Protean Bull

Hollywood must consider it axiomatic that summer makes people completely besotted. There exists, accordingly, a canicular film-releasing pattern that manages to depress the lowest common denominator—as well as the civilized moviegoer—a little further yet.

Take a film like Urban Cowboy, with which John Travolta hoped to efface the memory of Moment by Moment (or Eon by Eon, as it struck those of us who had to sit through it). This one is based on an Esquire cover story by Aaron Latham, a Texas-born journalist and Princeton PhD, whose doctoral thesis about Fitzgerald in Hollywood was published in book form. The screenplay, by Latham and James Bridges, the film’s director, ostensibly explores the lives of Texas blue-collar workers who, off the oil rigs, like nothing better than to mount the mechanical bull at Gilley’s, near Houston, the world’s biggest bar, which can hold eight thousand Texans (God only knows how many Rhode Islanders!), and caters to all the recreational needs of these eponymous urban cowboys. Donning cowboy gear, they drink, dance, brawl, and wench at Gilley’s (for which the movie is an excellent though overlong commercial), and, of course, ride the mechanical bull. Gilley’s is the self-styled “biggest honky-tonk in America,” and Urban Cowboy may just be the biggest rinky-dink among the summer’s movies.

JS

About the Author

John Simon

Featured Tags

Hollywood must consider it axiomatic that summer makes people completely besotted. There exists, accordingly, a canicular film-releasing pattern that manages to depress the lowest common denominator—as well as the civilized moviegoer—a little further yet.

Take a film like Urban Cowboy, with which John Travolta hoped to efface the memory of Moment by Moment (or Eon by Eon, as it struck those of us who had to sit through it). This one is based on an Esquire cover story by Aaron Latham, a Texas-born journalist and Princeton PhD, whose doctoral thesis about Fitzgerald in Hollywood was published in book form. The screenplay, by Latham and James Bridges, the film’s director, ostensibly explores the lives of Texas blue-collar workers who, off the oil rigs, like nothing better than to mount the mechanical bull at Gilley’s, near Houston, the world’s biggest bar, which can hold eight thousand Texans (God only knows how many Rhode Islanders!), and caters to all the recreational needs of these eponymous urban cowboys. Donning cowboy gear, they drink, dance, brawl, and wench at Gilley’s (for which the movie is an excellent though overlong commercial), and, of course, ride the mechanical bull. Gilley’s is the self-styled “biggest honky-tonk in America,” and Urban Cowboy may just be the biggest rinky-dink among the summer’s movies.