True Stories (film)
True Stories | |
---|---|
Directed by | David Byrne |
Written by | Stephen Tobolowsky Beth Henley David Byrne |
Produced by | Gary Kurfirst |
Starring | John Goodman Annie McEnroe Swoosie Kurtz Spalding Gray Pops Staples Tito Larriva David Byrne |
Cinematography | Ed Lachman |
Edited by | Caroline Biggerstaff |
Music by | Talking Heads |
Production company | True Stories Venture |
Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
Release date | October 10, 1986 |
Running time | 90 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Box office | $2.5 million[1] |
True Stories (full onscreen title: True Stories: A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil Texas.) is a 1986 American
True Stories was released by Warner Bros. in the United States, Canada, Italy, and Sweden in 1986, and received a limited release elsewhere the following year. Byrne was given much creative control over the motion picture's direction, largely due to the mainstream success of Talking Heads' 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense. The resulting film is replete with Byrne's eccentric and idiosyncratic observations of small-town life, exaggerated satirical imagery, and surrealist sense of humor.
Plot
The film is presented as a series of vignettes centered around Byrne as an unnamed, cowboy-hat-wearing stranger who visits the fictional Texas town of Virgil, where he observes the citizens as they prepare for the "Celebration of Specialness" to mark the 150th anniversary of Texas' independence. The event is being sponsored by the Varicorp Corporation, a local computer manufacturing plant. Among the many characters the visitor meets and interacts with, the most prominent are:
- Louis Fyne, a clean roomtechnician at Varicorp who is unlucky in love
- Civic leader Earl Culver, who never speaks directly to his wife, Kay
- Miss Rollings, who never leaves her bed
- Mr. Tucker, Miss Rollings' personal assistant, a kindly voodoo practitioner whom Louis hires to help him find love
- A conspiracy theorist preacher, whose shtick owes a great deal to the Church of the SubGenius
- Ramon, a Tejano singer who claims to hear tones from people
- "The Lying Woman", who recounts fantastic episodes from her life to anyone who will listen
Cast
- David Byrne as The Narrator (also as the Lip-Syncher with mustache during the "Wild Wild Life" sequence)
- John Goodman as Louis Fyne
- Spalding Gray as Earl Culver
- Annie McEnroe as Kay Culver
- Swoosie Kurtz as Miss Rollings, The Lazy Woman
- Pops Staples as Mr. Tucker
- John Ingle as The Preacher
- Tito Larriva as Ramon
- Jo Harvey Allen as The Lying Woman
- Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth and Jerry Harrison as Lip-Synchers (Wild Wild Life sequence).
Production
Byrne has stated that the decision to film in Texas was motivated in large part by investors in the project, due to anti-union
Stephen Tobolowsky recounts in an episode of his podcast The Tobolowsky Files that he and his girlfriend Beth Henley met David Byrne and Talking Heads when Jonathan Demme invited them to a preview screening of Stop Making Sense. Shortly afterward, Byrne invited Henley and Tobolowsky over to his house and showed them a collection of hundreds of drawings he had made and put up on his wall. He explained they were based on clippings he had scrapbooked from tabloids as the band had been on tour. He had been intrigued by the idea of making a film based on the premise, "What if all these stories were true?" and wanted Henley and Tobolowsky to write the script based on those drawings.[3]
Tobolowsky was aware that Texas was coming up on its sesquicentennial celebration, and thought that would provide a good framework for the characters Byrne had invented. Henley and he wrote a draft and provided it to Byrne, then did not hear back from him for about a year. It later turned out that Byrne had rewritten their script almost entirely, keeping only a few lines and the sesquicentennial framework from the first draft. However, he asked Tobolowsky and Henley for permission to list their names ahead of his as scriptwriters so the film would seem less like a "vanity project."[3]
During Tobolowsky's early talks with Byrne, he related to Byrne the story of a series of psychic experiences he had during college, in which he had been able to hear "tones" that told him things about other people. Byrne incorporated this story into his rewrite, using it as the basis for Ramon's psychic powers and the song "Radio Head."[3]
An early working title for the project (endorsed by bassist
Reception
True Stories was not a commercial success at the time of its release. On
Colin Greenland reviewed True Stories for White Dwarf #85, and stated that "True Stories is a tour of Virgil, Texas, Byrne's toytown utopia, whose peculiar citizens have neurosis down to a fine art. Zippy the Pinhead would be at home in Virgil."[8]
Home media
In 1987, the film was released on
Music
True Stories features a number of songs written by Byrne and performed by various members of the cast as well as by Talking Heads (the members of which make cameo appearances).
Talking Heads released an album titled True Stories in which the band performs most of the songs from the film, including songs that were performed by the actors in the film. As such, the album is not generally considered a true soundtrack album, a fact Byrne points out in his liner notes on the release. Later, Byrne released an album containing primarily instrumental music from the soundtrack titled Sounds from True Stories.
While several of the cast performances were released as bonus tracks on
The music video version of "Wild Wild Life" that debuted on
In November 2018, True Stories, A Film by David Byrne: The Complete Soundtrack, a comprehensive soundtrack album with 23 songs as they were recorded for the film, was released.[11] This marked the first time that the complete True Stories soundtrack was made publicly available, 32 years after the movie's original release. The soundtrack was issued to coincide with Criterion's 2018 DVD and Blu-ray release of the film, the latter of which it was also packaged with. The new-edition soundtrack includes the three Talking Heads performances with David Byrne on lead vocals that are featured in the movie, "Wild Wild Life," "Love for Sale," and "City of Dreams", which are the same recordings included on the Talking Heads album True Stories; otherwise, the material does not overlap with the Talking Heads album. The new edition includes the first official commercial release of McEnroe's "Dream Operator" and Ingle's "Puzzlin' Evidence".
Legacy
English rock band Radiohead is named after the song "Radio Head" from True Stories.[12]
References
- ^ "True Stories". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved October 13, 2023.
- ^ "David Byrne's History Of Avoiding Unions Dates Back To The 1980s". HuffPost. June 6, 2023. Retrieved June 7, 2023.
- ^ a b c "The Tobolowsky Files, Episode 44: The Voice from Another Room". /Film. February 18, 2011. Retrieved March 4, 2014.
- ^ "1985 - Transcript of interview picture disk (BAK 2017)". July 16, 2011. Archived from the original on July 16, 2011. Retrieved May 19, 2014.
- ^ "True Stories (1986) - Overview". TCM.com. Retrieved February 25, 2013.
- ^ "True Stories (1986)". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango. Retrieved October 23, 2021.
- ^ "True Stories". RogerEbert.com. Ebert Digital LLC. October 31, 1986. Retrieved September 5, 2017.
- ^ Greenland, Colin (December 1987). "2020 Vision". White Dwarf (85). Games Workshop: 6.
- ^ "Talking Heads - True Stories". Discogs. November 25, 1999. Retrieved December 23, 2018.
- ^ "True Stories (1986)". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved December 23, 2018.
- ^ "True Stories, A Film By David Byrne: The Complete Soundtrack". nonesuch.com. October 3, 2018. Retrieved October 13, 2023.
- ISSN 0955-4955.
External links
- True Stories at the American Film Institute Catalog
- True Stories at IMDb
- True Stories at the TCM Movie Database
- True Stories at AllMovie
- True Stories at Box Office Mojo
- True Stories at Rotten Tomatoes
- True Stories: Everybody Has Tones an essay by Rebecca Bengal at the Criterion Collection