On this episode of Our American Stories, Braveheart continues to capture the hearts of moviegoers around the world. The film was nominated for ten Academy Awards, winning five. Writer/director (Braveheart, We Were Soldiers, The Man in the Iron Mask, Heaven is For Real, Pearl Harbor, etc.) Randall Wallace shares the journey that led him to be be one of the most brave and courageous men in Hollywood.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Randall Wallace has written and or directed movies We All
Know and Love, Braveheart, We Were Soldiers, Secretariat, Man in
the Iron Mask, Pearl Harbor, Heavan Is for Real, and More.
(00:31):
He's the author of seven novels, and he also wrote
the lyrics from Mansions of the Lord, written for We
Were Soldiers, and performed as the recessional for President Ronald
Reagan's national funeral. He also has a one man show,
The Brave Heart of Creativity, which you can find at
Wallace Entertainment dot com. Here's Randall Wallace with his own story.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Music has always been the voice of God to me,
not the voice of intellectual understanding. But it feels to
me that music is the language of God, that it
speaks directly to your soul. It comes and from your soul.
(01:17):
Real music does not intellectual intervals and notes and music theory,
but the joy in it. And I just wanted to
play music when I was a boy. I got my
first guitar when I was twelve and started playing songs
like Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and those heroes of Memphis,
(01:43):
and went to college and wrote a song and started
playing it for people and in coffee shops, and people
liked it, and I made a record and had a
local hit, and about that time Chris Christofferson came to
du and Chris Christofferson epitomize it did then and still
(02:07):
does to me, a kind of artist like I related to.
Whenever I've been faced with a difficult decision, I do
all the things I guess everyone else does of trying
to weigh the pros and cons, but that never really
seems to be how the decision happens. I seem to
(02:33):
have a sense from the get go of what I'm
going to end up doing. I'm looking for ways to
understand what I'm going to do. A friend of mine,
who's a psychotherapist, said, I don't think we really think
with our brains. I think we use our brains to
rationalize our emotions. And there's a lot of truth in that.
For me, Well, I wanted so badly to pursue a
(02:56):
career in music, and I would look for people who
epitomized the kind of person I wanted to be. Chris
Christofferson was an airborne ranger. He was a Golden Gloves boxer.
He was a Rhodes scholar, and he wrote songs unlike
anybody else that were just bringing the songs that I loved.
(03:18):
So I thought, well, what did he do? And hear
this Rhodes scholar? He didn't go to New York or LA.
He went to Nashville, and I thought, well, maybe I
should consider Nashville, even though I didn't really see myself
as a country writer. So he came to do a
concert at my school, and I guess I could thank
my father for this. And I've just never been afraid
(03:41):
to talk to a stranger, and I waited for a
respectful moment. I was backstage before his concert, and I
saw him talking with a few people and just kind
of casual laughing talking, and I walked up and said
excuse me, and he turned around, looked me right in
the eye, said hey man, how you doing? And we
(04:02):
shook hands and I said, I really don't want to
bother you, but I just want to ask you a question.
He said sure, and I said, I'm a singer songwriter
and I love to write songs. And I had a
little local hit here on a record that I made,
and I'm not sure what to do. My parents really
want me to go to law school or med school,
and you know, I'm having a struggle, and I just
(04:26):
love your thoughts, and he went, you got to go
to Nashville, Man, You've got to go. You've got to go.
I love to tell this story because here's a life strategy.
A stranger who doesn't know you at all and has
never heard your music and is drunk tells you to
(04:48):
do something, and you go, absolutely, Man, sign me up.
That's where I'm going. So I can't blame him or
credit him too much. But I've run in to him
three different times since then, though that was a long
time ago, decades ago, and each time I've thanked him
(05:09):
and told him who I was. But he was so
gracious and grateful when he heard anything. That's great. That's
so great, and that's been a joy to me to
to in some ways get to pay him back. I
(05:31):
was in Nashville in the early nineteen seventies and I
had gotten a job at a theme park there called
opry Land, USA, and I had auditioned with a comedy
country song that I had written because I didn't have
a lot of sort of straight country material, and they'd
(05:52):
given me a job as manager of animal shows and
managed the Animal Opry, which was a live show in
which trained barnyard animals played musical instruments. Had a pig
named Pigarachi who played the piano, and a duck named
bert Backquack that played the drum. It was a great show.
(06:15):
I loved this show. Eight thousand people a day we'd
see this show, and I was working there eighty hours
a week at Opryland. But I was also writing songs
and doing my best to write country songs. And I
got signed at Tree Music, which was a fabulous company,
the largest BMI company at that time.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
And you're listening to Randall Wallace tell the story of
his own life. He spent so much of his life
telling the stories of other people's lives. This time it's
Randall on himself, starting out as a young musician growing
up in the Tennessee area Memphis, and then spending a
part of his young life in Nashville at the suggestion
(06:58):
of a drunk songwriter who he admired named Chris Christofferson,
who knew nothing about Randall's musical proclivities or the styles
or tastes of Randall Wallace as related to what kind
of music he'd actually like to write. And there he
finds himself in Nashville running the Animal Opry at Opryland,
and of course while they're landing a gig with one
(07:20):
of the best publishing houses in Nashville, when we come back,
more of Randall Wallace's story here on our American Stories.
This is Lee Habib, host of our American Stories. Every
day we set out to tell the stories of Americans
past and present, from small towns to big cities and
from all walks of life doing extraordinary things. But we
(07:42):
truly can't do this show without you. Our shows are
free to listen to, but they're not free to make.
If you love what you hear, go to our Americanstories
dot com and make a donation to keep the stories coming.
