Podcast
Thursday, April 28, 2011
How to Create a Compelling Character, Conclusion
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
How to Create a Compelling Character, Step 4: Determine their Default Personality Trait
- Their current emotional state (changes constantly)
- Their philosophy (changes once)
- Their default personality trait (never changes)
NOTE: I revised this piece in March, 2012. Instead of “Default Personality Trait”, I used to use the term “Verbal DNA”. (This will help explain the comments.) I later decided that “Default Personality Trait” is more self-explanatory.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
How to Create a Compelling Character, Step 9: Give Them TWO Statements of Philosophy

Monday, April 25, 2011
How to Create a Compelling Character, Step 7: Let Them Lay Down The Law

This is somewhat counter-intuitive. Everybody loves an underdog, right? And if the heroes are just learning the ropes, the audience is right there with them, learning everything by their side, so that’s a great way into the story, isn’t it? Yes, following rookies through their day is a great way into a new show, but you very quickly get into trouble...
A classic example is “The West Wing”. When Aaron Sorkin conceived and pitched the show, he imagined that it would feature only the President’s staff, but we would never see the big man himself. So he wrote the pilot, in which the staff vigorously debate back and forth about how they should advise the President on a difficult decision, and that worked well enough for most of the episode…
…But then Sorkin got to the end of the story. He suddenly realized that it would be enormously unsatisfying to end the pilot (and the next hundred episodes) with his heroes sending their advice up the chain of command and then powerlessly waiting to see what the outcome would be. Suddenly, in the very last scene, the President walks into the room after all, and lays down the law. This show needed a decider. Before long, it became exactly the opposite of what Sorkin wanted it to be: a show that centered around the President as main character.
And indeed every show tends to trend in this direction: away from the flunkies and toward the bosses. The “30 Rock” pilot was about Liz and Pete with Jack as a mere antagonist. Now Jack is Liz’s beloved co-star, and Pete is little-seen. Stories are about the consequences of decisions, so it’s much easier to write stories about people who actually have decision-making power. There’s a reason why most heroes, even if they’re children, are orphans. They need the ability to commit fully to whatever they decide to do, without anybody swooping in to protect them from danger. They need to be on the hook for the consequences of their actions.

Sunday, April 24, 2011
How to Create a Compelling Character, Step 5: Give Them Something To Fear

Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Storyteller’s Rulebook #75: Opposition Creates Meaning

This advice often meets resistance: “But I want to present what these people do in a positive light! I don’t want to bring negativity into it.” But the only way to show an activity as a positive thing is to show that your subjects are willing to overcome opposition in order to do it. If you just show people doing their thing and having a great time, there’s no story. If you show them doing it despite opposition, only then will we really start to appreciate them.
In my last two editions of The Meddler, on Julie and Julia and Walk the Line, I ran into similar problems. Both movies spent a lot of time on the heroes’ internal conflict, but lacked enough interpersonal conflict. This is inherently uncinematic. Not that internal conflict can’t be the topic of a movie--I’ve praised before on this blog those rare movies that find compelling ways to dramatize internal conflicts, like The Secret Lives of Dentists or Funny Ha Ha. But those were small indie movies. If you want to make a big, satisfying Hollywood movie, you’re need to show your hero overcoming actual opposition.
To re-imagine my Meddler picks, I had to ask myself: Who wouldn’t want Julie to blog? Who didn’t want Johnny to sing his kind of music? It wasn’t too hard to identify genuine sources of opposition in both cases. Once I added those elements into the mix, I was able to imagine versions of those movies that would be far more appealing to me.
Of course there’s a potential downside to this. There was an old Onion headline that said something like: “Area Man Fixes His Thomas Edison Screenplay By Adding A Character Who Insists: ‘How Dare You Invent the Lightbulb! Man Was Meant to Live in the Dark!’” When I read that, I laughed and then I winced. After all, I had just written a bio-pic about another inventor and I had amped up the conflict by highlighting anti-technology sentiments that sound silly today.
The trick, as always, is to do it well. If it seems too silly to your audience to imagine anyone being opposed to some innovation, then you have to delve deeper into that world and immerse the audience in an older way of thinking, one in which that opposition would actually make sense. Everybody who achieves anything faces some opposition, no matter how weird that may seem in retrospect. Your job is to dramatize that opposition.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Underrated Movies: Special Guest Picks #16

