The Story of the Man Behind Movie Classics “Braveheart,” “We Were Soldiers,” Secretariat,” and others —Screenwriter/Director, Randall Wallace

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, Heaven Is for Real, and more. He’s the author of seven novels, and he also wrote the lyrics for “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 WallaceEntertainment.com. Here’s Randall Wallace with his own story.

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. 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, 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, Kris Kristofferson came to Duke, and Kris Kristofferson epitomized it, did then, and still 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 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 career in music, and I would look for people who epitomized the kind of person I wanted to be. Kris Kristofferson 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 love. So I thought, well, what did he do? And hear this: Rhodes Scholar! He didn’t go to New York or L.A. 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 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 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 I’m having a struggle. And I’d just love your thoughts.” And he went, “You’ve 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 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 into him three different times since then, and though that was a long time ago—decades ago—each time I’ve thanked him and told him who I was. But he was so gracious and grateful when he heard his thing. “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 was in Nashville in the early 1970s, and I had gotten a job at a theme park there called Opryland 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 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 Pigerachi who played the piano, and a duck named Bert Baquack that played the drum. It was a great show. 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.

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 of a drunk songwriter who we admired named Kris Kristofferson, who knew nothing about Randall’s musical proclivities or the styles or tastes of Randall Wallace 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 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 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 OurAmericanStories.com and make a donation to keep the stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with 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, Heaven 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. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

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 Hiatt and others, and they wrote absolutely 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?” 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 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 greatest calling that anyone could have.” And he said, “No, you’re wrong. The greatest calling anyone 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 Beethoven, nothing but music all day long, every day. But what you find is Jordan Peterson talks 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 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 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 II and written an incredible story. And I picked it up and began 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. 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 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, 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 interweaves. And I know that nothing that we do gets wasted. All things work together for good if you love God. And I don’t mean as a reward. I mean, you love what is ultimate and significant and 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 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 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 talking the friend through it, and I thought, well, that’s a great guy to do that for his buddy. And the guy in good shape was telling stories about Elvis Presley, and 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 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 Post.” And I said, “I’m Rando.” “Wait, what Mike? Who, Mike Post?”

And I go, “The music Mike Post?” Because I knew he had had a hit with “Classical Gas” and I knew some of his other competes. I mean, Mike Post is a musical genius. And he said, “Yeah, yeah, that’s me.” And I started. I went with his running 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 kind of his kind of guy, and, well, man.” Steve Cannell was then King of Television. The A-Team was his biggest, but Hunter, all sorts of shows. And Mike said, “Give me a minute, I’m going to 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 work.” So Mike came back and said, “I want you to write a spec script for every episode that Cannell 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 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 J.J. 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 story about why I would be the guy to work on this show. 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 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: he loved what he did. 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 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 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 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 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 or something, and I took him down on the Sunday to clean out my office with me, and we’re packing up, and I was knotted up. I knew I was facing total unknown. And Andrew said, “Daddy, how are we going to eat?” And it was quite a moment, and just the two of us in…