George Strait’s ‘Country’ Film Trip

While country music stars Garth Brooks and Billy Ray Cyrus gallop over to the pop charts, traditionalist George Strait is pinning his hopes on a very different kind of cross-over dream. He’s riding high in a hand-tooled star vehicle, a movie aptly titled “Pure Country,” which just wrapped location filming in his native Texas.

“Well, it is awful nice to be in a movie,” Strait says in an interview, settling farther back into his favorite seat in his air-conditioned trailer. “I know that the reason I’m in this movie is because of my success in the music business. But, yeah, I guess everybody has dreams of being in a movie at one time or another. And I’m no exception.

“So I guess you could say--yeah, it is like a dream come true.”

Strait, the country music superstar with 25 No. 1 singles, 16 gold and platinum albums and a fistful of music industry awards to his credit, is passing the time this overcast afternoon before being called to an open-air rodeo arena a few yards away from his trailer door. A card-carrying rodeo professional, Strait is waiting to begin work on another scene in his movie debut, a $10-million musical drama directed by Chris Cain (“Young Guns”) and produced by Jerry Weintraub (“Nashville,” “The Karate Kid”) for Warner Bros. release.

It’s not all that much of a change of pace for the 40-year-old, Texas-born singer. Indeed, even Strait admits that his first starring role, playing a country music star named Dusty Chandler, isn’t exactly a stretch.

“I felt like this was a movie that might not be all that hard for me for a first-time deal,” says the soft-spoken, boyishly handsome Strait. “I’m familiar with the concert stuff, I’m familiar with the rodeo stuff. I never was into all this big, huge light, smoke and glitter thing that Dusty has in this movie.

“In 1982 and ‘83, we were doing probably 230 dates a year. And let me tell you, it doesn’t take long to experience the burnout that this guy in this movie is experiencing. Around October or November every year, when we’d start slowing down for Christmas, there were times when I would sit and think, ‘Can I do this for another year?’ ”

Neither Cain nor Weintraub have any doubt that Strait can carry a movie. And they’re quick to brush aside any questions about the relatively low success rate experienced by country singers such as Dolly Parton and the late Marty Robbins--or, for that matter, by pop stars such as David Bowie and Mick Jagger--who attempt to translate their popularity into film stardom.

“I think it’s easier to transfer the popularity than to start from nothing,” Cain says, adding that he doubts whether many major-league film stars could make the transition to a singing career. “I suspect,” he says, “that if Bob Redford were doing a concert at the Houston Astrodome, he wouldn’t fill it.”

At the start of “Pure Country,” tentatively set for an October opening, Dusty Chandler is filling concert halls across America, and not enjoying it very much. After one too many shows with too much Las Vegas-style glitz and glitter, Dusty shaves his beard, clips his ponytail, and takes off, seeking redemption by returning to his roots in small-town Texas.

On the road incognito, Dusty visits a honky-tonk where the men are rowdy and the women are wary. When one especially ornery fellow bothers a young lady, Harley (newcomer Isabel Glasser), Dusty comes to the woman’s defense--and is promptly punched out. Fortunately, Harley is able to handle the creep on her own. But she’s grateful anyway, so she brings her would-be knight in shining armor back home to the family ranch.

The bad news is, the family might lose their spread if they can’t pay their overdue bills. The good news is, Dusty might be able to help Harley, her brothers and their aging father (Rory Calhoun) as the siblings compete for rodeo cash prizes. The brothers are bull riders, Harley is a barrel rider--and Dusty is greatly impressed by their grit.

During the first days of filming “Pure Country,” Strait shocked 5,000 or so of his fans who served as extras for an elaborately staged Dusty Chandler concert sequence in Fort Worth. When Strait first appeared on stage as the bearded, beaded Dusty, many in the audience reportedly gasped in amazement at the drastic change from Strait’s clean-cut, straight-arrow image.

“But it’s a funny thing,” Cain says. “During the second concert we did, these same people came in with signs--’We Love Dusty!’--and T-shirts that they’d made up. It was amazing how they got into it. . . . The third time they heard the songs--there are 10 in the film--they were singing the words along with him.”