Writer / Director: Bill Forsyth
Scottish director Bill Forsyth is best known in the U.S. for his 1983 feature Local Hero, a quirky, bittersweet portrait of an isolated Scottish community and the Americans who come into contact with them. His follow-up film Comfort and Joy is unfortunately less known here, possibly because it is purely Scottish, meaning there are no American actors in it.
And this is a shame. Forsythe’s movies are great. He’s a gentle filmmaker; his films are touching, simple, and create odd, unadorned portraits of “real” people. They are quiet little films but are always charming, quite often with a healthy dose of bitterness. The deadpan performances only heighten the quality of the humor and pathos.
Comfort and Joy follows Glaswegian DJ Alan ‘Dickie’ Bird as he undergoes the trauma of losing his fabulous girlfriend and becomes caught up in the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars. The Glasgow Ice Cream Wars were a real event in the early ‘80s in which rival drug gangs using cream vans as fronts fought over territory, but the ever-innocent Forsyth took the wars at their face value and presents them here as a rivalry among ice cream salesman. This violent war between purveyors of ice cream provides a wonderfully convoluted foil for Dickie Bird’s life as he tries to find meaning and happiness as a middle-aged man who has lost the love of his life.
There are so many interesting characters in the forefront and periphery of this movie–ice cream gangsters Mr. McCool and Mr. Bunny, the dentist who looks like George C. Scott, the psychiatrist and the station manager who both claim the same story from their navy days–and every throwaway moment is worth paying attention to. This movie also boasts the funniest collection of lame radio jingles you’re liable to ever come across. But be warned–the “jiffy pops” theme will stay in your head for days!
In our post Judd Apatow world, when was the last time you saw a gentle comedy with heart that completely avoids lapsing into sentimentality? We all need more Bill Forsyth in our lives, and Comfort and Joy is as satisfying and unique as an ice cream fritter.

Writer / Director: Woody Allen
Woody Allen’s first British film Match Point left me disappointed and angry. His follow-up movie, however, also starring London and Scarlett Johansson, restored what I love about Woody Allen to the formula.
I won’t argue that Scoop is a great movie. I will, however, argue that it is underrated and certainly the most enjoyable movie of the latest stage of Allen’s career. Some perks to this movie:
- Johanssen convincingly plays a nerdy and awkward journalist who easily handles Allen’s wordy dialogue
- The film channels the imaginative quality of many of his early films. The plot is driven by the appearance of a ghost, and there are a few scenes which take place on a boat crossing the river Styx!
- Allen doesn’t try to play a romantic lead with a much younger woman like he did for most of the ‘90s (a big fear for us confronted with the prospect of an onscreen Allen / Johansson duo) but instead plays a con artist who poses as her father.
- There are some actual funny jokes in this! And Woody Allen has some fun with placing his shifty American character into high-class British garden parties, providing an element of levity completely missing from the wooden high-class world of Match Point.
Scoop isn’t one of Woody Allen’s greatest, but it’s a fun, pleasing diversion in the realm of Alice, another underappreciated movie of his. But more on that another time.

