James Bridges (Urban Cowboy) Urban Cowboy (1980)
James Bridges (February 3, 1936 – June 6, 1993) co-wrote and directed Urban Cowboy (1980). He was forty-three during production.
Bridges came up through Hitchcock television and the Roger Corman writing room
Bridges was born in Paris, Arkansas, and educated at Arkansas State Teachers College and the University of Southern California. He spent the early 1960s as a writer on Alfred Hitchcock's television anthology The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962–65), where he wrote episodes including "An Unlocked Window." He moved into film writing through Roger Corman, scripting The Appaloosa (1966) for Marlon Brando and The Forbin Project (1970).
His directing career began with The Baby Maker (1970) and The Paper Chase (1973) — the latter a critical hit that earned John Houseman an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Septembers of Shiraz (1979 — September 30, 1955) followed, then The China Syndrome (1979), the nuclear-power thriller that arrived in theaters twelve days before Three Mile Island and made him bankable. Urban Cowboy was the picture he made with the China Syndrome capital.
Bridges and Latham wrote the screenplay together over six months
Aaron Latham's Esquire article was the source. Bridges and Latham wrote the screenplay together — Bridges shaping the structure and the dialogue rhythms, Latham bringing the world. Bridges has spoken in subsequent interviews about how the relationship worked.
"Aaron knew the place. He knew Gilley's, he knew the refinery, he knew the people. I knew structure. We sat in a room for six months. The screenplay is half him and half me, and I don't always know which half is which." — James Bridges, American Film (1980)
Bridges directed the film as character work, not as country-western spectacle
The picture's most striking directorial decision is to refuse the spectacular. The mechanical bull is shot at human scale; the rodeo contest is staged so that the win is empty within thirty seconds; the Mickey Gilley and Charlie Daniels Band performances are ambient rather than centerpieced. Bridges treats the country-western surface as the room the picture is set in, not as the thing the picture is about. The thing the picture is about is two people learning what marriage costs.
"Jim was not interested in the country-western thing. He was interested in the marriage. The bull was a metaphor. Gilley's was a setting. The picture was about Bud and Sissy. Everything else was wallpaper." — Reynaldo Villalobos, American Cinematographer (1980)
The structural decision to deliberately empty the bull contest as a climax candidate (see The Decoy Climax) is a Bridges directorial decision, not a script accident. The picture is shaped to make the audience feel the difference between the costume reading of the cowboy and the character reading of the cowboy, and the camera keeps making that argument.
The career after Urban Cowboy was uneven
Bridges directed Mike's Murder (1984) — a second collaboration with Debra Winger, mishandled by the studio in editing; Perfect (1985) with Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis, a misfire; and Bright Lights, Big City (1988), a Jay McInerney adaptation with Michael J. Fox. He died in 1993 of cancer at fifty-seven.
"Jim Bridges was the most underrated American director of the 1970s and 1980s. He made The Paper Chase. He made The China Syndrome. He made Urban Cowboy. Three pictures any director would want on his stone. He doesn't have a stone." — John Travolta, GQ (2014)
He is one of the workmanlike American directors whose body of work is steadily being reassessed (see James Bridges and the Workmanlike Auteur).