday, Keith Carradine was at The Belcourt watching it all over again fifty years after he first saw the film at this same movie house.
“Halfway through the production, I wasn’t comfortable playing that guy. I didn’t like him, and I was just young enough and naive enough–and probably egotistical enough–to feel like I didn’t want to play somebody that was like him,” Carradine told the audience at the sold-out screening.
“I went to Bob and said, ‘I don’t feel good about what I’m doing. I don't think I'm any good.’ He looked at me and said, ‘You’re fine,’ and walked away. Wouldn't give me any help…What you see in the movie is an actor who doesn't like the character he’s playing. But what the audience gets is a person that doesn’t like himself. And it’s poignant. Bob got that out of me because he knew better than to tell me how to try to do that. He just knew that putting me there would bring him that result. That’s another part of his genius.”
When Altman and his frequent collaborator Joan Tewkesbury conceived Nashville, neither had much experience with the city. In the wake of his surprise 1970 blockbuster M*A*S*H, Altman turned down an offer to direct a film set in the world of country music. But after he read William Price Fox’s Nashville-set novel Ruby Red, the city’s distinct culture captured his attention. He sent Tewkesbury on a research trip during which she set out to capture the real Nashville. The diary she kept from her stint in the city served as the basis for her screenplay.
Though the film became an instant critical hit, earning a record 11 Golden Globe nominations and raves from writers on the coasts, it failed to connect with audiences on the same level as Altman’s now-classic military satire (though both appear on the American Film Institute’s “100 Years…100 Movies” list). Any born-and-bred Nashvillian can attest that the film’s public premiere at Hundred Oaks remains one of the most contentious culture clashes in the city’s history. Nashville locals like Minnie Pearl and Brenda Lee politely made their disdain clear while Ronnie Milsap offered up one of the most brilliantly terse movie reviews in cinema history: “I've seen a lot of movies in my day, and this is one of them.”
As the auditorium filled last Sunday, The Belcourt screened these vintage press clips with Music Row greats, highlighting that the community’s grave concerns about Southern representations from outsiders were alive and well long before the time of white rural rage. The tense reception remains on Carradine’s mind. “I remember our time here making the film vividly,” he said, “And I do remember the premiere here and the attendant celebration, and, in some instances, the denigration of what we had done.”
Yet, Nashville’s hometown reception is far more complicated than what passes today for naked Southern populism. For Altman, the city served as both a location that deserved attention to detail and the site of an American myth he felt compelled to examine on the cusp of the country’s bicentennial.
Shortly after the film begins with the voice of Replacement Party candidate Hal Philip Walker bellowing over a campaign van’s speakers, Altman cuts to Henry Gibson’s Haven Hamilton, a Nudie-suit-clad grandfather of country music recording a sappy ode to patriotism with the chorus, “We must be doing something right to last 200 years.”
The next studio over, Tomlin’s gospel artist is in session with Fisk Jubilee Singers, hoping to finish a track before going home to the two deaf children she shares with her portly gadfly of a husband (Ned Beatty)—a lawyer, artist manager, and faux-populist Walker hack. Then as now, these aural snippets of raw emotion and hollow politics remain Music City’s go-to soundtrack.
And so, Altman sets the stage for his prophetic portrait of Nashville that somehow anticipates every issue it currently faces. Michael Murphy’s glib campaign manager for Walker’s proto-Bernie rogue presidential bid tries to get Hamilton as well as Tom and his folk group on the bill for a fundraiser because he needs to appeal to a more sophisticated crowd than just the country and western rubes. Duvall’s “L.A. Joan” serves as a pioneer of the California transplants that mask their failure with an air of superiority as they attempt to bend a provincial city to their whims. Even the film’s iconic finale better explains how the violence of an event like Covenant could happen in Nashville's cultural milieu than any pundit–local or national.
“They saw that coming,” Carradine said of Altman and his creative team. “This was before Jimmy Carter. This was before John Lennon got shot. This was before all of those things that have come to pass. And somehow Bob, in his uncanny way, managed to tap in and see stuff. And I think that a lot of what you see was a result of his intention, but also the result of his openness to capturing whatever presented itself.”
Much of the local backlash to Nashville was rooted in Altman’s decision to eschew music from local artists and allow his actors to write their own songs–a choice that worked in Carradine’s favor when“I’m Easy” garnered him the only Oscar win out of five nominations for Nashville at the 1976 Academy Awards. While “I’m Easy” eventually became a Top Ten pop hit, the songwriters in the local community felt that the film treated them more as SNL parody than carefully observed individuals. Most infamously, Billy Sherrill opined on the film’s end, “I’ll tell you what I liked about the film — when they shot that miserable excuse for a country music singer.”
While Carradine was modest about his Oscar win and impressive parallel career as a musician during his Q&A last weekend, his presence at the Belcourt also captures the theater’s role in Music City during its 100th birthday celebration. As Nashville’s non-profit cinema, it continues to offer unifying movie experiences like last Sunday’s Nashville screening that kicked off both its “Nashville: A City on Screen” and “Altman at 100” retrospectives.
But, like any artistic hub in a growing Southern city, it attracts a certain subset of clientele that feels above it all, most recently apparent the last time the Exit/In graced its screen back in April during the premiere of The Day The Music Stopped, an insipid piece of hollow activist hagiography about Chris Cobb, the club’s former owner, self-professed defender of Nashville’s soul, and online purveyor of the schizophrenic politics Walker spends Nashville bloviating about.
But, as Altman knew fifty years ago, there’s no denying that Nashville is Nashville because of this unrelenting conflict between downhome local authenticity and pseudo-artistic opportunism that continues to position the city as a microcosm of the nation. “He [Altman] was both cynical and optimistic, if that's possible,” Carradine said. “His interaction with Joan Tewkesbury, in terms of what they were putting together and what they saw and what they were trying to capture, was basically the essence of who we are as a country. They felt that this city was the ideal avatar for that, because it has so many elements of what is considered to be American.”