The Neon Highway tells an uplifting tale of a young country singer Wayne Collins (Rob Mayes) whose dreams of making it in Nashville were dashed after a car accident. Seven years later, after meeting drunken has-been country music legend Claude Allen (Beau Bridges) and he listens to one of Wayne’s original songs, the pair return to Nashville for a second chance in a town where the industry has changed and nobody wants to take a chance on them.

Screenwriter and director William Wages (Yellowstone) and producer Stratton Leopold Mission Impossible III)) spoke with Creative Screenwriting Magazine about the decades-long process of bringing their story to the screen.

“We didn’t think about it as an uplifting story. We just thought of telling a good story,” declares screenwriter William Wages. “We went where our hearts led us. [hence the original title of Heart’s Desire]. This wasn’t thinking about marketing or any of those things. It was just a story that wouldn’t go away and we had to we had to get it on paper,” he continues.

Wages co-wrote the script with Phillip Bellury (Remember This, A Ride To Heaven). The duo sent their drafts to a famous TV director Lamont Johnson (Lincoln) where they knew they would receive honest feedback. “Lamont came back and said, ‘Yeah I have a few notes, but I think we can make this,‘” continues Wages. Lamont was also slated to direct it, but has since passed.

Wages, Bellury and Lamont met with country music legend Johnny Cash a week later. After several fruitful meetings, Cash got sick. “This was long before the public knew and he was advised by his doctor not to make a movie. It was too stressful. He still kept touring after that,” recalls Wages.

The Neon Highway went on hiatus for several years. Wages wrote other scripts in the meantime, but this one kept coming back to him. Eventually, he and Bellury wrote another draft and sent it producer Stratton Leopold who responded positively.

William Wages

It’s no coincidence that Claude’s character was initially called Lamont Johnson. When Beau Bridges read the script, he asked Wages why he named the character Lamont Johnson. He responded that he was his close friend and mentor and wanted to honor him. As fate would have it, Lamont was also Beau’s mentor, sealing his involvement with the project.

Stratton Leopold decided The Neon Highway was a refreshing change to high budget studio projects with numerous stunts and visual effects.

“We had wanted from many years ago to do stories that we wanted to make. Stories that had a meaning for us. Stories that had heart. And doing that in Hollywood, at least with the studio, is not the easiest thing in the world because it’s driven by other parameters,” advises Leopold.

He previously had discussions with Brad Grey, former CEO and Chairman of Paramount Pictures, expressing his concerns about underserved audiences for these kinds of tender stories. Leopold was still interested in the explosive, adrenaline-filled Mission Impossible movies, but he couldn’t ignore these other audiences.

“You can blow up all the cars you want, but if there’s not a character in that car you care about, who cares?” states Wages.

Input From Johnny Cash

As a big movie star and famous singer, Cash wanted to be the main guy in the movie. “Johnny came in the first meeting and he wanted us to change Claude to be the hero and not have all the other things,” says Wages. “And I finally just said, ‘Johnny, you’ll do more for people to show the error of that life in that way.’ And you can play that. And he looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’”

“He got it. I mean, a movie’s a song. The closest thing to movie making is symphonic music. They’re both temporal. They both flow. You have peaks and valleys just like when you’re writing a script. You can’t have two heroes,” adds Wages.

Claude and Wayne persist in the face of rolling rejections in a town that doesn’t want them there. There passion for music wouldn’t let them leave. “Nobody does this because it’s fun. You do it because you have to,” notes Wages. When he asked Johnny Cash and other country musicians why they stay in such a brutal business, they say, “It’s what I do.”

“Stratton and I joke about the movie business and making movies as being a disease. You have it and you can’t do anything about it. We didn’t need to do this. We both could keep going doing what we were doing, but we decided to do something we care about and we think there’s an audience for it. You can’t help yourself. It’s like being an alcoholic You have to go with it.”

Claude and Wayne continue in the same vein.

“I’ve worked with some circus people in the past who’ve moved into working on movies. And as they say, you travel with a circus. You don’t work for a circus. And that’s the same thing with filmmaking. It’s a family.”

“We all have the passion. If you don’t have a passion in the movie business, it will beat you down and you won’t make it. And it’s the same thing in music. You just have to keep going, keep doing it.”