Writer / Director: Ali Selim
“Let us all hope that we are preceded into this world by a love story.” So begins Sweet Land, one of the sweetest movies you’ll ever see, but grounded by a stark, simple Pioneer aesthetic. It’s like Appalachian Spring made into a movie. Or how Terrence Malick would have made Days of Heaven if he cared more about people and storytelling than he does about landscapes.
Set just after WWI among a Norwegian community in rural Minnesota, Sweet Land tells the story of Inga, an orphaned immigrant who has been brought over specifically to marry a local farmer, Olaf. The two haven’t met, and the Minnesota locals are shocked to learn that Inga is not Norwegian but German. The town refuses to accept Inga, and she and Olaf are ostracized when they end up sharing a house together. Forced to harvest their crop alone, the cheery outsider Inga and the grumpy and awkwardly silent Olaf learn to respect and then love each other. And after Olaf performs a reckless and self-destructive act of kindness, they are welcomed back into the community.
Director Ali Selim keeps it simple, letting the images and acting tell the story and never lapses into sentimentality or pity for his characters. Performances are grounded and utterly believable, even when “name” actors such as Alan Cumming and Ned Beatty show up. A double framing device in the present day about Inga and Olaf’s grandson deciding whether or not to sell their house and then recalling the elderly Inga telling him stories about her past, serves as a nice entryway to this place and time that is so underrepresented in movies. There is beautiful period detail of common life in rural America in the early 20th century but the film doesn’t wallow in it or glorify it.
Sweet Land is not only an underrated movie, it just may be one of the best movies from the past 10 years that you’ve never heard of.
In addition to co-hosting Iron Mule, Jay Stern is a writer and director in his own rite, for both stage and screen. He is currently working on his third feature film, the romantic comedy musical adventure The Adventures of Paul and Marian. Go check out the trailer and maybe even sign up to be a co-producer.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Storyteller’s Rulebook #74: The Love Interest Can't Just Be The Love Interest

Dating scenes, or any flirtation scene where the hero is there for no reason other than flirting, can be tough. It’s hard, because the intentions are too obvious, which gives you too little subtext to work with. But if there’s some other context for the meeting, and you add flirting on top of that, then there’s going to be a lot more energy to the scene. You need some other goal for the romantic inclinations to push and pull against.
Ideally, heroes should be required to run into their love interests, even if they definitely don’t want to see them, so that you can have a lot more variety in your love scenes. If heroes just go home to their sweethearts at the end of the day and tell them what’s going on (Like the girlfriends in so many cop movies, such as Bullitt), then those scenes are going to be totally limp.It’s great if the love interest has vital information that the hero needs, or can otherwise be a potential obstacle, as well as an attractor. “Hill Street Blues” had a perfect set-up: It featured a relationship (and eventual marriage) between a police chief and a public defender, which constantly put them at odds. When they argued about the case at work, it could also be a metaphor for their love life. When they talked about their love life at home, it could be a metaphor for the case. Every scene had instant subtext.
But Ross and Rachel on “Friends” were a much harder couple to write well. Part of the tension in their relationship was that they didn’t care to hear about each other’s jobs (paleontology and fashion, respectively), but that’s the sort of tension that kills stories rather than launching them. Ultimately, It gave them nothing to talk about except their relationship, in scenes that lacked subtext. In the end, the only way to wring interest out of the relationship was to watch them break up and get back together, over and over and over.
Take heed: there’s a reason why everybody gets worried when they hear the phrase, “Let’s talk about our relationship.”
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Underrated Movie #115: Act of Violence

Year: 1948
Director: Fred Zinnemann (High Noon)
Writer: Robert L. Richards, from an unpublished short story by Collier Young
Stars: Van Heflin, Robert Ryan, Janet Leigh, Mary Astor
The Story: A smiling war hero has come home, married a beautiful girl and become a civic hero by building good houses. Then a shadowy figure arrives in town seeking righteous revenge, ready to reveal the horrible things that really went down in the war.