That's our American Stories dot Com. And we continue with
(08:10):
our American Stories and the story of Randall Wallace as
told by Randall himself. He's written and directed many of
the movies we know and love. Braveheart, We Were Soldiers' Secretariat,
Pearl Harbor, a man in the Iron Mask. Heavan is
for real. He's the author of seven novels and also
a terrific musician and songwriter. He wrote the lyrics to
Mansions of the Lord, one of my favorites. Let's pick
(08:33):
up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
I was working there eighty hours a week at Opryland,
but I was also writing songs and doing my best
to write country songs. And I got signed at Tree Music,
which was a fabulous company, the largest BMI company at
that time, and there were great songwriters there like Bobby
Braddock and John Hyatt and others, and they wrote absolutely
(09:02):
brilliant songs. I wrote songs that I felt were really good,
and they apparently thought my songs were good, but they
didn't fit kind of in the country category. And a
sort of country music legend named Wesley Rose sat down
with me one day and listened to my song and said,
these are really good songs, but do you like country music?
(09:24):
And I said, well, I respect country music and I
love it, but it's not quite my thing. And he said,
don't sell your soul for a few pennies. Find the
thing you love to do the most. And it's interesting
that that echoed something that I had been told by
(09:45):
my pastor of the church that I grew up in.
When I decided to major in religion at school, my
pastor said to me, do you feel the calling to
be a pastor? And I said, honestly, I don't, but
I know it's the great calling that anyone could have.
And he said, no, you're wrong. The greatest calling anyone
(10:05):
can have is the one God has for you. And
that bit of sharing from him allowed me to leave seminary,
to leave school and head off to Nashville. I wanted
to be like Beethovenly nothing but music all day long,
every day. But what you find is Jordan Peterson talks
(10:27):
about you find your limits, that you can't do that
all the time. You need people. You need conversation, You
need encounters, you need disagreement, You need the grinding points
where soul is created. You need those things. And I
got really dark. I went through fourteen days without a
(10:49):
patch of sunshine. So I told my best friends, I
need you to help me pack up my place, but
I've got to get out of here. I was really
depressed and drove to California alone. Kept writing songs but
wasn't really getting anywhere. And I started dating a woman
(11:10):
that I ultimately would Marry, and on her coffee table
was a stack of pages that were bound in an
interesting way, and I said, what's this and she said,
it's a screenplay written by my father and he had
been a prisoner of war in World War two written
an incredible story. And I picked it up and began
(11:33):
to read it. And I loved the format instantly because
it was clear, and it was powerful, and it was unpretentious.
You could only show the reader what you could see
a character do and what you could hear the character say.
You didn't have to go into explaining and expounding all
(11:56):
of your literary references. You didn't have to show your erudition.
Just what does the character do? What does he say?
And from the first line of doing it, I thought
this is my medium. Because all the training that I
had in writing songs enabled me to write lyrics, because
(12:18):
every syllable is valuable, and I wrote dialogue in a
lyrical way. I wrote it with a kind of musical
and dare I say poetic rhythm to it, because it
was music that led me into screenwriting. But also the
music was not divorced from the experience of screenwriting or
(12:44):
or later on and directing that a movie is like
a symphony. It's a whole piece in it. It has
its quiet parts, and it builds and it repeats in it,
and it inerwaves. And I know that nothing that we
do gets wasted. All things work together for good. If
(13:08):
you love God. And I don't mean as a reward.
I mean you love what is ultimate and significant in
real and you keep loving that, and that makes everything
you've done, in everything you're doing, have its place, have
its value that you can draw from. I was in
(13:29):
Los Angeles and was writing novels now and screenplays, writing
screenplays based on my novels, and novels based on my screenplays,
and I would go to the gym a lot and
work out. And one day I was in a gym
in Studio City, California, near where I lived, and a
(13:52):
guy was next to me helping a friend who was
really out of shape. But this one guy who was
in really great shape was was talking to friend through it,
and I thought, well, that's a that's a great guy
to do that for his buddy. And the guy in
good shape was was telling stories about Elvis Presley, and
(14:16):
I sort of chimed in and said, my father saw
Elvis Presley seeing at a supermarket opening in Memphis, and
the guy went really and we started talking and we
just talked about working out, and I was working out
a lot, and he said something about me being in
(14:37):
good shape, and he said do you run any and
I go I not for a long time. I ran
in college, but I haven't run. And well, I'm in
a running group. Why don't you come run with us
on Saturday mornings early at six o'clock. And I went, great, okay,
super I had very few friends. I was an isolated
kind of mode. And he introduced him, said I'm Mike
(14:58):
Post and I said, I'm Rando. Wait what Mike? Who
Mike Post? And the music Mike Posts? Because I knew
he had had had a hit with Classical Gas and
I knew some of his other COMPETI I mean, Mike
Post is a musical genius and he said, yeah, yeah,
that's me. And I started. I went with his running
(15:21):
group and was running, oh for a couple of years
with him. And Mike said, what are you doing to
get your career going? I said, I'm all I know
to do is write stories and sort of show them
when I can, and he went, well, I worked for
Steve Cannell, and I think Cannell would really like you.
You're you're kind of his kind of guy and well man.
(15:44):
Steve Cannell was then king of television. A Team was
his biggest but hunter all sorts of shows, and Mike said,
give me a minute, I'm gonna get back to you.
So he talked with Steve about me, and Steve said,
I'll hear about him if I'm supposed to hear about him,
I don't want to read any of his works. So
(16:05):
Mike came back and said, I want you to write
a spec script for every episode that Canill has. And
he had six different shows on television, so he was
telling me, write six different shows for which you will
not be paid, but just write six episodes and you're
going to demonstrate how willing you are to work. And
(16:28):
I did that, and Steve didn't read any of them.
But Mike was not going to give up. And Steve
was doing a show called JJ Starbuck about a country guy.
And I wrote Steve a letter and I said, I
know everyone and his brother is trying to get in
to see you. I just want to tell you a
(16:51):
story about why I would be the guy to work
on this show.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
And you're listening to screenwriter, director, author, and musician rand
Wallace share his story his journey from Nashville and the
East Coast to the West and how he just knocked
around for a bit and had some really great breaks
and to be able to bump into a guy like
Mike Post, a legend in the business, and then make
(17:17):
his way into this really difficult business to crack into,
which is TV production with a monster talent like Stephen
Kennell is just an opportunity of a lifetime. And also
bumping into that thing called a screenplay sitting on the
desk of his future bride's place, reading it, seeing it
and knowing that the screenplay was the medium for him,
(17:40):
and also that insight that he stumbled upon from his
pastor the greatest calling anyone can have is the calling
God has for you. When we come back more of
Randall Wallace's story here on our American Stories, And we
(18:08):
returned to our American Stories and to Randall Wallace telling
us his own story. He's written and directed many of
the movies we know. In Love, Braveheart, We Were Soldiers' Secretariat,
Evan is for Real. He's the author of seven novels
and also a terrific musician and songwriter. He wrote the
lyrics to Mansions of the Lord, one of my favorite songs.
