Appendix 1
A movie based on the life of Hank Williams was, and is, such a logical idea that it’s surprising it has only been done once, and done badly. The arc of Hank’s career lends itself naturally to a movie treatment, even if the unhappy ending doesn’t. His life played out over a short time frame, and the songs are plentiful and well known.
The movie of Hank’s life was in discussion almost from the moment of his death, and the ties between MGM Records and MGM Pictures meant that Hank’s original recordings could be used for the soundtrack if MGM Pictures was prepared to forgive and forget. Shortly after the estate paid off Billie Jean, Audrey asked A. V. Bamford to go to Hollywood on her behalf and shop for a deal. In a letter to Lilly’s attorney, Robert Stewart, on September 24, 1953, Bamford explained why he was hawking a proposal around Hollywood without consulting anyone in Montgomery. It was Bamford’s opinion, “based on many years in show business… that this picture should be released not later than the end of 1954.” Like nearly everyone else, Bamford believed that Hank would be forgotten within a year, at best two years.
On November 19, Bamford returned to Hollywood, this time with Audrey. He’d lined up an appointment with Kenneth MacKenna at MGM Pictures. MacKenna, born Leo Mielziner, had been a bit actor in the 1920s and 1930s before moving into production. He later returned to acting, starring in Judgment at Nuremberg before his death in 1962. Talking to MacKenna, Bamford tried to squeeze a percentage of the profits from MGM, but the company held firm in offering twenty thousand dollars for the rights to Hank’s life and another twenty thousand for the rights to the music. Bamford went around to Universal, Gene Autry Productions, and Republic Pictures, all of whom expressed an interest in making the movie. Returning to Nashville, he told everyone that he was in favor of holding out for fifty thousand up front and a percentage of the gross, but he was bluffing. MGM Records, which controlled Hank’s voice, and Acuff-Rose, which controlled most of the songs, would decide who made the movie. Bamford was irrelevant.
Lilly took Fred Rose’s advice and sided with MGM. On April 8, 1954, MGM Pictures wrote to Lilly, mentioning that a screenplay was already under consideration. “We would agree not to refer to the divorce of Hiriam ‘Hank’ Williams, or to his second wife,” they said. The family would be paid two thousand dollars to option the story, and an additional eighteen thousand in the event that the movie was actually made. The check for the option arrived in November 1954. Fifty percent went to the estate, 25 percent to Audrey, 20 percent to Lilly, and 5 percent to Irene.
A script, dated September 2, 1954, went out to the estate for consideration. It was written by Guy Trosper, a forty-three-year-old westerner and Hollywood journeyman. Two years later, Trosper wrote Jailhouse Rock for Elvis Presley, and, shortly before his death in 1963, wrote three hit movies, One-Eyed Jacks, Birdman of Alcatraz (which he also produced), and The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. MGM assigned Hungarian-born producer Joe Pasternak to the Hank Williams project. Pasternak had worked on The Great Caruso in 1951 with the troubled and troublesome Mario Lanza, and would later produce several Presley movies.
The hand of Audrey Williams seems evident in Trosper’s treatment. In the first draft, Audrey worked for a radio station: “She sings, acts as emcee, promotes, hands out publicity, etc.” Hank enters a talent contest, and she is immediately consumed with such belief in him that she quits her job. “All he needs,” she says to herself, “is some encouragement.” Ernest Tubb offers to hire her, and Audrey is torn. “It’s a wistful scene,” wrote Trosper, “with Audrey hoping that Hank won’t let her go, and Hank wanting her to say she doesn’t want to.” Of course, she stays. They go to see Fred Rose, but Rose doesn’t think Hank has what it takes as a singer. But wait! Over in the corner, there’s a stranger who’d like to take a listen to the tape. It’s Frank Walker! “The music starts as we…DISSOLVE TO: Records pouring out of a pressing machine. A montage shows the number reaching the chart.”
In one of the few scenes to make it to the final version, Hank attacks Walker in a drunken stupor, then goes to see him in the hospital to give him a wristwatch. Trosper’s original draft concluded with Hank performing on nationwide television from New York:
He and Audrey leave the theatre building from which the show was telecast. Hank has a quart bottle in his hand. As they pass a garbage can, he drops it in. Audrey asks him why he didn’t break it. Hank looks down at the bottle and bids it goodbye. Somebody else might need it, he says. DISSOLVE: Dawn finds them in the rolling hills headed for home. As we watch, the big Cadillac is going away from us. It becomes smaller and smaller, and then disappears. THE END.
No death, no puking, no second wife. It had so little to do with Hank Williams that MGM could have renamed the characters and made it anyway.
Realizing that it might be tough getting this fanciful rendering past the family, MGM’s Kenneth MacKenna came to Montgomery on September 22, 1954, to give a verbal presentation. “Inasmuch as ours is admittedly not a factual account of his life, but is rather a freely fictionalized and romanticized version, it seems proper to present it to you in this way,” he wrote beforehand. The meeting didn’t go well. Lilly and Irene were outraged, and on October 12, 1954, their attorney, Robert Stewart, advised them to refuse permission for the movie to be made. It’s hard to know if they objected to the drinking scenes, or if they wanted to recognize the Hank Williams they knew.
MGM conscripted Frank Walker to calm the waters. Writing to Lilly on October 14, Walker laid it on thickly. “There isn’t and never has been any intention to play up any particular weakness in Hank’s life, but it is necessary that the facts be portrayed but in such a manner that only good can come from the portrayal. Hank was a grand boy, you and I both know that.” Walker added that the producer, Joe Pasternak, had met Hank, and that they were lucky to get him for this movie. Trying to explain the way Hollywood worked, Walker said that it was necessary “in the writing of the preliminary script to point out all important factors, and then in the final work through acting and picturization, play away from those initial points. That is the intention with this picture, Mrs. Stone.” Lilly wasn’t buying it.