How it Came to be Underrated: For some reason, this was never on VHS and has only just now appeared on DVD. It’s hard not to imagine that this has something do with the harshly subversive vision of the postwar era that the movie presents.
Why It’s Great:
- Much has been made of the guilt Vietnam soldiers felt saddled with when America turned against that war, but this movie shows that there was also a downside to the myth of World War II as “the good war”: those who were wracked with guilt over what they done over there had no audiences available for expiating it.
- You’ll rarely see any Zinnemann retrospectives today. His films have too much gloss and prestige for genre fans, but, other than From Here to Eternity, they’re too grimy for everybody else. I would say his ability to bridge high-budget and low-budget styles is precisely what makes him so great. He’s the love child of William Wyler and Anthony Mann.
- For instance, most noirs are suffused with a uniformly bleak atmosphere that surrounds and traps all the characters. But this was one of the few noirs that seemed to understand, even at the time, what the noir style really meant on an existential level. As Ryan arrives in this sunny town, he brings his own shadows with him (We first see him limping his way against the flow of a happy Memorial Day parade, wearing a raincoat on a sunny day). Whenever Heflin tries to explain what he did in the war, he first retreats out of bright rooms into shadowy ones, fit for a confession. This film reminds us that the noir world is always with us, one closet door away.
- The whole cast here is underrated. Robert Ryan is my all-time favorite character actor. No one could pack as much steely determination into every sentence. Every line holds a complex lifetime of hurt, yet with an aggressive swagger that keeps his characters from falling totally into despair.
- Janet Leigh is equally great, even in this early role. She co-starred in so many masterpieces (Touch of Evil, Psycho, Manchurian Candidate), but she never seems to get enough of the credit for them. Like Ryan, she’s got a real rawness to her that lets her suffer and lash out in equally good measure, without a self-conscious filter. Mary Astor is also amazing as an over-the-hill prostitute who tries to help Heflin.


If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Leigh and Ryan reteamed for the equally-subversive western The Naked Spur, Zinnemann showed us another killer relentlessly pursuing quite a different war hero in Day of the Jackal.
How Available Is It?: It’s finally on DVD, and even though it has to share a disk with another movie (Mystery Street), they both get commentaries and documentaries.
Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Hang This Medal On Your Friends!

Thursday, April 14, 2011
What’s the Matter With Hollywood, Part 5: The Strange Disappearance of Co-Stars


Wednesday, April 13, 2011
What’s the Matter With Hollywood, Part 4: The Star System is Broken

American movies were studio driven until the mid-‘60s, then briefly director-driven until 1980, then star-driven ever since. Some blame this “star system” for everything that has gone wrong. That’s a little extreme; some great movies have been made along with the bad. But our problem now is that we seem to be entering another transition, because the star system is breaking down and nothing is rising to replace it.
The lack of bankable stars has its roots in some of the problems I’ve been talking about: Movies take so long to get made that imaginary stars are created who never actually catch fire.
It used to be that a star had to play minor roles until the public decided that they liked this person and demanded to see more of them, which is a great way to create a real star. There are still a few stars who get to do that: Amy Adams blew audiences away in Junebug so she got more roles. Emily Blunt stole The Devil Loves Prada, so she got more roles. But with movies now being cast years and years in advance, and with star salaries skyrocketing so quickly, that process frequently gets short-circuited.
Two of the biggest fizzles of would-be superstars in recent years were Colin Farrell and Eric Bana. Both were cast as the lead in five or six tentpole movies only to see every single one flop. Audiences just weren’t embracing them. But at least those two had each starred in minor movies that impressed some critics (Tigerland and Chopper) before Hollywood prematurely anointed them as superstars. Now things have gotten even crazier: Now we have Sam Worthington.

The irony here is that Worthington actually did a fine job in Avatar (I thought so, anyway). It could have been the foundation of a decent career, if he hadn’t already worn out his welcome. Hollywood needs to go back to letting the public pick our own stars.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
What’s the Matter With Hollywood, Part 3: Movies Take WAY Too Long To Get Made