(18:28):
Let's return to Randall Wallace with the story of how
he went from songwriting to working for Stephen Kennell, one
of the great TV producers of the nineteen eighties and nineties.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
During the depression, my grandfather started a country store and
he built a store out of wood he salvaged, and
he didn't have enough money to buy the stock that
he needed to sell in the store, and the only
place that paid cash in the town was an ice
factory where they freeze huge blocks of ice and men
(19:02):
would sling them onto wagons so that farms without electricity
could keep their milk and their meat cold. And my
grandfather went to work on that crew, and the first day,
the foreman came up to him and said, listen, I
want to let you know that I cuss at the
men to get them to work, and if I call
(19:23):
you a son of a don't pay me no mind.
It don't mean nothing by It's just the way I am.
And my grandfather said, I understand completely, and I just
want you to know that if you do happen to
call me a son of a and I hit you
in the face with a claw hammer. Don't pay me
no mind. I don't mean nothing by it's just the
way I am. Those are my people, those are the
(19:44):
people that I know. I think I could write your
show for you. I got a call not from Steve,
but from one of his producers saying, Okay, we're going
to give you a shot. And I wrote the script
and the next day Steve came in and said, I
want you to be on staff. And the next script
(20:07):
I wrote, they made me a story editor. And the
next script I wrote, they made me a producer. So
Steve became my mentor. And one of his greatest qualities,
other than being incredibly talented, I mean a genius, but
he had a quality of he loved what he did.
(20:29):
He never lost enthusiasm for anything that he did. Steve
died of melanoma. The day he died, he still got
out of bed to map out a story, a new
story that he wanted to write. He loved what he did,
and he loved sharing it, and he loved teaching it.
He was a powerful mentor in my life. But none
(20:54):
of that would have ever happened Without Mike Post, I
was on quite a trajectory in television. I went from
a freelancer to being a producer in a really short time,
maybe six months or so. And I also realized that
(21:17):
I had to have ambitions beyond just the television world.
And I don't mean in any sense to demean that world.
Television is incredibly lucrative, it's incredibly influential. But I also
felt that I didn't want to be a cog in
(21:39):
a big wheel, and that I always would be if
I was grinding out episodic television and I was writing
feature scripts, and I was writing novels and still writing
songs and trying to look outside the world that I
was in. I realized there was kind of a glass
(22:02):
ceiling for me there. And I remember packing up my
office and I had gone from having no money at
all to having a really good income and I quit.
And I remember going down to pack up my office
and my son Andrew was then only seven years old
(22:23):
or something, and I took him down on a Sunday
to clean out my office with me, and we're packing up,
and I was knotted up. I knew I was facing
like total unknown and Andrew said, Daddy, how are we
going to eat? And it was quite a moment, and
(22:47):
just the two of us in that office and with
all my stuff packed into boxes, and I sat down
in the chair, put him in my lap, and I said, son,
that's a really good question. And this is a really
scary time. And I've been working for the last four
years to make mister Cannell wealthier man and make him
(23:10):
better known, and to make us some money. And now
what I'm going to try to do, and I am
gonna do is make us more money and let us
have a reputation, to let us stand on our own.
And it's going to be scary, and that's what we're
going to do. And he went got it okay, And
(23:32):
his courage, his love and his trust to me was
profoundly important to me. So cut too. It's a year
or so later and I can't even get an appointment.
I can't get a pitch meeting because the business was
treating me like, well, you were Steve Cannell's protege, you
(23:53):
were only ascendancy. Now you're out of that company. You
must have screwed up some way. We don't even want
to talk to you. That was literally the way it was.
And there were I think people from Steve's company who
had maybe poisoned the well for me a little bit.
And I know Steve hadn't. He was too good a
man and too proud a man to talk down on
(24:15):
my abilities. But I think, you know, there's just that
kind of front runner bandwagon mentality in Hollywood. I was
so tense. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, and I
certainly couldn't write. And I felt that I was going
to put my sons through the same thing that I
had gone through when my father had a breakdown. And
(24:36):
I got on my knees, which was the only place
I had to go, and I said a prayer, and
the prayer was what really concerns me now that my
primary responsibility is my son's And maybe they'll become better
men if they don't live in a big house California
(25:00):
with a swimming pool and tennis courts and fancy cars
in the driveway. Maybe they'll learn more if they live
in a house, even when without indoor plumbing, the way
my sister and I lived when our father lost his way.
But if that's what God wants, if that's best for
my sons. Then please bring that on and help me
(25:21):
bear it. But if I go down in this fight,
let me go down not worshiping Hollywood, but standing up
with my flag flying, fighting for what I believe. And
I stood up, and I went back to my desk.
And without that moment, that would have never written. They
may take our lives, They'll never take our freedom.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
What will you do without freedom?
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Will you'll fight? I guess no, we will run and.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
We will live. I fight, and you may die, Run
and you'll love at least a while.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
I'm dying in your fads many years from now, would
you be willing to trade all the days from this
day to that for one chance, just one chance, to
come back here and tell our enemies that they may
take our lives, but they'll never take me. Oh, pray do.
(26:34):
And you've been listening to Randall Wallace share with us
a very personal story about in the end where some
of the language for Brave Heart came from, and a
lot of it had to do with his own existential struggles,
with his own life, with risk taking, with fear, and
that prayer he prayed for his son was a simple
one that we've all prayed maybe Lord, your plan for
them is to have less, not more, and for us
(26:58):
to be true to you and not to our own calling.
