True Stories: Everybody Has Tones

Just before he embarked on the film, Byrne had composed music and text for The Knee Plays, a series of vignettes planned for Wilson’s epic opera the CIVIL WarS. “Knee plays” is Wilson’s term for entr’actes, skits or other kinds of interludes performed before a drop curtain as a kind of distraction while set changes take place—“all those short comic scenes with buffoons or side characters who would sometimes comment on the larger action,” as Byrne has described them. Byrne wrote knee plays of sorts for True Stories, too, and they provide some of the most transcendent and memorable moments in the film. 

He discovered that Wilson tended to begin with visual and sound elements and let a story layer over and grow around them, and for True Stories, Byrne tried a similar approach. He made drawings of characters and events inspired by his tabloid clippings, things he could imagine existing in one place. He also began to think about the songs that might connect these disparate characters. It wouldn’t be a musical, he later wrote in a book created to accompany the film, “where people burst into song for unjustified reasons,” or a pantomime of a story, like so many music videos of the era. Instead, the music would grant a town’s neighbors and coworkers a liberating form of expression, a means of “exposing their insides to everyone else in the town.” 

Joan Tewkesbury, who had written Nashville’s brilliantly pageant-like script, suggested Byrne con­sider Texas for his setting. He visited and was fascinated by the state’s visual contrasts, and he appreciated the range of music that had deep roots in the place—cumbia, country, polka, and blues, to name a few kinds. He liked the wide-open landscapes around Dallas, which made everything look cool and graphic. Everything was bigger in Texas, and that fed into his ideas of the film too; because people had space to be themselves there, Byrne reasoned, “they seemed to be fairly tolerant of personal eccentricities.” 

To articulate the look of the film, Byrne hired director of photography Ed Lachman, who had worked with Wim Wenders on the expressionistic documentary Lightning over Water; he, Lachman, and production designer Barbara Ling referenced color photographs by Len Jenshel, Stuart Klipper, Joel Sternfeld, and William Eggleston. Eggleston was one of a few photographers Byrne enlisted to take photos at the Dallas-area location during the shoot. “Movie sets are so boring!” Eggleston told me once, when I asked him about that time. He and his camera drifted instead, with Byrne’s blessing. The photographs he made, ultimately published in the book True Stories, are very much his own—like the rest of his work, color-saturated images of the humor and grace beneath mundane surfaces—and perfectly suited to the film’s themes and aesthetic. Eggleston photographed forlorn displays of fake flowers and toothpaste and waterbeds, and sunlight striking a rumpled bedsheet on which a phone receiver has been left off the hook.

On Byrne’s wall, the drawings kept shifting. Beth Henley and Stephen Tobolowsky, whom Byrne had hired to create a story from his sketches, suggested that an anniversary celebration like the sesquicentennial one Texas was preparing for at the time could provide a framework for the various threads. Ultimately, Byrne revised their script several times, dismantling it back into something more fragmentary. He was intent on leaving enough room for the “tangential activity of the film”—essentially, the sound and visual elements that constitute the “knee plays” of True Stories, its quieter, more off-kilter sequences. 

One of these tangents, created by composer, singer, and choreographer Meredith Monk, both opens and closes the film. The first song of True Stories is a wordless one, made up of sounds that seem to emanate from the landscape itself—a Texas-flat horizon, an open road disappearing into a blue sky. Down that road wanders a little girl, moving her hands in an odd little dance to accompany the birdlike tune she sings to herself, the first suggestion of the quiet inner life behind the film’s extroversion. She fades into the background of the scene, letting Byrne’s vivid cast of characters take the stage.