Rhinestone

If it were not for the always lovable Dolly Parton singing some enjoyable tunes, I think this movie would beat Best Defence for the title of Worst Picture of 1984. It was certainly one of the year's biggest flops and a film everyone involved with has publically stated they regret making. The country music comedy features two major mismatched movie stars. Parton plays Jake Farris, a down-home country singer stuck in a long-term contract performing at a sleazy NYC cowboy bar called "The Rhinestone." Jake boasts to the club's manager (Ron Leibman in the single most unpleasant screen performance of 1984) that she can make any normal guy into a halfway decent country singer in just two weeks. Sylvester Stallone plays an oafish, Italian-American cab driver named Nick Martinelli, who becomes the object of this distinctly American spin on My Fair Lady.

Rhinestone is a tedious picture, and the stories about how this movie came together and fell apart are more entertaining than the film itself. The project started as an original screenplay by newcomer Phil Alden Robinson. The future writer/director of Field of Dreams, Sneakers, and The Sum of All Fears became a hot commodity in Hollywood due to spect scripts like this one—he was hired to write the last of the Steve Martin/Carl Reiner pictures, the wonderful All of Me which also came out in 1984, off of how much studio execs loved this script. 20th Century Fox chief Sherry Lansing called it the best love story and the best comedy she'd read in years. Still, studio romantic comedies aren’t made without movie stars, and it was difficult to put together a combo that felt like a winner.

The script was loosely based on the 1974 song "Rhinestone Cowboy,” written and performed by Larry Weiss, which became a monster hit when it was covered by country singer Glen Campbell the following year. The country music theme and potential for a hit soundtrack made Dolly Parton an obvious choice to star in the picture. The country-western singer/songwriter, already a music superstar with a nearly 20-year singing career, had crossed over to the ranks of movie star with the one-two punch of hit films 9 to 5 in 1980 and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas in 1982. Rhinestone should have marked her trifecta, but studios and agents were wary of pairing male stars opposite Parton out of concern they would be blown off the screen by the bigger-than-life performer's energy, charisma, and star power. Many felt this had happened to Burt Reynolds in Best Little Whorehouse. The only male star of similar wattage who was interested in sharing top billing with Parton at this time was Stallone.

The Italian Stallion may have leaned heavily into his muscleman machismo during the second half of his career, but he was a tortured artist for much of his early life. Even after scoring an icon-making success writing and starring in Rocky, and even after finding his second successful character of John Rambo in First Blood (need we forget both Rocky and First Blood are excellent films that belong to the arthouse as much as the multiplex), he continued to stretch his artistic aspirations. Stallone worked diligently on a biopic screenplay about his idol, Edgar Allen Poe; he played polo, collected fine art, and painted with oils, often in the nude! In 1984, he was very close to making two other films that might have blossomed into franchises for him, as Rocky and Rambo would—Romancing the Stone and Beverly Hills Cop. He didn't go down either of those roads, though he did get far enough into production on Beverly Hills Cop that he had amassed enough rewrites that when he left, he took all the drafts he'd supervised to another studio and turned them into the 1986 film Cobra). Instead, the two films Stallone made between Rocky III and Rambo: First Blood Part II, were both forays into musical cinema that were both way WAY out of his comfort zone. In 1983, he directed the much-anticipated sequel to Saturday Night Fever with John Travolta. In 1984, he starred opposite Dolly Parton in this aptly titled false gem.

For Staying Alive, Stallone threw out most of the script by original Saturday Night Fever writer Norman Wexler and did a page-one rewrite largely based on his own life and his fight to break into show business. Travolta loved Rocky III, which Stallone directed, and felt a filmmaker like Sly could get the long-stalled sequel on its feet. He loved training with Stallone, who put Travolta through the Rambo regiment, sculpting the actor's body into a work of art. But Staying Alive ended up an absurd movie with none of the gritty, street-level verisimilitude that made the original so powerful. Stallone instead opted for PG-rated schmaltz, really dumb jokes, and power ballads written by his brother Frank Stallone. As director and screenwriter, Sly concentrated most of his energy and focus on the movie’s 30-minute climax, an elaborately staged musical based on Dante's Inferno, with Travolta in a loin cloth fighting his way out of hell with whip-cracking S&M dancers. That ill-advised sequence cost more than Rocky's entire budget, but, fortunately, Staying Alive was a big hit, though it was savaged by critics and quickly became a cultural joke.

Fresh from the experience, Stallone signed on to make Rhinestone and brought his Rocky III editor, Don Zimmerman, to direct. As was his MO at the time, Stallone took over the project, completely rewriting the screenplay twice, with everyone involved agreeing his changes were terrible. He filled his drafts with awful jokes, which made Robinson strongly consider removing his name from the credits (though his manager convinced him that would be a mistake). Unhappy with the dailies, Stallone fired his former pal Zimmerman off the project a few weeks into the shooting. Stallone has always maintained that he planned to bring Mike Nichols on as director to class up the project, but everyone connected to this film (and to Mike Nichols) claims this was never even remotely considered. Instead, Canadian writer/director Bob Clark, who was enjoying the windfall success of his 1982 smash Porky’s, was brought in to take over. Clark had a horrible time directing. The film’s budget ballooned to almost $30M (more than all three Rocky films combined!).

Rhinestone was a massive flop and got some of the worst reviews of Stallone's entire career. Parton, a performer who seemingly has never had a negative word to say about anyone, didn't hold back when it came to her thoughts about the experience of working with Stallone as an actor. "Sly is the perfect balance of total ego and total insecurity," she said. "I always told him he was spectacular but that he had a blind spot where compassion and spirituality are to be." Stallone's atrocious contributions to the screenplay are matched by his awful singing. It should be funny that this mook can't carry a tune—it could have all built to a scene like the one with Cameron Diaz in My Best Friend's Wedding, but this is clearly an instance where the actor is uncomfortable with his inability to perform and that discomfort comes across in ways that make you want to look away as opposed to laugh. It's a blessing that Jake takes Nick to her home in Tennessee to teach him how to walk, talk, and behave like a country boy because it takes us away from Leibman's insufferable Freddie Ugo (known as F.U.) in favor of time spent with Richard Farnsworth as Jake's singin' farmin' daddy and Tim Thomerson as the obnoxious hayseed who has always been sweet on her. I can't say either actor seems to know exactly what to play in any of their scenes, but they're far more enjoyable to watch than any of the characters in NYC.