And Randall had this fervent prayer and outcomes that scene
from Braveheart. And that's what you were just listening to
Mel Gibson's epic speech as William Wallace. When we come back,
more of the remarkable life story of Randall Wallace, to
connection between creativity and courage, love and fear, and so
(27:19):
much more here on our American stories. And we continue
with our American stories, and with Randall Wallace, let's pick
(27:42):
up where he last left off.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
I said a prayer, and the prayer was, if I
go down in this fight, let me go down, not
worshiping Hollywood, but standing up with my flag flying, fighting
for what I believe. And I stood up and I
went back to my desk. And without that moment, that
would have never written every man dies, not every man
(28:08):
really lives?
Speaker 3 (28:13):
Who died will beautiful?
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Every man dies, every man already lives. I never have
written freedom.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
Uh, it can all end right now, just say it,
cry oud, Let's see Monday, Joseph say, let's see.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Yah him.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
Yes, Jesus the President, which is just a whall.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Free never written that, and I had to be in
that moment. God had to put me in that moment
to mold me into this new direction. I say in
(29:32):
my book Living the Brave Heart Life, it's more powerful
to believe than to know, because we never fully know anything.
So science. You listen to a great scientist and said
that the whole notion of science is we think this,
and this seems to explain everything for now, but there's
all this stuff that we don't know. We were having
(29:57):
a negotiation my wife and I about having children, and
she said, look, I am really not eager to have them,
but I know you want to. So if you get
me pregnant, you've got to agree to take me to Europe.
And I went done, and we got pregnant. We went
(30:17):
to Europe and we were in London. I said, you know,
I would love to be able to tell we knew
we're going to have a son. I'd love to be
able to tell him some part of my ancestry, like
you know all of yours back hundreds and hundreds of years.
And I hear there are Wallace Is in Scotland. Let's
go up there and poke around a little and she went, sure,
(30:38):
why not as an adventure, Let's go to Scotland. She
was four months pregnant. We went to Edinburgh. We walked
into Edinburgh Castle and as we walked into the castle,
my eye fell on a statue on one side of
the castle and it's William Wallace. And there's the name Wallace.
And I went Wallace And the other side was Bruce,
(31:02):
Robert the Bruce. And I grabbed a member of the
Black Watch guard there, tough little guy on a kilt,
and said, who is this Wallace? And he said it's
William Wallace. It's hero. And I went, greatest hero, honey,
greatest hero. And I knew about Robert the Bruce from
(31:23):
a Robert Burns poem of Scott's which have with Wallace bled,
And that was how I knew that there must be
Wallace is in Scotland. And I said, was William Wallace
an ally of Robert the Bruce in fighting the English?
And this guard said, well, no one will ever know
(31:45):
for sure, which, of course are magic words to a writer.
What our legends say more magic words to a writer?
That Robert the Bruce may have been one of those
who betrayed William Wallace into the hands of the English
to clear the way for himself to become the king.
(32:05):
Now I knew none of that history, but it was
as if I had heard that Saint Peter and Judas
were the same person. In that instant, the tumblers all
tripped into my head, and I thought, how does Robert
the Bruce be someone who could do such a terrible thing,
(32:29):
betrayed the hero of his country, but he becomes the
country's greatest, most courageous king. How does that happen? What
if there was something so noble in the life and
death of William Wallace that that's what transformed Robert the
Bruce And I knew in that moment it was an
(32:49):
incredible story that I wanted to write, and I didn't
feel I was yet ready to. For one thing, I
had a baby on the way and I had to
find a way to feed him. So I went into
television and focused on television first. But in television I
gained the skills and didn't know when the time would
(33:12):
come until that moment when I got on my knees
to say the prayer of I'm not going to worship Hollywood,
I'm going to stand up and fight for to write
the kind of movie I want my sons to see.
And that's what William Wallace means to me. And people
will say, oh, well, you're not a relative, and I go,
you can't prove that. And I can't prove that I am,
(33:33):
but you can't prove that I'm not. I had a
meeting with Mel Gibson once when we were doing Braveheart,
and Mel was the biggest star in the world and
I was a completely unknown screenwriter. Hollywood was starting to
hear about me because suddenly this script that they had
(33:55):
never seen was getting made. But Mel and I were dinner,
just the two of us in London, and he was
talking about a role that he was thinking to cast,
and I was questioning the casting choice a bit. He
said something absolutely stunning to me. He said, Look, the
(34:18):
truth is writers write, director's direct actors act from their
essence as a human being. He said, this script is you.
It is right out of your soul. It is you.
He said, I'm going to bring everything I have to
directing it. A few years ago I did a charity
screening of Braveheart in Austin, Texas, and at the end
(34:44):
of the movie, I was in a theater, a small theater.
Into the movie, I walked up on the stage to
do a question and answer with the audience, and the
first person who stood up was a nineteen year old
woman on the front row. And she stood up and said,
mister Wallace, I don't have a question. I just want
(35:06):
to tell you something. My fiance died six months ago,
and before he died he told me he wanted me
to watch Braveheart so I would understand the way he
loved me. It took me a couple of minutes to
compose myself enough to speak. After that, it confirmed for
(35:26):
me what I always have said that it's not war
stories that I write. It's that until you find who
in your life you would give your life for, you're
not really alive yet. That's when you know. I think
Mark Twain said something like the man who is fully
(35:48):
ready to die is the one who is living. He
said it better than that, but that's the thought. And
I think kind of animal instinct for survi is powerful,
but it's not particularly admirable in that it's just an
(36:08):
errand it is what it is. It exists in everything
from I guess, from ants to angels. But the notion
of finding something that you put above yourself is where
I think you really for me. It's where I begin
(36:30):
to find actual meaning. I'm living for someone else, but
to me, faith has to do with standing in awe
and in accepting that there is a God and it's
not me, and that I try to listen to what
(36:52):
God has to say. That's where I found the most meaning.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to Randall
Wallace for sharing his story with us. Is one man show.
The Brave Heart of Creativity is touring the country. To
find out where it's playing or find out how to
bring it to your town, go to Wallace Entertainment dot com.
I love what he said about his movies, particularly the
(37:21):
war movies. It's not war stories. I write their love stories.
