David Byrne
True Stories
New York City, USA: Penguin Books, 1986
192 pp., 25 x 21 x 1 cm., softcover
Edition size unknown
True Stories: A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas is ‘true' in the way that the Coen Brothers’ Fargo was true.1 The feature film’s loosely connected vignettes are based on articles David Byrne clipped from supermarket tabloids while on tour with the Talking Heads, and there is no town in Texas named Virgil.
"There is no real plot here, just wonderment,” notes Roger Ebert in his glowing contemporaneous review, which likens the 1986 film to landscape painting.2
True Stories stars John Goodman, in one of his earliest roles (predating Raising Arizona by a year and the Roseanne sitcom by two) and is narrated by Byrne, touring the town in a cowboy hat and convertible. He is there to witness the "150 Years of Specialness" celebration, and introduces us to as series of eccentric characters.
Swoosie Kurtz plays a woman bed-ridden not from illness, but from wealth. She experiences the world through television or magazines that she reads with the assistance of a page-turning device. She meets Goodman’s character, a teddy bear of a man so desperate to marry that he advertises for a wife with a local TV ad.
Most of the rest of the cast are non-actors, performance artists (Spalding Gray and Jo Harvey Allen) or musicians (Tito Larriva and Roebuck "Pops" Staples).
Warner Brothers had given creative control to Byrne after the success of the Talking Head’s concert film Stop Making Sense, directed by Jonathan Demme. It was Demme who proposed the sesquicentennial celebration.
“He pointed out the value of having something he referred to as a 'clock,'” said Byrne. “He meant that you know something’s coming, and that as the film moves on, you know you’re going to get closer to it. You’re bouncing around, visiting all these different characters, but you have a sense that you’re headed somewhere. That helped cement the idea of the talent show at the end, and the parade and all that kind of stuff. And all you had to do was have people mention it every once in a while.”
Other influences include Robert Wilson’s Knee Plays and Robert Altman’s Nashville. Joan Tewkesbury, the screenwriter of Altman’s 1975 classic, gets a thank-you in the credits. She suggested to Byrne that he consider setting the film in Texas.
“I first was lured there for financial reasons,” he told the Miami Herald in November 1986, "because it’s a right-to-work state, and they have experienced crews and a studio near Dallas.” Right-to-work laws forbid unions collecting dues from their membership, thus weakening union power and lowering worker wages.
This rationale would land Byrne in hot water decades later, when his musical Here Lies Love (a collaboration with Fatboy Slim) came under fire for using pre-recorded music instead of live performers. Given Fatboy Slim’s role as a DJ, the pair might’ve weathered the storm of not using players from the musician’s union, had this quote not resurfaced.3
“Most of all, Texas looked great,” Byrne wrote in the introduction to the book that accompanied the film. “It didn’t look that different from anywhere else, there was just more of it.” After his first visit to the state he found it difficult to imagine the film taking place anywhere else.
"I started with images,” he told Rolling Stone in 2018. "I started with a big wall full of drawings and images, and I would order and reorder them until there would be a flow to them. It was pictures of people singing, drawings of their Texas landscape. As my wife and I were collecting the Weekly World News, I was grabbing articles and going, “Well, maybe one of the people could be this. Maybe one of the people in the drawings could be this person.” And it slowly evolved into having a through-line, even if it’s not a conventional narrative."
To help turn his drawings and collected tales from the tabloids into a feature film, Byrne hired playwright Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart) and her romantic partner Stephen Tobolowsky, who is now best known as a successful character actor4. During college, Henley had encouraged the reluctant Tobolowsky to monetize his psychic abilities. While working on the script, she cajoled him into sharing this information with Bryne. He recounted the story in 2015, on Chris Hardwick’s Nerdist podcast:
“Tell David. Because David wants to put all these true stories in his movie, Stephen. Tell him the true story about you hearing tones.” And I said, “No, baby, no, I don’t want” — “No, tell him the story about you hearing tones.”
So I sat and told David the story of me hearing tones. And he says, “You’re kidding!” And I said, “No, David, that’s really the story but I don’t do it anymore, I don’t like to do it anymore, it was too creepy, and I don’t like to do it anymore.”
So anyway — sure enough, a year later, David has written into True Stories a character that hears tones, and he wrote the song. That day he came over and played “Wild Wild Life.” He says, “Here is a song that I wrote for you, Stephen.” And we put it in the thing, and it was “Radio Head.”
When signing a six-album recording contract with EMI records in 1991, the band On A Friday were encouraged by the label to change their name. They settled on Radiohead, inspired by Bryne’s song.5
It’s unlikely Warner Brothers imagined that True Stories would become anything more than a minor cult-hit, more likely hoping that it would help propel the album of the same name. The Beatles' film A Hard Day’s Night was an instant classic, and earned back more than ten times its meagre budget in box office revenues, but was originally only a secondary concern for its financiers. Bud Ornstein, the head of production for United Artists is reported to have said: "Our record division wants to get the soundtrack album to distribute in the States, and what we lose on the film we'll earn back on this disc.”
