True Stories is a 1986 American musicalsatiricalcomedy film directed by David Byrne, who stars alongside John Goodman, Swoosie Kurtz, and Spalding Gray. The majority of the film's music is supplied by Talking Heads. A soundtrack album, titled Sounds from True Stories, featured songs by Byrne, Talking Heads, Terry Allen & The Panhandle Mystery Band, and others. Around the same time, Talking Heads released an album titled True Stories, composed of studio recordings of songs featured in the film. True Stories was released by Warner Bros. in the United States, Canada, Italy, and Sweden in 1986, with limited release elsewhere the following year. Byrne was given much creative control over the motion picture's direction, largely due to the mainstream success of Talking Heads' 1984 concert filmStop Making Sense.
Plot
The film is presented as a series of vignettes centered around Byrne as an unnamed, cowboy-hat-wearing stranger who visits the fictional Texas town of Virgil, where he observes the citizens as they prepare for the "Celebration of Specialness" to mark the 150th anniversary of Texas' independence. The event is being sponsored by the Varicorp Corporation, a local computer manufacturing plant. Among the many characters the visitor meets and interacts with, the most prominent are:
Louis Fyne,, a country-western-singing clean room technician at Varicorp who is unlucky in love,
Civic leader Earl Culver, who never speaks directly to his wife, Kay,
Miss Rollings, who never leaves her bed,
Mr. Tucker, Miss Rollings' personal assistant, a kindly voodoo practitioner whom Louis hires to help him find love,
Stephen Tobolowsky recounts in an episode of his podcast The Tobolowsky Files that his girlfriend Beth Henley and he met David Byrne and Talking Heads when Jonathan Demme invited them to a preview screening of Stop Making Sense. Shortly afterward, Byrne invited Henley and Tobolowsky over to his house and showed them a collection of hundreds of drawings he had made and put up on his wall. He explained they were based on clippings he had scrapbooked from tabloids as the band had been on tour. He had been intrigued by the idea of making a film based on the premise, "What if all these stories were true?" and wanted Henley and Tobolowsky to write the script based on those drawings. Tobolowsky was aware that Texas was coming up on its sesquicentennial celebration, and thought that would provide a good framework for the characters Byrne had invented. Henley and he wrote a draft and provided it to Byrne, then did not hear back from him for about a year. It later turned out that Byrne had rewritten their script almost entirely, keeping only a few lines and the sesquicentennial framework from the first draft. However, he asked Tobolowsky and Henley for permission to list their names ahead of his as scriptwriters so the film would seem less like a "vanity project." During Tobolowsky's early talks with Byrne, he related to Byrne the story of a series of psychic experiences he had during college, in which he had been able to hear "tones" that told him things about other people. Byrne incorporated this story into his rewrite, using it as the basis for Ramon's psychic powers and the song "Radio Head." An early working title for the project was Wild Infancy. Locations for the filming took place in Dallas and its suburbs Allen, McKinney, Mesquite, Midlothian and Red Oak. The interior mall and fashion show scene was filmed in NorthPark Center in North Dallas, and the exterior mall was filmed at the now-demolished Big Town Mall in Mesquite. The parade scene at the end of the film includes various local groups, including the Tejas Low Riders Club and the Sunset High School Marching Band.
Reception
True Stories was not a commercial success at the time of its release. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 77%, based on 22 reviews, with an average rating of 6.63/10. Roger Ebert gave it a glowing review with a rating of 3.5/4 stars. It has achieved success in home video release as a cult classic among fans of Byrne's work.
True Stories features a number of songs written by Byrne and performed by various members of the cast as well as by Talking Heads. Talking Heads released an album titled True Stories in which the band performs most of the songs from the film, including songs that were performed by the actors in the film. As such, the album is not generally considered a true soundtrack album, a fact Byrne points out in his liner notes on the release. Later, Byrne released an album containing primarily instrumental music from the soundtrack titled Sounds from True Stories, though it was never released on CD. While several of the cast performances were released as bonus tracks on 12-inch single releases, no full album of cast performances was released until 2018. Prior to 2018, few of the original versions of songs from the film found official release. The St. Thomas Aquinas School Choir's version of "Hey Now" was released on the 1987 Talking Heads UK CD single, "Radio Head"; the Pops Staples version of "Papa Legba" and Tito Larriva's version of "Radio Head" appear as extra tracks on the 2006 Rhino reissue of True Stories; and John Goodman's version of "People Like Us" was initially released as the B-side to the single for "Wild Wild Life" and later was released on the 2006 digital compilation Bonus Rarities and Outtakes, but the rest of the songs whose versions differ between the movie and album were not officially available. "Cocktail Desperado", recorded by Terry Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band and featured in the film, is included on the Sounds from True Stories LP. The music video version of "Wild Wild Life" that debuted on MTV is largely a scene taken from the film, in which many of the film's characters lip-synch to the music in a night club; the video version is more risque and features more pop music references/parodies than seen in the film; the Prince and Billy Idol parodies remain in the film version. Similarly, the video for "Love for Sale" is the same as that seen in the film except the video version has additional footage of Talking Heads, more references to recognizable TV commercials of the day, and no intercuts to any of the film characters. In November 2018, True Stories, A Film by David Byrne: The Complete Soundtrack, a comprehensive soundtrack album with 23 songs as they were recorded for the film, was released. This marked the first time that the complete True Stories soundtrack was made publicly available, 32 years after the movie's original release. The soundtrack was issued to coincide with Criterion's 2018 DVD and Blu-ray release of the film, the latter of which it was also packaged with. The new-edition soundtrack omits the Talking Heads renditions of the songs, with the exception of the three featured in the movie. The new edition includes the first official commercial release of McEnroe's "Dream Operator" and Ingle's "Puzzlin' Evidence".
Legacy
In January 2017, Red Letter Media published a video where Jay Bauman and Josh "The Wizard" Davis gave a retrospective review of the film. They focused on the eccentricity of the characters, the performance of David Byrne as the film's narrator, the way the film extensively incorporates music, and the observations the film makes about American culture. Both hosts praised it, and Davis said of the film, "It never gets old for me, and I've shown it to so many people".