Until you find who in your life you would give
your life for, you're not really alive. He also talked
about putting things above himself, that that's when you find
real meaning in your life. And of course faith is
(37:42):
such a big part of Randall's life, standing in awe
that there is a God and it's not me. Randall
Wallace's story here on our American story,
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Randall Wallace has written and or directed movies We All
Know and Love, Braveheart, We Were Soldiers, Secretariat, Man in
the Iron Mask, Pearl Harbor, Heavan Is for Real, and More.
(00:31):
He's the author of seven novels, and he also wrote
the lyrics from Mansions of the Lord, written for We
Were Soldiers, and performed as the recessional for President Ronald
Reagan's national funeral. He also has a one man show,
The Brave Heart of Creativity, which you can find at
Wallace Entertainment dot com. Here's Randall Wallace with his own story.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Music has always been the voice of God to me,
not the voice of intellectual understanding. But it feels to
me that music is the language of God, that it
speaks directly to your soul. It comes and from your soul.
(01:17):
Real music does not intellectual intervals and notes and music theory,
but the joy in it. And I just wanted to
play music when I was a boy. I got my
first guitar when I was twelve and started playing songs
like Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and those heroes of Memphis,
(01:43):
and went to college and wrote a song and started
playing it for people and in coffee shops, and people
liked it, and I made a record and had a
local hit, and about that time Chris Christofferson came to
du and Chris Christofferson epitomize it did then and still
(02:07):
does to me, a kind of artist like I related to.
Whenever I've been faced with a difficult decision, I do
all the things I guess everyone else does of trying
to weigh the pros and cons, but that never really
seems to be how the decision happens. I seem to
(02:33):
have a sense from the get go of what I'm
going to end up doing. I'm looking for ways to
understand what I'm going to do. A friend of mine,
who's a psychotherapist, said, I don't think we really think
with our brains. I think we use our brains to
rationalize our emotions. And there's a lot of truth in that.
For me, Well, I wanted so badly to pursue a
(02:56):
career in music, and I would look for people who
epitomized the kind of person I wanted to be. Chris
Christofferson was an airborne ranger. He was a Golden Gloves boxer.
He was a Rhodes scholar, and he wrote songs unlike
anybody else that were just bringing the songs that I loved.
(03:18):
So I thought, well, what did he do? And hear
this Rhodes scholar? He didn't go to New York or LA.
He went to Nashville, and I thought, well, maybe I
should consider Nashville, even though I didn't really see myself
as a country writer. So he came to do a
concert at my school, and I guess I could thank
my father for this. And I've just never been afraid
(03:41):
to talk to a stranger, and I waited for a
respectful moment. I was backstage before his concert, and I
saw him talking with a few people and just kind
of casual laughing talking, and I walked up and said
excuse me, and he turned around, looked me right in
the eye, said hey man, how you doing? And we
(04:02):
shook hands and I said, I really don't want to
bother you, but I just want to ask you a question.
He said sure, and I said, I'm a singer songwriter
and I love to write songs. And I had a
little local hit here on a record that I made,
and I'm not sure what to do. My parents really
want me to go to law school or med school,
and you know, I'm having a struggle, and I just
(04:26):
love your thoughts, and he went, you got to go
to Nashville, Man, You've got to go. You've got to go.
I love to tell this story because here's a life strategy.
A stranger who doesn't know you at all and has
never heard your music and is drunk tells you to
(04:48):
do something, and you go, absolutely, Man, sign me up.
That's where I'm going. So I can't blame him or
credit him too much. But I've run in to him
three different times since then, though that was a long
time ago, decades ago, and each time I've thanked him
(05:09):
and told him who I was. But he was so
gracious and grateful when he heard anything. That's great. That's
so great, and that's been a joy to me to
to in some ways get to pay him back. I
(05:31):
was in Nashville in the early nineteen seventies and I
had gotten a job at a theme park there called
opry Land, USA, and I had auditioned with a comedy
country song that I had written because I didn't have
a lot of sort of straight country material, and they'd
(05:52):
given me a job as manager of animal shows and
managed the Animal Opry, which was a live show in
which trained barnyard animals played musical instruments. Had a pig
named Pigarachi who played the piano, and a duck named
bert Backquack that played the drum. It was a great show.
(06:15):
I loved this show. Eight thousand people a day we'd
see this show, and I was working there eighty hours
a week at Opryland. But I was also writing songs
and doing my best to write country songs. And I
got signed at Tree Music, which was a fabulous company,
the largest BMI company at that time.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
And you're listening to Randall Wallace tell the story of
his own life. He spent so much of his life
telling the stories of other people's lives. This time it's
Randall on himself, starting out as a young musician growing
up in the Tennessee area Memphis, and then spending a
part of his young life in Nashville at the suggestion
(06:58):
of a drunk songwriter who he admired named Chris Christofferson,
who knew nothing about Randall's musical proclivities or the styles
or tastes of Randall Wallace as related to what kind
of music he'd actually like to write. And there he
finds himself in Nashville running the Animal Opry at Opryland,
and of course while they're landing a gig with one
(07:20):
of the best publishing houses in Nashville, when we come back,
more of Randall Wallace's story here on our American Stories.
This is Lee Habib, host of our American Stories. Every
day we set out to tell the stories of Americans
past and present, from small towns to big cities and
from all walks of life doing extraordinary things. But we
(07:42):
truly can't do this show without you. Our shows are
free to listen to, but they're not free to make.
If you love what you hear, go to our Americanstories
dot com and make a donation to keep the stories coming.
That's our American Stories dot Com. And we continue with
(08:10):
our American Stories and the story of Randall Wallace as
told by Randall himself. He's written and directed many of
the movies we know and love. Braveheart, We Were Soldiers' Secretariat,
Pearl Harbor, a man in the Iron Mask. Heavan is
for real. He's the author of seven novels and also
a terrific musician and songwriter. He wrote the lyrics to
Mansions of the Lord, one of my favorites. Let's pick
(08:33):
up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
I was working there eighty hours a week at Opryland,
but I was also writing songs and doing my best
to write country songs. And I got signed at Tree Music,
which was a fabulous company, the largest BMI company at
that time, and there were great songwriters there like Bobby
Braddock and John Hyatt and others, and they wrote absolutely
(09:02):
brilliant songs. I wrote songs that I felt were really good,
and they apparently thought my songs were good, but they
didn't fit kind of in the country category. And a
sort of country music legend named Wesley Rose sat down
with me one day and listened to my song and said,
these are really good songs, but do you like country music?