The True Stories companion album is considered minor Talking Heads, lacking the urgency and inventiveness of their debut, the production and experimentation that Brian Eno brought to the later works, or the sophistication of their swan-song (which also benefitted from guitarist Johnny Marr, who had just left the Smiths). Some of this is due to its confusing relationship to the film - it’s not a soundtrack and it’s not a stand alone LP. It can almost be viewed as a cover album, with the band that wrote the songs covering them. Byrne has gone on record calling it a mistake and regretting being talking into singing the songs himself.
The singles are certainly not the band’s best ("Love for Sale", "Wild Wild Life") but the deep cuts are strong. "Hey Now" is better performed by the children in the film, but the Talking Heads version works well enough. “People Like Us”, “Dream Operator” and "City of Dreams” are excellent. The latter recently appeared over the credits of the (sadly overlooked) Nicolas Cage vehicle Dream Scenario6.
Alongside the Talking Heads LP, the album Sounds From True Stories was released, but this was primarily an instrumental score record, lacking the songs performed by the characters in the film. The kids choir version of “Hey Now” appeared as the b-side to “Love For Sale” and John Goodman singing “People Like Us” backed “Wild Wild Life”. Pops Staples’ version of "Papa Legba” would not be released until 2006, on the reissue of the Talking Heads' True Stories album.
The rest of the songs would wait even longer, until 2018, when the double LP True Stories: The Complete Soundtrack would be issued by Nonesuch records, to coincide with the Criterion DVD and Blu-ray.
Where the soundtrack album was initially a missed opportunity, the publishing of the film’s screenplay was carefully considered. Instead of a simple transcript of the dialogue, Byrne released an artist’s book to accompany the film. In addition to the (annotated) script, the book includes photographs commissioned by William Eggleston, story boards, location shots, lyrics, film stills, drawings, and some of the original newspaper clippings from the Weekly World News.
“Movies are a combination of sounds and pictures, and stories are a trick to keep you paying attention,” Byrne writes in the introduction, sharing insights into his craft in a way that he would return to in his 2012 book How Music Works. Then, later: “Movie making is a trick. Songwriting is a trick. If a song is done really well, the trick works. If not, people can see through it right away. Maybe this movie can be a trick and show you how the trick is done at the same time. Maybe this book can kind of do that, too”.
The highlight for me are the sidebar texts - very brief essays about subjects touched on in the film. Every few pages features a subtitle and a paragraph or two: Dinosaurs, Food Styling, See-through Houses (“Houses look best when they're not finished”), Metal Buildings, Assembly Kines, Flat Landscapes, Twins (“Twins confuse our ideas about individuality”)7, Shopping Malls, Fashion Shows, Freedom of Information, and Conspiracies. As a fan of footnotes, these digressions in the margins are added value.
On each spread of the oblong book, the material directly related to the film is laid out on the left: the script, storyboards and stills. On the right hand side are the “making of” materials: location shots, research clippings, and the sidebar texts.8
“I’m hoping that this book will be the equivalent of the way we experience people and things in our environments,” Byrne writes. "Out there lots of different things are going on at the same time. You can change your focus from one thing to another and still keep the first thing in your mind. You can look through other people’s eyes, or look with a changing point of view, at the same place. You can stand in one spot and focus on different things and really look at them in different ways simultaneously. It’s an effect that can be achieved in the theatre, but it’s almost impossible to do in film. It’s easier in a book”.
1. Fargo is introduced with a caption that reads “This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.” The television series in particular, leaned into this trope. After years of deflection and contradictory statements, Joel Coen revealed that Fargo is “completely made up, or as we like to say, the only thing true about it is that it’s a story.”
2. Ebert writes "This movie does what some painters try to do: It recasts ordinary images into strange new shapes.”
3. After damning press coverage, on June 9th, 2023, the pair capitulated and it was announced that Here Lies Love would employ twelve live musicians.
4. Stephen Tobolowsky portrayed “Action” Jack Barker in the HBO sitcom Silicon Valley, Ned "The Bull" Ryerson in Groundhog Day and Sammy Jankis in Memento.
5. Singer Thom Yorke told Q magazine that the name Radiohead "sums up all these things about receiving stuff ... It's about the way you take information in, the way you respond to the environment you're put in."
6. Dream Scenario is much stronger than its gimmicky premise would suggest. The film also makes reference to Byrne’s famous oversized suit.
7. True Stories employed fifty sets of twins.
8. Some of the texts are surprisingly prescient: “True story: I was just recently told about a man in Texas who’s soliciting funds to build a wall around the state of Texas modeled after the Great Wall of China.”