Back in 2005, I read an interview with the writers of the movie Waiting, a low-budget comedy about wacky waiters at a TGI-Friday’s-type restaurant who cause hi-jinks by spitting in the customer’s food.
The writers were talking about the ups and downs of getting the movie made. They mentioned how, at one point, after they had worked on it for years and finally sold the script, they saw the trailer for a new movie that was coming out soon called Office Space. They were worried because that trailer had a big joke in it about Jennifer Anniston being unhappy working at a lame family restaurant. Later, they were relieved when Office Space finally came out and they saw that it had only one scene in that setting.
The moral of the story was supposed to be this: don’t worry too much about competing projects. But I took away a different moral from this anecdote: They spent way too long making this movie! Office Space came out in 1999! Six years before Waiting! This meant that these poor writers had devoted at least seven years of their lives to making this movie.
It’s one thing to hear about Mark Wahlberg spending ten years trying to get The Fighter made, because at least that was an ambitious project. But Waiting?? This was a disposable little comedy that, even if had been well reviewed, wasn’t ever going to be life-changing for anybody who saw it. More importantly, it wasn’t going to make any of the moviemakers rich.
This is insane. In the heyday of the studio system, they made some good movies and they made some bad movies, but most every movie went from idea to execution to release in less than a year. Maybe, at the end of those months, you ended up with Casablanca, or maybe you ended up with Ants In Your Pants of 1939, but either way, you released it and you moved on.
This is a big part of the reason that nobody onscreen looks like they’re having any fun anymore. They’ve grown tired of the material, and all that build-up means that too much is now riding on every movie. That pressure crushes the performances.
Monday, April 11, 2011
What’s the Matter With Hollywood, Part 2: Potential is Worth More Than Reality

Before 1980, very few of the studios were owned by publicly-traded companies. The only way they had to make money was to make a good product and sell it. Then every studio either went public or got swallowed up by a corporation. Once you start offering stock in your company, you quickly realize that there’s more money to be made by selling your stock than there is by selling your product. Soon, whatever you make just becomes a tool to goose your stock price.
I’ve talked before about how embarrassing it is to try to create value from scratch, rather than merely trade back and forth value that already exists. Combined with the stock problem, this brings us to the #2 reason that movies have plummeted in quality: Potential movies are worth more than actual movies. If you create anticipation for a movie, it starts pushing up the stock price, and will continue to do so until the movie is released, at which point, unless it’s a massive hit, disappointment will set in and the air will leak out of the bubble. Perversely, a situation develops in which the most valuable movies are those that never get made at all.
This is the real reason that the studios prefer franchises to original scripts. When you announce that you’ve acquired a bit of value, and then add it to another bit of value, those two bits begin to mate in the minds of investors and multiply like bunnies. But if you announce that you’ve acquired an unknown quantity, like an original script, it’s inert. It doesn’t multiply.
There was recently a major announcement that Taylor Lautner from Twilight would soon star in an adaptation of the Stretch Armstrong “franchise”. Most people have forgotten it today, but Stretch Armstrong was a short-lived toy from the ‘70s: a rubber muscleman whose only notable quality was they you could stretch his arms out and watch them snap back.
What nobody mentioned, but everybody knew, is that they didn’t have any intention of making a Stretch Armstrong movie. Stretch never had a cartoon or comic. He’s never had a goal or a problem or a story. All he has is a name that people are vaguely familiar with, which also happens to be what Taylor Lautner has. Put these two bits of value together and you goose the stock price for a few days. That’s all. Sure, they’ll hire some lucky writers and pay them six figures each to write a few scripts, but the scripts will be terrible and the project will die.
Of course, that payday could have gone to a writer who actually had a story to tell. It could have created a new franchise from scratch, but while they were waiting for that franchise to materialize, the market would punish the studio for pouring money down a no-name black hole. And the market must be obeyed.
Tomorrow, we’ll look at the other horrible consequence of development being more valuable than the product itself…
Sunday, April 10, 2011
What’s the Matter With Hollywood, Part 1: All Movies Must Be All Things To All People

So what went wrong?
Let’s start with the biggest problem, which is the source of all the others: Every movie now has to be all things to all people. This was not always the case. Back in the old days, each studio would make dozens of different movies at a time, each aimed at different audiences. Most lost a little money, but a few made a lot of money, so the studio still made steady profits overall.
Those days are long gone. Though the studios still exist as distributors, they have found a way, like so many other American corporations, to ensure that the profits trickle up but the risk trickles down. They no longer initiate their own projects, but instead wait for independent producers to bring projects to them. This means most movies has at least one person involved who is putting up a huge stake of their own money (or money they raised themselves).
You would think that someone putting up their own money would be more risk-averse, but the opposite is true. In the investment game you have to go big or go home. You’ll never be able to raise the money if your investors suspect you’re hedging your bets. They want to know that you’re all in, that this is a passion project.
It’s easier to convince investors that you need 100 million to make one movie you really believe in than it is to ask for the same amount to make five 20 million dollar movies that may or may not be good, even though the latter would actually be a far better investment. You would have a better chance that one of those five would make at least 100 million, even if the other four sucked. But that’s a harder sell for some reason in our topsy-turvy world.