(09:24):
And I said, well, I respect country music and I
love it, but it's not quite my thing. And he said,
don't sell your soul for a few pennies. Find the
thing you love to do the most. And it's interesting
that that echoed something that I had been told by
(09:45):
my pastor of the church that I grew up in.
When I decided to major in religion at school, my
pastor said to me, do you feel the calling to
be a pastor? And I said, honestly, I don't, but
I know it's the great calling that anyone could have.
And he said, no, you're wrong. The greatest calling anyone
(10:05):
can have is the one God has for you. And
that bit of sharing from him allowed me to leave seminary,
to leave school and head off to Nashville. I wanted
to be like Beethovenly nothing but music all day long,
every day. But what you find is Jordan Peterson talks
(10:27):
about you find your limits, that you can't do that
all the time. You need people. You need conversation, You
need encounters, you need disagreement, You need the grinding points
where soul is created. You need those things. And I
got really dark. I went through fourteen days without a
(10:49):
patch of sunshine. So I told my best friends, I
need you to help me pack up my place, but
I've got to get out of here. I was really
depressed and drove to California alone. Kept writing songs but
wasn't really getting anywhere. And I started dating a woman
(11:10):
that I ultimately would Marry, and on her coffee table
was a stack of pages that were bound in an
interesting way, and I said, what's this and she said,
it's a screenplay written by my father and he had
been a prisoner of war in World War two written
an incredible story. And I picked it up and began
(11:33):
to read it. And I loved the format instantly because
it was clear, and it was powerful, and it was unpretentious.
You could only show the reader what you could see
a character do and what you could hear the character say.
You didn't have to go into explaining and expounding all
(11:56):
of your literary references. You didn't have to show your erudition.
Just what does the character do? What does he say?
And from the first line of doing it, I thought
this is my medium. Because all the training that I
had in writing songs enabled me to write lyrics, because
(12:18):
every syllable is valuable, and I wrote dialogue in a
lyrical way. I wrote it with a kind of musical
and dare I say poetic rhythm to it, because it
was music that led me into screenwriting. But also the
music was not divorced from the experience of screenwriting or
(12:44):
or later on and directing that a movie is like
a symphony. It's a whole piece in it. It has
its quiet parts, and it builds and it repeats in it,
and it inerwaves. And I know that nothing that we
do gets wasted. All things work together for good. If
(13:08):
you love God. And I don't mean as a reward.
I mean you love what is ultimate and significant in
real and you keep loving that, and that makes everything
you've done, in everything you're doing, have its place, have
its value that you can draw from. I was in
(13:29):
Los Angeles and was writing novels now and screenplays, writing
screenplays based on my novels, and novels based on my screenplays,
and I would go to the gym a lot and
work out. And one day I was in a gym
in Studio City, California, near where I lived, and a
(13:52):
guy was next to me helping a friend who was
really out of shape. But this one guy who was
in really great shape was was talking to friend through it,
and I thought, well, that's a that's a great guy
to do that for his buddy. And the guy in
good shape was was telling stories about Elvis Presley, and
(14:16):
I sort of chimed in and said, my father saw
Elvis Presley seeing at a supermarket opening in Memphis, and
the guy went really and we started talking and we
just talked about working out, and I was working out
a lot, and he said something about me being in
(14:37):
good shape, and he said do you run any and
I go I not for a long time. I ran
in college, but I haven't run. And well, I'm in
a running group. Why don't you come run with us
on Saturday mornings early at six o'clock. And I went, great, okay,
super I had very few friends. I was an isolated
kind of mode. And he introduced him, said I'm Mike
(14:58):
Post and I said, I'm Rando. Wait what Mike? Who
Mike Post? And the music Mike Posts? Because I knew
he had had had a hit with Classical Gas and
I knew some of his other COMPETI I mean, Mike
Post is a musical genius and he said, yeah, yeah,
that's me. And I started. I went with his running
(15:21):
group and was running, oh for a couple of years
with him. And Mike said, what are you doing to
get your career going? I said, I'm all I know
to do is write stories and sort of show them
when I can, and he went, well, I worked for
Steve Cannell, and I think Cannell would really like you.
You're you're kind of his kind of guy and well man.
(15:44):
Steve Cannell was then king of television. A Team was
his biggest but hunter all sorts of shows, and Mike said,
give me a minute, I'm gonna get back to you.
So he talked with Steve about me, and Steve said,
I'll hear about him if I'm supposed to hear about him,
I don't want to read any of his works. So
(16:05):
Mike came back and said, I want you to write
a spec script for every episode that Canill has. And
he had six different shows on television, so he was
telling me, write six different shows for which you will
not be paid, but just write six episodes and you're
going to demonstrate how willing you are to work. And
(16:28):
I did that, and Steve didn't read any of them.
But Mike was not going to give up. And Steve
was doing a show called JJ Starbuck about a country guy.
And I wrote Steve a letter and I said, I
know everyone and his brother is trying to get in
to see you. I just want to tell you a
(16:51):
story about why I would be the guy to work
on this show.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
And you're listening to screenwriter, director, author, and musician rand
Wallace share his story his journey from Nashville and the
East Coast to the West and how he just knocked
around for a bit and had some really great breaks
and to be able to bump into a guy like
Mike Post, a legend in the business, and then make
(17:17):
his way into this really difficult business to crack into,
which is TV production with a monster talent like Stephen
Kennell is just an opportunity of a lifetime. And also
bumping into that thing called a screenplay sitting on the
desk of his future bride's place, reading it, seeing it
and knowing that the screenplay was the medium for him,
(17:40):
and also that insight that he stumbled upon from his
pastor the greatest calling anyone can have is the calling
God has for you. When we come back more of
Randall Wallace's story here on our American Stories, And we
(18:08):
returned to our American Stories and to Randall Wallace telling
us his own story. He's written and directed many of
the movies we know. In Love, Braveheart, We Were Soldiers' Secretariat,
Evan is for Real. He's the author of seven novels
and also a terrific musician and songwriter. He wrote the
lyrics to Mansions of the Lord, one of my favorite songs.
