Production History (Urban Cowboy) Urban Cowboy (1980)

Aaron Latham's Esquire piece was the source

The film began with a magazine article. Aaron Latham, a Texas Monthly and Esquire writer who had grown up in Spur, Texas, spent the spring of 1978 hanging around Gilley's, the vast Pasadena, Texas honky-tonk co-owned by Mickey Gilley and Sherwood Cryer. The piece he filed — "The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy: America's Search for True Grit" — ran in Esquire on September 12, 1978, and centered on a young refinery worker named Dew Westbrook and his bull-riding girlfriend Betty.^{(The Latham Source Article)}

Producer Robert Evans optioned the piece for Paramount within months of publication. Evans had run Paramount production through The Godfather, Chinatown, and Marathon Man, and was now an independent producer with a first-look deal at the studio. He hired James Bridges (in Urban Cowboy) — fresh off The China Syndrome (1979) — to co-write and direct.

"Aaron Latham wrote a piece in Esquire that I read on the airplane. I read it and said: 'This is a movie.'" — Robert Evans, Vanity Fair (2010)

Bridges and Latham wrote the screenplay together. Bridges was a Paris, Arkansas-born director with a literary background; Latham knew the world the picture was about and brought the article's reportage forward into the dialogue.

Travolta committed early and stayed committed across a year of training

John Travolta (in Urban Cowboy) was attached early. He had grown up on the Welcome Back, Kotter television series and had become, after Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978), the biggest star of his generation. Urban Cowboy was the picture between his two big musicals and the leaner 1980s. He took the work seriously: he set up a mechanical bull at his Santa Barbara ranch and trained on it for months, working with rodeo coach Buck Flowers and stunt-coordinator Conrad E. Palmisano.

"I had the bull for five or six months at my place. I rode it every day. I knew what every bolt did. By the time we shot, I could ride it as well as the rodeo guys." — John Travolta, Texas Monthly (2018)

The training was load-bearing. Travolta rides in most of his bull shots himself; Sissy's bull rides are largely Debra Winger (in Urban Cowboy).

Debra Winger was cast against type at the last minute

Several actresses passed on or were considered for Sissy. Sissy Spacek was Bridges's first choice — Latham had named the character Sissy partly with Spacek in mind — but she was unavailable. Michelle Pfeiffer auditioned. Bridges saw Winger in a French Postcards dailies tape and brought her in.

"Debra came in, and she did a scene with John, and you could feel the whole room shift. The two of them — they didn't act it. They just had it. We knew within fifteen minutes." — James Bridges, American Film (1980)

Winger trained on the bull alongside Travolta. She and Travolta did not get on personally during the shoot — Winger has spoken about this in subsequent interviews — but the antagonism reads onscreen as something the picture wanted (see Debra Winger's Emergence).

Gilley's was the location, not a set

Bridges shot the Gilley's interiors at the actual Gilley's Club in Pasadena, Texas, between July and October 1979. The honky-tonk stayed open for business during portions of the shoot; many of the dancers and bar patrons in the wide shots are real Gilley's regulars.

"We didn't dress the place. We didn't add anything. We just turned the lights down a little and shot what was there. The place was already a movie." — Reynaldo Villalobos, American Cinematographer (1980)

The mechanical bull at Gilley's was the actual bull (one of several Sherwood Cryer had bought from the El Paso machine shop that built them); after the film made it famous, every roadhouse in America wanted one (see The Mechanical Bull).

The refinery exteriors were shot at Houston-area Gulf Coast plants. The interior of the trailer Bud and Sissy live in was a real 50-foot mobile home, dressed and lit by Reynaldo Villalobos (in Urban Cowboy) for cramped two-shots.

Irving Azoff produced the soundtrack as a parallel project

Co-producer Irving Azoff was the manager of the Eagles and head of Front Line Management. Paramount let him build the soundtrack as a parallel commercial enterprise. Azoff signed acts to the album who appear in the film performing themselves — Mickey Gilley, Johnny Lee, the Charlie Daniels Band, Bonnie Raitt — and pulled Eagles, Boz Scaggs, Linda Ronstadt, and Anne Murray cuts from his and his peers' catalogs.

"Irving knew this was going to be the country-pop crossover album of the decade. He treated the soundtrack like an Eagles record. He was right." — Robert Evans, Vanity Fair (2010)

The double LP, released in May 1980 a month before the film, would sell more than three million copies in the U.S. and produce two number-one country singles — Johnny Lee's "Lookin' for Love" and Mickey Gilley's cover of "Stand By Me" (see The Soundtrack).

Release was June 6, 1980, and the cultural impact was immediate

Paramount opened the film on June 6, 1980, on roughly 700 screens. It grossed $46.8 million on a budget of about $10 million, the eighteenth-highest grossing film of the year. The mechanical bull went viral — every honky-tonk and a great many suburban bars in 1980 and 1981 installed one. Country radio's market share spiked. Western wear sales boomed. The film was the visible face of a country-pop crossover that had been brewing since the mid-1970s and that Urban Cowboy both crystallized and accelerated (see The Rhinestone Cowboy Generation and Gilley's).