The recent remake had not one but two bankable stars, a major director, a huge budget, and a summer “tentpole” release with a massive marketing campaign (in which everybody involved complained about how crappy the original was) that tried to convince everybody that this was an “important” movie. The result was a disaster. Every frame was drenched in flop sweat. You could see on their faces that they knew they had a stinker on their hands but they didn’t know what to do about it.
It took a thousand wrong decisions to make a movie that bad, but it never really had a chance from the start. This is a great little story, but it’s not “important”. And Hollywood doesn’t dare tell great-but-unimportant little stories anymore, because every movie has to convince its investors that this movie is “the one” that’s going to shoot into the stratosphere. So they get inflated into bloated messes that collapse under the weight of their own swelled heads.
We’ll see an even more maddening consequence of this problem tomorrow...
Thursday, April 07, 2011
The Meddler #8: My Fixes for Walk the Line, aka Man in Black

Okay folks, like last time, this gets very long, since I’m re-writing the whole damn movie. (And yes, I admit that I’ve compressed and slid around some real-world events, as all bio-pics do.) (By the way, this is a pretty good example of the 30-beat beatsheet I mentioned before. You’ll see what I mean when I say that a beat can include more than one scene, but each beat is one “event”.)
- Cash and his band, in matching black outfits, warm up by playing profane songs, before their big try-out at Sun Records. Cash reminds them that they’ll have clean up their act for audition, he’d be embarrassed for anyone to hear him play that stuff.
- They play their gospel stuff for Sam Phillips. Phillips tells them gospel doesn’t sell: “Go home and sin, then come back with a hit.” They stop him from walking away by playing a down and dirty song in their rollicking, sinister style. He loves it and signs them immediately, but, in passing, he jokes that they should add some color to their outfits. Johnny says he’ll see what he can do. (This anecdote was cleaned up in the actual movie)
- He goes home to tell his resentful wife, who is not at all happy for him. He promises her that this will make everything better for them in the long run.
- He quickly breaks with Sam Phillips, who wants to push him in a more rock-n-roll direction. Instead, he pokes (good-natured) fun at longhaired rock and rollers in his act:
Then he announces that he’s switching to a bigger label, Columbia, that has promised to finally let him put out a gospel album. - A few years later, he’s strung out on pills and miserable while touring with the Carter family (still wearing black). He complains to his friend June Carter that Columbia still hasn’t let him record a gospel album.
- At a meeting with Columbia, they finally agree to a gospel album, then tell him he looks like hell and he should go home to his wife. He tells them that he can’t, he’s got to leave right away for another show in another city.
- That night, he’s served with divorce papers. He goes to call his wife to beg her to reconcile, but he stops himself. Instead he goes to June’s trailer and tells her he’s free now. She is drawn to him but she says it wouldn’t be right… yet. He says he’ll wait.
- The gospel album doesn’t sell, and his label blames his divorce for alienating the Christian audience he wants. He complains that staying in a bad marriage isn’t what Christianity is all about. They scoff and ask what does being a Christian mean to him anyway, if not family values? He doesn’t have an answer…
- June sees how distressed he is and tells him to re-read the bible for answers. He does and realizes that half of the Jesus’s ministry was about mercy towards prisoners.
- He meets with a warden before a prison show, who instructs him to only sing morally enriching songs. He reluctantly agrees.
- On stage, they start out with a gospel number, and the audience listens respectively. Disappointed with the response, Johnny holds a hasty huddle with the band. They play Folsom Prison Blues (“I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die…”) and the crowd goes wild. The warden tries to shut them down, but the prisoners threaten to riot and the warden backs down and lets him finish. Johnny then plays a mournful song about a regretful prisoner, and the crowd, now that they’re on his side, is very moved...
- He brings June along to duet at a series of prisons and other venues with the song “Jackson” (“We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout…”), finally he impulsively proposes for real onstage one night. The band wonders what took them so long. They get married that night.