(18:28):
Let's return to Randall Wallace with the story of how
he went from songwriting to working for Stephen Kennell, one
of the great TV producers of the nineteen eighties and nineties.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
During the depression, my grandfather started a country store and
he built a store out of wood he salvaged, and
he didn't have enough money to buy the stock that
he needed to sell in the store, and the only
place that paid cash in the town was an ice
factory where they freeze huge blocks of ice and men
(19:02):
would sling them onto wagons so that farms without electricity
could keep their milk and their meat cold. And my
grandfather went to work on that crew, and the first day,
the foreman came up to him and said, listen, I
want to let you know that I cuss at the
men to get them to work, and if I call
(19:23):
you a son of a don't pay me no mind.
It don't mean nothing by It's just the way I am.
And my grandfather said, I understand completely, and I just
want you to know that if you do happen to
call me a son of a and I hit you
in the face with a claw hammer. Don't pay me
no mind. I don't mean nothing by it's just the
way I am. Those are my people, those are the
(19:44):
people that I know. I think I could write your
show for you. I got a call not from Steve,
but from one of his producers saying, Okay, we're going
to give you a shot. And I wrote the script
and the next day Steve came in and said, I
want you to be on staff. And the next script
(20:07):
I wrote, they made me a story editor. And the
next script I wrote, they made me a producer. So
Steve became my mentor. And one of his greatest qualities,
other than being incredibly talented, I mean a genius, but
he had a quality of he loved what he did.
(20:29):
He never lost enthusiasm for anything that he did. Steve
died of melanoma. The day he died, he still got
out of bed to map out a story, a new
story that he wanted to write. He loved what he did,
and he loved sharing it, and he loved teaching it.
He was a powerful mentor in my life. But none
(20:54):
of that would have ever happened Without Mike Post, I
was on quite a trajectory in television. I went from
a freelancer to being a producer in a really short time,
maybe six months or so. And I also realized that
(21:17):
I had to have ambitions beyond just the television world.
And I don't mean in any sense to demean that world.
Television is incredibly lucrative, it's incredibly influential. But I also
felt that I didn't want to be a cog in
(21:39):
a big wheel, and that I always would be if
I was grinding out episodic television and I was writing
feature scripts, and I was writing novels and still writing
songs and trying to look outside the world that I
was in. I realized there was kind of a glass
(22:02):
ceiling for me there. And I remember packing up my
office and I had gone from having no money at
all to having a really good income and I quit.
And I remember going down to pack up my office
and my son Andrew was then only seven years old
(22:23):
or something, and I took him down on a Sunday
to clean out my office with me, and we're packing up,
and I was knotted up. I knew I was facing
like total unknown and Andrew said, Daddy, how are we
going to eat? And it was quite a moment, and
(22:47):
just the two of us in that office and with
all my stuff packed into boxes, and I sat down
in the chair, put him in my lap, and I said, son,
that's a really good question. And this is a really
scary time. And I've been working for the last four
years to make mister Cannell wealthier man and make him
(23:10):
better known, and to make us some money. And now
what I'm going to try to do, and I am
gonna do is make us more money and let us
have a reputation, to let us stand on our own.
And it's going to be scary, and that's what we're
going to do. And he went got it okay, And
(23:32):
his courage, his love and his trust to me was
profoundly important to me. So cut too. It's a year
or so later and I can't even get an appointment.
I can't get a pitch meeting because the business was
treating me like, well, you were Steve Cannell's protege, you
(23:53):
were only ascendancy. Now you're out of that company. You
must have screwed up some way. We don't even want
to talk to you. That was literally the way it was.
And there were I think people from Steve's company who
had maybe poisoned the well for me a little bit.
And I know Steve hadn't. He was too good a
man and too proud a man to talk down on
(24:15):
my abilities. But I think, you know, there's just that
kind of front runner bandwagon mentality in Hollywood. I was
so tense. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, and I
certainly couldn't write. And I felt that I was going
to put my sons through the same thing that I
had gone through when my father had a breakdown. And
(24:36):
I got on my knees, which was the only place
I had to go, and I said a prayer, and
the prayer was what really concerns me now that my
primary responsibility is my son's And maybe they'll become better
men if they don't live in a big house California
(25:00):
with a swimming pool and tennis courts and fancy cars
in the driveway. Maybe they'll learn more if they live
in a house, even when without indoor plumbing, the way
my sister and I lived when our father lost his way.
But if that's what God wants, if that's best for
my sons. Then please bring that on and help me
(25:21):
bear it. But if I go down in this fight,
let me go down not worshiping Hollywood, but standing up
with my flag flying, fighting for what I believe. And
I stood up, and I went back to my desk.
And without that moment, that would have never written. They
may take our lives, They'll never take our freedom.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
What will you do without freedom?
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Will you'll fight? I guess no, we will run and.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
We will live. I fight, and you may die, Run
and you'll love at least a while.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
I'm dying in your fads many years from now, would
you be willing to trade all the days from this
day to that for one chance, just one chance, to
come back here and tell our enemies that they may
take our lives, but they'll never take me. Oh, pray do.
(26:34):
And you've been listening to Randall Wallace share with us
a very personal story about in the end where some
of the language for Brave Heart came from, and a
lot of it had to do with his own existential struggles,
with his own life, with risk taking, with fear, and
that prayer he prayed for his son was a simple
one that we've all prayed maybe Lord, your plan for
them is to have less, not more, and for us
(26:58):
to be true to you and not to our own calling.
And Randall had this fervent prayer and outcomes that scene
from Braveheart. And that's what you were just listening to
Mel Gibson's epic speech as William Wallace. When we come back,
more of the remarkable life story of Randall Wallace, to
connection between creativity and courage, love and fear, and so
(27:19):
much more here on our American stories. And we continue
with our American stories, and with Randall Wallace, let's pick
(27:42):
up where he last left off.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
I said a prayer, and the prayer was, if I
go down in this fight, let me go down, not
worshiping Hollywood, but standing up with my flag flying, fighting
for what I believe. And I stood up and I
went back to my desk. And without that moment, that
would have never written every man dies, not every man
(28:08):
really lives?
