Rhinestone

Plot

Jake Farris is a down home country singer from Tennessee stuck in a long-term contract performing at "The Rhinestone", a sleazy country music nightclub in New York City. Jake boasts to the club's manager, Freddie Ugo, that she can make anybody into a country sensation, insisting that she can turn any normal guy into a country singer in just two weeks. Freddie accepts Jake's bet, putting up the remainder of Jake's contract (if she wins the bet, the contract becomes void; if she loses, another five years will be added). He then ups the ante: if Jake loses, she must also have sex with him.

The problem is that Freddie can select the man, and he selects an obnoxious New York City cabbie named Nick Martinelli. Nick not only has no musical talent whatsoever; he claims to hate country music "worse than liver". Realizing that she is stuck with Nick, she takes him back to her hometown of Leiper's Fork, Tennessee to teach him how to walk, talk and behave like a real country star. While there, he has to put up with Jake's constant nagging and berating him about his behavior; the culture shock of not knowing anything about the South; and Jake's ex-fiancé, Barnett Kale, who befriends Nick, then turns on him when he realizes that he and Jake have developed feelings for one another.

It all leads to Nick performing a song at The Rhinestone where the crowd is a crazed group of hecklers and are "out for blood." After Nick's first attempt to sing bombs, he turns to the band and says, "Okay guys, let's pick up the beat" and the band begins playing the song in a more rock n' roll version and he wins the crowd over. In the end, Jake gets her contract back and she and Nick begin to sing another song with the implication that they will continue their budding relationship together.

Production

Development and writing

Sylvester Stallone reportedly turned down Romancing the Stone (1984) to make Rhinestone. He was paid $5 million and a percentage of the gross. Executives at both Fox and Paramount expressed interest. Paramount's interest evaporated after president Michael Eisner reviewed the project and liked it but not enough to get into a bidding war with another studio. Fox production chief, Sherry Lansing, was enthusiastic enough to buy it out of turnaround from Embassy for about $60,000, telling screenwriter Phil Alden Robinson that it was the best love story and the best comedy they had read in years. They loved the dialogue and talked of offering Robinson an overall deal in which he would write, direct and produce future projects.

However, when Sherry Lansing departed Fox, her successor, Joe Wizan, reviewed all projects in development. Wizan felt the Rhinestone script could not move forward unless they could get major stars for it. He and several Fox executives reviewed the list of actors who could co-star with Dolly Parton. They were concerned that they find someone who could be believable as a New York cab driver and have enough charisma that he would not be blown off the screen by the presence of Parton—who, some Fox executives thought, had done just that to Burt Reynolds in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982). Mike Ovitz, whose talent firm, Creative Artists Agency, represented Parton (and Stallone) intervened, and insisted Fox take one of its male stars if they wanted Parton; CAA advocated for Stallone. According to one insider, CAA said, “‘If you want her, you better take him,’” and “that was the end of discussions of whether anyone else could be obtained for the part.” Stallone's agents at CAA had been positioning him to direct Rhinestone himself. When Stallone declined to pursue the position, it was decided to let him direct the picture in fact, even though Don Zimmerman would be the director of record. But Zimmerman was never let in on the secret. He thought he was the one and only director.

Sylvester Stallone was tentatively set to do a film for Paramount before beginning production on Rhinestone for Fox. The Paramount producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, were encountering the same problems as their Fox counterparts, after offering Stallone the lead in Beverly Hills Cop, Stallone told the Paramount executives he wanted to make a few changes and then proceeded to rewrite the script. Simpson and Bruckheimer, with more experience producing big-budget, high concept projects, than the executives at Fox, responded by saying that they did not want to film the script as rewritten and promptly exited talks with Stallone and his representatives. When the Paramount film fell through, the start date for Rhinestone was moved up. The original four or five months of preparatory planning were reduced to two and a half. To complicate matters further, Stallone decided that the script needed to be rewritten.

Reception

Critical response

The film was panned upon its release, and is generally regarded as a commercial and critical flop. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 19% based on reviews from 16 critics. On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 36 out of 100, based on 9 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Nonetheless, the soundtrack album gave Dolly Parton two top ten country singles: "Tennessee Homesick Blues" and "God Won't Get You".

Variety magazine wrote: "Effortlessly living up to its title, Rhinestone is as artificial and synthetic a concoction as has ever made its way to the screen."

Phil Alden Robinson publicly distanced himself from the film during its release. Robinson took the highly unusual step of mounting his own publicity campaign, criticizing the movie, saying that the humor and intelligence of the original script had been replaced with vulgarity, caricature and farce. Disassociating himself from the picture, he sent letters to film critics explaining what had happened to his script. It was, he said, a textbook example of a studio willingly sacrificing the quality of a script for what was perceived as the marketability of star casting."I thought a long time before speaking out," Robinson says. "Of course the conventional wisdom is that you don't open your mouth. But I was having a hard time living with that. I wrote letters and I gave interviews and I did a lot of press. I couldn’t do nothing. I mean, I was doing nothing and I couldn’t keep doing that. I would rather take the heat for saying what I believe and for telling the truth than to just let the industry know you can do this to me. And so I did a lot of press and got no heat. Stallone called my agent and was furious but that was it. People at studios, even at Fox, called to say we’re glad you did that and it’s about time somebody said these things. Writers, of course, were thrilled. I actually got calls from people who worked on the movie, from agents, and who were allied with Stallone, saying, we’re glad you did that, we can’t say this to Sly, but you’re right."In her 1994 autobiography Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business, Parton said of the film “I guess the public didn’t want to see Sylvester Stallone do comedy – or see me do Sylvester Stallone."