Part of Music City Mondays, Nashville: A City on Film and Belcourt 100 Seminars
General Admission: $16 | Belcourt Members: $13
*Ticket includes the seminar and a screening of RANCHO DELUXE immediately following at 8:00pm
A History of Nashville’s Film Culture: A Century of Filmmaking in Music City uncovers the city’s often ignored role in American film history. For more than 100 years, exhibitors, theaters, filmmakers, and the stories produced about (and in) the city have built a film culture that has reached far beyond Nashville’s geographic boundaries.
This seminar looks at Nashville as a topic, a filming location, and a place where makers have come of age — exploring how making movies has given us a parallel entertainment identity as a film city, not just a musical one. We’ll explore how fictionalized dramas and made-for-television features have used the city to test ideas about identity, place and change, and how documentaries and music-driven productions have highlighted the region and its people. Taken together, these works show how Nashville’s image has been built on screen across the last century and how cultural values and anxieties surface through that image — and why the city’s contributions remain vital to regional and national film culture. It will also explore how the Belcourt has often sat at the center of this history as Nashville’s oldest neighborhood venue — a place where generations have learned how movies reflect and shape community life.
Presented by T. Minton, Belcourt’s public historian and archivist.
RANCHO DELUXE (35mm)
Dir. Frank Perry | USA | 1975 | 93 min. | R | 35mm
Directed by Frank Perry (MOMMIE DEAREST and PLAY IT AS IT LAYS) and written by novelist-screenwriter Thomas McGuane, RANCHO DELUXE is part cheeky neo-Western, part satirical comedy and reimagines outlaw life in modern-day 1970s Montana. Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston star as two aimless cattle rustlers targeting a wealthy rancher (Clifton James) under the sleepy gaze of a washed-up detective (Slim Pickens). Featuring a supporting cast that includes Harry Dean Stanton, Elizabeth Ashley and Richard Bright, the film brings 1970s countercultural clowning to the singing cowboy spaghetti western classics of early American cinema.
Nashville’s rich recording tradition played a notable role in the film’s making. The soundtrack’s composer, Jimmy Buffett, makes a memorable cameo that highlights his blend of humor and honky-tonk sensibility. Local session greats Tommy Cogbill, Sammy Creason and Reggie Young also contribute to the music — players who helped shape the sound that would later define Buffett’s long-running Coral Reefer Band.
RANCHO DELUXE marks a cultural moment when Nashville’s music and cinema worlds quietly intersected, and the film stands as a humorous reflection on the fading myths of both the city and the American West.
“A quirky, inventive portrait of the no longer wild West.” —Paul D. Zimmerman, Newsweek “One of the most pastoral, panoramic, and laid-back caper comedies you’ll come across. An atypically light-hearted entry in the filmography of director Frank Perry.” —Austin Trunick, Under The Radar