Cain admits he feared the loyal fans might be displeased--or, worse, outraged--by Strait’s brief walk on the wild side.

In the early part of film, Cain says, “George is doing a character that--well, I don’t want to use the name Elvis, but if you had a country Elvis, he’s moving into that direction. There are some things in the movie that, partially because Jerry Weintraub worked with Elvis so long (as a concert promoter), he sort of borrowed from that thinking. So, like, we have (Dusty) in costumes that you’d never see George Strait in. And some of his moving on stage--I don’t think you’ll ever see George Strait moving that way.”

And you don’t see him doing it very long. No one involved with “Pure Country” is eager to stray too far from what Strait’s audience might expect in a movie starring the country-music singer.

“Strait’s audience is a family audience,” Weintraub says. “And I’m making a family picture with him. It’s geared to that audience. I’m not fooling around with it.”

Weintraub first got word of Strait’s movie potential from a reliable source--Col. Tom Parker, the late Elvis Presley’s longtime manager. So Weintraub caught a few concerts, liked what he saw, and approached Strait with an offer. Strait conditionally accepted--but insisted on reading a finished script before making a commitment.

Enter Rex McGee, a Texas-born writer who had several scripts optioned, but none produced, during his two decades in Hollywood. More than a year ago, McGee decided to go home to Texas, and move into a house he had inherited from his late aunt in the small town of Cleburne. “And three weeks after I moved back into this house,” McGee says, “I got a call from Weintraub, saying I got the job.”

McGee and Cain began their collaboration on “Pure Country” by seeing Strait perform at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles last August.

“We had an unusual problem,” McGee says. “We wanted to put George in a movie. And since he loves to rodeo . . . he wanted to do something with a rodeo in it. And we knew he had to sing a number of songs in it. So that was the challenge before me--we really had no story at all, we had nothing but these elements.”

McGee opted to give a story a slightly autobiographical edge, recalling his own stirrings of discontent during his final years in Hollywood.

“I began to imagine a singer who has to do the same songs every night, the same way every time. And he’s getting more and more successful, bringing in more and more money. And you’ve heard that old phrase, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Well, he gets that thrown at him. But something is broke here. His own creative energy is draining out of him. So how does he find that again?”

“Pure Country” is intended as a PG-rated, idealized version of the country music and rodeo worlds. “The director told me he wanted to approach Texas by way of Ralph Lauren,” says production designer Jeffrey Howard. “A kind of stylized, hip Texas. And he liked my credits--I won an Emmy for ‘Miami Vice’--and he thought I could bring a kind of style to it so we could eschew the country kitsch.’

Cain agrees. “A lot of this picture will look like a real pretty commercial,” he says. “It should be fun to look at it. No hidden meanings.

Strait says, “We started out doing the concert stuff first, and I was pretty comfortable with that. . . .

“But the first day I had to do dialogue stuff, I was pretty nervous that morning.”

Strait was particularly anxious about his first scene with actress Lesley Ann Warren, who plays Dusty Chandler’s manager.

“I know she’s a good actress,” Strait says. “And I know I’ve never done this before. And I’m thinking, ‘God, I hope I can pull this off, so she doesn’t think I’m just some jerk, and she won’t regret that she’s agreed to do this movie.’ So there’s a lot of pressure there that I was putting on myself, because I wanted to do good. But once I started rehearsing the scene with her, and I felt like I was more comfortable doing it, I did get more comfortable doing it.”

Still, Strait knows his limitations. Yes, he is an active member of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Assn. and conducts his own annual George Strait Team Roping Contest in Kingsville, Tex. But in “Pure Country,” he will leave the bull riding to the experts.

“I rode just one bull in my life,” Strait says, smiling at the memory, “and that was enough for me. I rode him about three jumps out of the chute, and I was on the ground, looking around. Then I was running. That’s about how long it took me to figure out that I didn’t want to be a bull rider.”

It will take him a little longer, he admits, to figure out whether he wants to be a movie actor.