The 1975 Classic ‘Nashville‘ Predicted Donald Trump and This Crazy Election

A scene from the movie ‘Nashville’ (Paramount)

The most surreal presidential election of our time has reminded a lot of movies fans of Idiocracy, the 2006 satire directed by Mike Judge that stars Terry Crews as a former pro wrestler who gets elected president in an aggressively anti-intellectual future. But just as apt a comparison for today’s bizarro politics is the presidential candidate presented in Nashville, Robert Altman’s classic 1975 ensemble drama.

The film, which follows the interconnecting lives of disparate characters in the country music capital in 1975, revolves in part around the insurgent presidential campaign of a mysterious businessman named Hal Phillip Walker, who’s oft-heard but never actually seen. The candidate stokes populist outrage and builds a fervent fanbase through long, anti-establishment bromides broadcast via roving vans with megaphones. He rails against the “elites” in Washington and promises to replace “this lawyeristic, red-taped and blank-taped government with the yes-and-no language of farmers and teachers, engineers and businessmen.”

Yahoo Movies recently talked to the screenwriter of Nashville, Joan Tewkesbury, 80, about her and Altman’s surprisingly prescient creation. “It seemed to me that what the movie was really about, in a funny way, was realizing that we don’t live in a black and white world — it’s all in grey,” she said.

Tewkesbury, who also wrote the screenplay for Altman’s Thieves Like Us before going on to her own directorial career, says that she sees many parallels between the film and today’s presidential campaign, which is currently being dominated by former reality TV star and business tycoon Donald Trump, who just posted multiple victories in yesterday’s Super Tuesday primaries.

“We kept noticing that Andy Warhol’s prediction — that everybody will have 15 minutes of fame — was coming true, and it was shocking. Now it’s utterly insane,” Tewkesbury said. “And when Nixon won that [1972] election, we were all a little pissed off. And we kept talking about, ‘What if you ran somebody for president that would appeal to both sides?’ And what’s interesting to me about Trump and Bernie Sanders [the populist Democratic candidate], is they are the same guy in a way. Of course not at all, but what they are representing is both sides of the anger.”

In particular, Tewkesbury sees Trump as a modern-day embodiment (and even an exaggeration) of her satirical creation. The Republican front-runner has built his campaign on both the power of his celebrity and the anger of a country roiled by economic and racial inequality. Some of his rhetoric is far more extreme than Nashville’s fictional candidate, who railed against things like the boring national anthem, but like Walker, his candidacy is based on appealing in rousing, non-specific terms to people feeling disconnected from the political establishment.

Watch a scene from the movie:

For Nashville, Altman and Tewksbury had some expert help in crafting the blunt, yet vague political pronouncements for the character of Walker, who vows to do things like replace the national anthem with “something people understand, something that would make a light shine in their faces.” The speeches were written by an actor and novelist named Thomas Hal Phillips, a Mississippi native who had real political experience.

Phillips’ brother, Rubel Phillips, was a pro-segregation Democrat who backed Kennedy, then jumped to the Republican Party to run for governor of Mississippi in 1963, and then later ran as a pro-civil rights moderate. “Thomas Hal Phillips had been his speechwriter and go-to guy,” Tewkesbury said. “He was the most elegant Southern gentleman, but it was an amazing choice to have him write all of those speeches, because he came from that part of the world. But he also taught literature, and he was an incredibly erudite man. So he could pull both sides of an issue and make it incredibly graceful.”

There’s little consolation in the new relevance of her film; Tewkesbury is less delighted by her foresight, than disturbed by seeing a version of her satire come to life.

“It really points to the disintegration of the education system in the country,” she said. “People don’t have a clue, so the loudest baby gets the bottle… I hadn’t seen the movie in a long time, and then the Museum of Modern Art [recently] did a screening of a brand new print, and it was startling. You just went ‘Oh my God, this is really weird.’ It really resonates right now.”

Watch a scene from ‘Nashville:’