http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/arts/ ... odayspaper
The Heartbeat, and the Twang, of a City
‘Nashville,’ the TV Series Starring the City
By JOE RHODES
Published: October 5, 2012
THE Bluebird Cafe doesn’t look like much in the daylight, especially if you’re just driving by. It’s a storefront in a nondescript strip mall, wedged between Helen’s Children’s Shop and the Patio Hair Salon. You might, if you’re looking for it, notice the blue canvas awning. Little else would catch your eye.
But at night it glows from within, white lights twinkling through the window, a neon bluebird above the tiny stage, which is crowded with singers and musicians, some of them famous, most of them not, playing to a tightly packed 100-seat house. No one in the audience checks smartphones when music is being played. No one dares interrupt the songs.
It’s a place that matters to Callie Khouri, the Academy Award-winning writer of “Thelma & Louise” who lived in Nashville from 1978 to 1982 and who is making her first foray into network series television as creator and writer of the new ABC drama “Nashville.” She says this little room, where music is sacred and the people who play it are revered, contains the essence of what makes Nashville unique, as much if not more than the suburban Grand Ole Opry Entertainment Complex or the venerable downtown Ryman Auditorium, the longtime former home of the Opry. That all three places use church pews for seats is hardly a coincidence.
“Whenever I’ve seen shows or films set here, they just don’t feel like the real Nashville to me,” Ms. Khouri said, echoing a common local complaint that the city’s metro area, with more than 1.6 million residents and a booming diverse economy (ranked by Forbes as one of the fastest-growing job markets in the country) is too often portrayed as a hillbilly Hollywood, populated by charlatans and rubes, slick talent managers and whiskey-guzzling fools.
“This is a place that can be mocked and made fun of, and sometimes it deserves it, like any place,” said Ms. Khouri, whose mother and sister still reside here. “But it also is an incredibly beautiful, cosmopolitan city, and I wanted to show that to the world. I want to represent it in a way that everybody who lives here would find completely realistic.”
On the surface “Nashville,” which begins Wednesday, could easily be mistaken for just another prime-time soap opera, a “Dallas” with a different skyline and more guitars, country music moguls instead of oil tycoons. There are, to be sure, back stabbings, betrayals and sordid affairs aplenty, the stuff of which soap operas — and country songs — are made. ABC’s splashy promotional campaign has primarily focused on the rivalry between a young and ruthless country-pop diva (played by Hayden Panettiere) and a past-her-peak superstar (played by Connie Britton).
But Ms. Khouri and her fellow executive producer, R. J. Cutler, the documentarian best known for “The War Room,” are going for something more nuanced and ambitious than the promos might suggest, encompassing a musical universe that goes far beyond mainstream country.
It will include original songs from a range of writers (some of them established artists like Lucinda Williams and Elvis Costello) sung by the cast members and produced by the Grammy-winning T Bone Burnett, who happens to be Ms. Khouri’s husband and whose credits include “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “Crazy Heart.”
“The driving theme of our series is how one controls one’s destiny,” Mr. Cutler said, speaking by phone from Los Angeles. “Every one of these characters are at a crossroads in their lives and, of course, the crossroads is such a mythic theme in American musical history.”
A fan of Robert Altman’s “Nashville,” Mr. Cutler said the show could be considered a contemporary response to that 1975 film. “I don’t want to overstate the connection because that’s a film from a very particular moment in the 1970s, and this is a very different beast,” he said. “But it was a film where Nashville was a main character, where the music industry and the politics of the moment were intertwined. And that idea was very interesting and exciting to us.”
This “Nashville,” like Altman’s, features a large ensemble cast (including Powers Boothe as a high-powered political puppet master and the singer-songwriter J. D. Souther as a music producer) and multiple interconnected story lines, many of them revolving around Ms. Britton’s character, Rayna Jaymes, the 40-year-old “reigning queen of country music” who’s also a wife and mother trying to hold on to her artistic integrity in the face of a shrinking music marketplace and competition from younger, hotter, more easily marketed acts.
“I think this happens to a lot of people, men and women, where you reach a point in your life and all of a sudden realize that things have changed,” said Ms. Khouri, 54, two decades and a handful of film and TV projects removed from the flurry of attention that accompanied “Thelma & Louise,” her first screenplay. “You suddenly realize that people are coming up behind you, that maybe somebody might want to replace you for less money. You don’t get advance notice, I don’t think. One day you wake up, and there’s just the slightest whiff of a change. And if you’re attuned to it, then you figure out how to deal with it.”
Ms. Britton, 45, who has wondered in public whether her Emmy-nominated role as a high school football coach’s wife on “Friday Night Lights” might have been the peak of her career, said the part of Rayna resonated with her on a professional and personal level.
“I was drawn to the idea that we’re going to see a woman who has been self-made, who has built and created this career and this family life, this empire, really, on her own. And we see her hit a place in her life where suddenly there are obstacles she had not anticipated.”
The question, for Rayna and all the characters in “Nashville,” Ms. Khouri said, is how do they deal with upheavals without losing their integrity, their sense of who they are. “In a business as mercurial and fickle as the music business,” she said, “it’s particularly hard. The whole business model is basically collapsing in on itself. And there comes a point where you start to realize that it really doesn’t matter if you’re good. It doesn’t really matter if you’re great. You can be all of those things and still not succeed.”
Except maybe in places like the Bluebird, where there are open mike nights when anyone with a guitar and a song has chance to perform. On the “Nashville” soundstage, which is a former Nascar racing team headquarters, production crews have constructed a stunningly exact replica of the Bluebird, making copies of every faded 8-by-10 glossy on the wall and even recreating the ancient ice maker. On the show, as in real life, the Bluebird will be a place where lives and careers intersect.
“One of the magical things about Nashville is just how many incredibly talented people are here and the way they support each other,” Ms. Khouri said.
“Nashville is the place where I first realized how impossible it is to look at someone and know what is inside them, what special something they possess,” she said. “There’s something about that connection here, not just between the artists but with the audience, that we want to come across in this show, that connection to what music actually is, before it’s produced and sold to you as a commodity.”
Callie Khouri, the Oscar winner who helped create the series, and her husband, T Bone Burnett, who’s producing the show’s music.