- His prison albums come out and he is heavily criticized for having too good of a time with the prisoners. But then he meets a big fan, Merle Haggard, who was an inmate at one of his first prison shows, where he was inspired to clean up his life and become a country singer himself. Cash feels vindicated and helps Haggard with his career.
- Haggard scores an unexpected hit with a jokey song called “Okie From Muscogee”, which becomes an unlikely anthem for Nixon-loving middle America. Haggard’s label wants him to follow up with non-ironic right-wing songs, and he asks Johnny if he should. Though Johnny disdains some of the songs they want Haggard to perform, he tell his friend to do whatever will help his family the most. Haggard thanks him and decides to record the songs.
- But soon Columbia is unhappy with Johnny as a result. Other country stars are now getting huge crowds in Middle America, putting on rhinestone outfits and singing angry anti-hippy anthems. He still dresses like an undertaker and sings in prisons. He always said he wanted a Christian audience, but now that they’re showing up in droves for more conservative singers, he’s shunning them. Johnny says preachers dress in black and Jesus ministered to prisoners, so if that’s not Christian enough for them, he doesn’t know what to do. He storms out…
- Meanwhile, at home, he sees his new marriage is starting to fail under the same strain as his first one did from his constant touring…
- He decides to start his own TV variety show so that he can get off the road. He pitches it as a show where he’ll bring on all the greats of country music, including Haggard, and other favorite musicians as well. His reps love it. They feel like he’s finally playing ball.
- But on opening night, everyone is furious that he’s invited Bob Dylan, who reached out to him, to be on the program. He stands his ground, and that night Bob is hesitantly introduced to middle America. The audience is uncertain, but Johnny loves the music. Bob enjoys himself but tells Johnny that he hopes he knows what he’s doing…
- Johnny continues to discover and feature more long-hair musicians, along with the country greats, on his show, causing the network and his label to get angrier and angrier. They play him some recent pro-Vietnam country hits and demand that he record something like that or they’ll drop him. He supports the war, he supposes, but he discovers that he can’t write or sing anything like that without sounding inauthentic. June tells him that he should go play for the troops over there and find out what they’re really going through.
- In Vietnam, Johnny is shocked to find that the troops are frequently long-hairs themselves who prefer Dylan to Haggard. He’s also shocked to see how disastrous the war really is.
- That night their camp is unexpectedly shelled and he and June are hustled into an improvised bunker, where they pray with the soldiers, expecting to die any second. June finally tells Johnny he should take some of his pills to sleep through the night. He realizes that he forgot to bring any pills—he hasn’t been taking them much since he started the show. She’s glad to hear it.
- He comes back and writes his Vietnam song, but the song ends pointedly with a demand that the war end and the boys come home. He plays it on his show, infuriating the network.
- Calls are made to hastily cancel the show.
- Johnny finds out the show is cancelled but he doesn’t care. He feels that his burdens are finally lifted now that he’s not trying to please everyone else anymore. He suddenly gets inspiration to write a song that’s been building in him for sometime.
- On his final show, he plays his new song “Man in Black,” “You ask me why I always dress in black? Why you never see bright colors on my back? And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone? Well there’s a reason for the things that I got on…” He sings about how he’ll keep wearing black to protest the injustices against prisoners, soldiers, hippies and all the oppressed people in America. His audience, which is now mostly young people, loves it. Backstage, his label drops him. He points out that he’d already sent in his contract termination notice. He heads home with June, who couldn’t be prouder of him.
- On the way home, his adrenaline rush starts to fade and with a wary laugh he asks June what on Earth are they going to do now? She says that for the first time she’s sure that they’re going to make out alright somehow.
- Ending titles explain that Johhny had to battle his pill addiction and his recording labels off and on for the rest of his life, but he never stopped finding new audiences for his outlaw version of the gospel.