"PURE COUNTRY" Musical Pure Country Michael H. Price - August 22, 2005 Author Rex McGee revamps movie for the stage at Casa Mañana Countrified music and the movies, though blessed with a great deal in common as American cultural phenomena, usually make for an awkward combination. Either the music proves too big for the movie — or vice versa — or the singer thus tapped for big-screen stardom proves ill equipped to handle the demands of acting. Casualties are numerous. A clunker from 1967 called The Fastest Guitar Alive served chiefly to demonstrate that, as an actor in search of a story worth telling, Roy Orbison made a pretty fair recording artist. The redemption of Grand Ole Opry mainstay Roy Acuff’s starring pictures of the 1940s lies in their reliance upon music more so than melodrama. And the less said, the better, about 1967’s Hillbillys in a Haunted House, a strange fusion of an all-star country-music revue with horror-movie clichés. The odds improve in favor of a country-style artist when some serious screenwriting goes into a project. This rare consideration made a worthy box-office contender of George Strait’s star vehicle Pure Country (1992), which placed the singer’s natural amiability at the service of a challenging story. And that plaintive, hopeful story has lent the film permanence in the modern-day video marketplace. With all due respect to George Strait and director Christopher Cain, the greater appeal of Pure Country can only lie with its Cleburne-based screenwriter, Rex McGee, and the quality of self-searching soulfulness that McGee had poured into the film. Barring the compromises that afflict any such high-concept picture — Strait must have room to sing a fixed number of tunes, and he must demonstrate his prowess with a lariat — Pure Country emerged as a cry from the heart of a country boy sold out to uptown interests, bound and determined to find his way back to a simpler life. All these years later find McGee, at 53, reclaiming his Pure Country story with the aim of placing its countrified-Faust directness in a new setting: the musical stage. The destination is Casa Mañana, the Broadway-caliber showplace in Fort Worth’s West Side Cultural District, where executive producer Denton Yockey envisions the prospect of a workshop production designed to test such a show’s viability. The creative partnership, in league with Santa Monica-based Promenade Pictures, is in the midst of seeking investors. McGee foresees a trial-run launch in September of 2006, with casting and preliminaries taking shape as early as the next spring-into-summer. “We’ll have to see what the local talent pool has to offer, what with this being a workshop venture,” director Peter Masterson said from New York. “And as it evolves, we’ll have to be careful not to make it look like a finished production.” Masterson described a rehearsal/performance cycle that will allow the revamped Pure Country to evolve even as its first stagings go before an audience. “The beauty of a workshop-type production,” added Masterson, “is that it can allow you to see if your project works on its story strengths, without finished sets and all the trappings of a finalized production. If the story and the music register on that level, then you know pretty well that you’re on the right track.” The credentials include, in addition to McGee’s Hollywood track record, the stage-and-screen accomplishments of director Masterson, best known for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and the 1985 Oscar-bait film The Trip to Bountiful; and the hit-song successes of composer Steve Dorff and lyricist John Bettis, whose various interpreters range from George Strait and Kenny Rogers to Barbra Streisand, the Carpenters, and Whitney Houston. The project stems from McGee’s having retained the stage rights to his original story at the time he signed with Warner Bros. to tackle Pure Country. When engaged to craft a movie-star picture for George Strait, McGee recalls, he had wondered, “What on earth am I going to write about?” But McGee realized soon enough that the story must be that of his own quest to return home from a 20-year stretch in the service of the Hollywood system. “Living in Cleburne was not the plan,” McGee said in a recent visit, “but Fort Worth — this area, this setting where I was born and raised — just keeps calling me back. It seems crazy for a Hollywood writer to be allowed to live in Cleburne and keep writing for the movies, but my coming home [shortly before the original Pure Country assignment] was just exactly what I’d been needing.” As to the new project, McGee added: “I have no Broadway illusions. This is a story of the heartland, and Casa Mañana is a heartland theater with all the expertise and the facilities, and the well-attuned audiences, to do things up right.” He said the musical-adaptation idea took root “the first time I saw the movie … and realized what had ne...