Some ten years later, Pasternak told Hank’s first biographer, Roger M. Williams, that he couldn’t find anyone to fill the lead role, but newspaper accounts seem to suggest that he kept trying. In February 1955, there was a report that pop singer Kay Starr would play Audrey, which was not a bad idea because Starr was from Memphis and had grown up with country music. Unlike Audrey, though, she could sing. In May 1956, there were reports that the movie was on the verge of being made with the star of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Jeff Richards, as Hank and June Allyson as Audrey. All the while, Frank Walker was dangling the carrot of the Hank movie role in front of every country singer he wanted to sign to MGM Records.
Frank Walker left the presidency of MGM Records in 1958, but continued to work for the parent company, Loews, as a consultant, and appears to have been the one to have revived the idea of a Hank Williams movie in 1959. In November that year, it was announced that Paul Gregory, producer of Night of the Hunter and The Naked and the Dead, was at the helm, and trying to get Steve McQueen for the title role. But then the project landed in the lap of the legendary “King of the Quickies,” Sam Katzman.
The hugely prolific Katzman had produced Tim McCoy Westerns during the 1930s, then ground out East Side Kids movies for Monogram. His life was a whirlwind of Hollywood, Vegas, deals, girls, and incredibly bad movies. In 1956, he produced thirteen movies, although he’d slowed down a little by the time he took over the Williams project in 1963. He put the movie, now titled Your Cheatin’ Heart, into production immediately after wrapping up one of Elvis Presley’s less creditable ventures, Kissin’ Cousins. The script was entrusted to Stanford Whitmore, a television scriptwriter who’d worked on The Fugitive and later wrote some episodes of Night Gallery. Director Gene Nelson also came from television, and would return to the small screen immediately after working with Katzman, first on the execrable Hootenanny Hoot, then on Kissin’ Cousins, and finally on Your Cheatin’ Heart. He had directed some episodes of The Andy Griffith Show and The Rifleman, and later worked on Star Trek.
Stanford Whitmore delivered his first draft on January 14, 1964, and the movie went into production a few weeks later. Whitmore had done a creditable amount of homework. He tried to interpolate Hank’s first song, “WPA Blues,” into the script, and his first draft featured Tee-Tot singing an old Joe Turner song, “Jump for Joy.” Wesley Rose, of course, objected to Tee-Tot singing a non-Acuff-Rose song, so musical director Fred Karger was conscripted to write a number called “Poppin’ That Shine” (Whitmore and Gene Nelson were listed as cowriters). Fred Rose might have smiled because it was curiously similar to the song he’d surrendered in order to get Hank on the Opry, “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy.”
Hank Williams would be played by George Hamilton, who told reporters that he went to Nashville three times in preparation for the role. Part of the movie was shot inside Audrey’s home. “We didn’t go for any art in it,” Katzman cheerfully admitted to Roger Williams. “We had to exaggerate a lot of spots and make a lot of points that didn’t really exist, just to get a story out of it.” The finished product was crafted to suit everyone’s agenda. Hank was deemed never to have sung a non-Acuff-Rose copyright (thereby writing “Lovesick Blues” out of the story), and Audrey got Hank Jr. to sing the soundtrack, thereby giving his young career a boost. “MGM didn’t want that,” Audrey told Dorothy Horstman. “There was no way they’d let the boy do the soundtrack. George Hamilton wanted to do it, plus they had some other singers in mind. So I took Hank Jr. in the studio here, and I did a number of his dad’s songs with him. I put those under my arm and I went straight to the MGM studios, to the head guy. I said, ‘I got something I want you to listen to.’ They listened, and they said nobody else could do it.” Audrey probably leaned upon Acuff-Rose to deny clearances if Junior didn’t get the soundtrack, but the fact remains that Junior did a fine job for a fourteen-year-old. Time magazine said that Your Cheatin’ Heart was a movie “better heard than seen.”
The movie premiered in three cities: Montgomery, Nashville, and Atlanta. The world premiere was in Montgomery on November 4, 1964, with Katzman and several cast members in attendance. It was preceded by a concert featuring Johnny Cash, Roy Acuff, Tex Ritter, and Hank Jr. Two days later, it premiered in Nashville. The deejays convention was in full swing, and MGM lined up a gala guest list that included Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff, Faron Young, and Pee Wee King. All those who’d known Hank kept their thoughts to themselves as they emerged (and Acuff and Tubb emerged before the end). The movie did good business, especially in the South. It had cost $1.2 million to make, and reportedly grossed more than 10 million during its first go-round. By Katzman’s criteria, that was success.
In April 1978, another Hank Williams movie was attempted. Warner Bros. wanted to make it, and assigned Paul Schrader, the writer of Taxi Driver, to the project. The script was written, and the call went out for someone to play Hank Williams. If George Hamilton had been an unlikely Hank, then those up for the role in 1978 were even more improbable. Henry Winkler, Robert DeNiro, David Carradine, Jack Nicholson, and Kris Kristofferson were among those considered. The script, though, was so unremittingly dark that Acuff-Rose refused synchronization rights, thereby scuppering the project.
Other Hank Williams movies have been mooted since Schrader’s project went down in flames, but four parties with conflicting agendas (Hank Jr., Billie Jean, Acuff-Rose / Sony, and Jett Williams) must sign off on the manner of Hank’s portrayal. Thus, benighted as it is, Your Cheatin’ Heart remains the only Hank Williams movie as of this writing.