Speaker 3 (28:13):
Who died will beautiful?
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Every man dies, every man already lives. I never have
written freedom.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
Uh, it can all end right now, just say it,
cry oud, Let's see Monday, Joseph say, let's see.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Yah him.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
Yes, Jesus the President, which is just a whall.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Free never written that, and I had to be in
that moment. God had to put me in that moment
to mold me into this new direction. I say in
(29:32):
my book Living the Brave Heart Life, it's more powerful
to believe than to know, because we never fully know anything.
So science. You listen to a great scientist and said
that the whole notion of science is we think this,
and this seems to explain everything for now, but there's
all this stuff that we don't know. We were having
(29:57):
a negotiation my wife and I about having children, and
she said, look, I am really not eager to have them,
but I know you want to. So if you get
me pregnant, you've got to agree to take me to Europe.
And I went done, and we got pregnant. We went
(30:17):
to Europe and we were in London. I said, you know,
I would love to be able to tell we knew
we're going to have a son. I'd love to be
able to tell him some part of my ancestry, like
you know all of yours back hundreds and hundreds of years.
And I hear there are Wallace Is in Scotland. Let's
go up there and poke around a little and she went, sure,
(30:38):
why not as an adventure, Let's go to Scotland. She
was four months pregnant. We went to Edinburgh. We walked
into Edinburgh Castle and as we walked into the castle,
my eye fell on a statue on one side of
the castle and it's William Wallace. And there's the name Wallace.
And I went Wallace And the other side was Bruce,
(31:02):
Robert the Bruce. And I grabbed a member of the
Black Watch guard there, tough little guy on a kilt,
and said, who is this Wallace? And he said it's
William Wallace. It's hero. And I went, greatest hero, honey,
greatest hero. And I knew about Robert the Bruce from
(31:23):
a Robert Burns poem of Scott's which have with Wallace bled,
And that was how I knew that there must be
Wallace is in Scotland. And I said, was William Wallace
an ally of Robert the Bruce in fighting the English?
And this guard said, well, no one will ever know
(31:45):
for sure, which, of course are magic words to a writer.
What our legends say more magic words to a writer?
That Robert the Bruce may have been one of those
who betrayed William Wallace into the hands of the English
to clear the way for himself to become the king.
(32:05):
Now I knew none of that history, but it was
as if I had heard that Saint Peter and Judas
were the same person. In that instant, the tumblers all
tripped into my head, and I thought, how does Robert
the Bruce be someone who could do such a terrible thing,
(32:29):
betrayed the hero of his country, but he becomes the
country's greatest, most courageous king. How does that happen? What
if there was something so noble in the life and
death of William Wallace that that's what transformed Robert the
Bruce And I knew in that moment it was an
(32:49):
incredible story that I wanted to write, and I didn't
feel I was yet ready to. For one thing, I
had a baby on the way and I had to
find a way to feed him. So I went into
television and focused on television first. But in television I
gained the skills and didn't know when the time would
(33:12):
come until that moment when I got on my knees
to say the prayer of I'm not going to worship Hollywood,
I'm going to stand up and fight for to write
the kind of movie I want my sons to see.
And that's what William Wallace means to me. And people
will say, oh, well, you're not a relative, and I go,
you can't prove that. And I can't prove that I am,
(33:33):
but you can't prove that I'm not. I had a
meeting with Mel Gibson once when we were doing Braveheart,
and Mel was the biggest star in the world and
I was a completely unknown screenwriter. Hollywood was starting to
hear about me because suddenly this script that they had
(33:55):
never seen was getting made. But Mel and I were dinner,
just the two of us in London, and he was
talking about a role that he was thinking to cast,
and I was questioning the casting choice a bit. He
said something absolutely stunning to me. He said, Look, the
(34:18):
truth is writers write, director's direct actors act from their
essence as a human being. He said, this script is you.
It is right out of your soul. It is you.
He said, I'm going to bring everything I have to
directing it. A few years ago I did a charity
screening of Braveheart in Austin, Texas, and at the end
(34:44):
of the movie, I was in a theater, a small theater.
Into the movie, I walked up on the stage to
do a question and answer with the audience, and the
first person who stood up was a nineteen year old
woman on the front row. And she stood up and said,
mister Wallace, I don't have a question. I just want
(35:06):
to tell you something. My fiance died six months ago,
and before he died he told me he wanted me
to watch Braveheart so I would understand the way he
loved me. It took me a couple of minutes to
compose myself enough to speak. After that, it confirmed for
(35:26):
me what I always have said that it's not war
stories that I write. It's that until you find who
in your life you would give your life for, you're
not really alive yet. That's when you know. I think
Mark Twain said something like the man who is fully
(35:48):
ready to die is the one who is living. He
said it better than that, but that's the thought. And
I think kind of animal instinct for survi is powerful,
but it's not particularly admirable in that it's just an
(36:08):
errand it is what it is. It exists in everything
from I guess, from ants to angels. But the notion
of finding something that you put above yourself is where
I think you really for me. It's where I begin
(36:30):
to find actual meaning. I'm living for someone else, but
to me, faith has to do with standing in awe
and in accepting that there is a God and it's
not me, and that I try to listen to what
(36:52):
God has to say. That's where I found the most meaning.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to Randall
Wallace for sharing his story with us. Is one man show.
The Brave Heart of Creativity is touring the country. To
find out where it's playing or find out how to
bring it to your town, go to Wallace Entertainment dot com.
I love what he said about his movies, particularly the
(37:21):
war movies. It's not war stories. I write their love stories.
Until you find who in your life you would give
your life for, you're not really alive. He also talked
about putting things above himself, that that's when you find
real meaning in your life. And of course faith is
(37:42):
such a big part of Randall's life, standing in awe
that there is a God and it's not me. Randall
Wallace's story here on our American story,
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.