Stratton has a similar take on the movie business. “The parallels are quite true. I was in my twenties in New York and I was told that ‘Show is only ten percent. Never forget the business part.’ You do beat your head and your core. You do suffer rejection. It’s part of it.”

Much of the thematic conflict in The Neon Highway is about Claude and Wayne not wanting to change in the face of a constantly changing industry.

Every music genre forms an emotional and spiritual connection with its audience.

“Each country music song is a story. It has a beginning, middle, and end. I think we responded to that. And I think the audience responds to that as well,” says Stratton.

William Wages mentions that country music is arguably the most popular music genre in the world. “It’s about heart and about reality. That’s the world that most people live in.” It’s not about dreaming about a better place.

Leopold gets most excited by stories with an “immutable change in character. When you can’t go back. And in our story, we do go back. But we have we have wonderful changes in both Claude and Wayne.”

A Changing Country Music Scene

“That’s actually what’s going on in country music. A lot of the purists don’t like some of the modern country music because they think it’s too ‘pop’ for lack of a better term. As a matter of fact, we talk about that in the car scene when one asks, ‘Isn’t that what people want?’ The other replies, ‘Yeah, but that’s not music,‘ says Wages.

“But just like the movie industry, nothing sits still. Everything is evolving. The movie industry has never been stagnant for more than a year or so. Something new is always coming out. Another way to do something. So you can’t fight it. You have to adapt. And that’s what a lot of music people are doing.”

Stratton Leopold

“Mike Curb, who supplied a lot of music for us, is right on top of that. He loves music. He was a performer too. If you fight change, you’re going to lose. So you go for a ride. And you’ll end up doing things you never thought you could do. Things you couldn’t even imagine. So you learn as you go. And I find that inspiring.”

“The best stuff I’ve ever done is when everything fell apart and you had to come up with an idea right then on the spot to fix it. And usually that’s the best stuff in the movie because it has a reality and a heart to it that doesn’t get if you overthink things.”

Leopold sees opportunity to thrive in small budget movies with limited resources.”You will think of things that no one has thought of because you won’t have a choice. I truly believe that creativity is bred by necessity. And magic happens then.”

William Wages recounts some storytelling lessons he learned from the late Lamont Johnson. He would print the first take of each scene to ensure everyone was on their toes. He wouldn’t do a second take. “He would also sometimes engineer a catastrophe. So we had to think out of the box to do something. That takes a lot of brass. You have to be brave to do that. But he was secure in his ability to do that.”

The Writing Process

“Phil Bellury and I have been writing scripts together for years. We never wrote an outline. We just hit the ground running. That can be dangerous because you can sometimes go down a rabbit hole and realize it doesn’t work. So you adapt and change it,” continues Wages.

“But that rabbit hole ends up having something in the movie too. None of it is a waste of time. I write in long hand on paper with a pencil so I can erase. If I type, I have to pay attention to the typing and I can’t go with the flow. So it’s more of a free flowing thing.”

“Outlining is a little too analytical. It just, it doesn’t work for us.”

Stratton Leopold also gave some feedback on various drafts. “We talked about simplicity of certain sequences. There was a little bit of modifying, if we had to, because of locations. It was on the page and the cast understood and lived it.”

“Complicated is easy to do. Simple is very hard because you’ve pared everything down to where there’s nothing left except the story. You can hide things in complications that in a simple story you won’t get away with. In every shot, every scene, we tried to shorten the movie,” says William Wages.”There’s a tendency to overwrite.”

Wages and Bellury wrote their screenplay for years. They lost track of how many drafts they wrote of Heart’s Desire/ The Neon Highway. They were even rewriting during shooting. Wages doesn’t consider any movie finished until it’s edited.

When they hit a creative roadblock, they would discuss the theme of each scene rather than the plot to find a solution. If things need to be moved around it’s fine, as long the intent of the scene remains intact.

We asked William, where he finds the magic of surprise while writing the screenplay. “Some of it just comes from your psyche. There’s no ego involved at all. It’s not about being right or being wrong. It’s about this works or it doesn’t work. And that’s how Phil and I have always approached it.”

“I think the ability to improvise and eliminate is vital for a good script,‘” adds Leopold. “It’s exciting when that happens. All of a sudden, all your pretense goes away,  all your concepts go away, and you have to come up with something exciting.”

For the filmmakers it’s all about capturing a truth in the story, or a representation of it.