A major Nashville singing star of the late 1980s is making quiet but impressive strides toward achieving a Hollywood film presence at the end of the ’90s.
Randy Travis, whose multimillion-selling meld of youth and traditionalism revolutionized country music and set off its international explosion in the early ’90s, has gotten well past the dabbling stage as a movie thespian.
Travis’ growing list of credits includes small but apparently very visible roles in a variety of forthcoming high-profile projects–Francis Ford Coppola’s production of the John Grisham novel “The Rainmaker”; “Steel Chariots,” a Disney-Fox TV movie; a new Steven Seagal thriller called “Fire Down Under”; and “Annabelle’s Wish,” a holiday-season animated film in which Travis supplies the voice of one of the characters and sings a song.
“It’s finally starting to happen a little bit,” affirms the mild-mannered singer, who will appear Friday and Saturday at Star Plaza in Merrillville, Ind., and whose voice is one of the most adept and recognizable from Nashville’s past couple of decades. “Doing that small thing in the Coppola movie is definitely a big step forward.”
Possessor of chiseled features and eyes that can blaze with the inner fire that nearly landed him in prison as a rebellious teen, the 38-year-old North Carolina native has been patiently cultivating the Hollywood vineyard for several years, appearing in episodes of the network TV series “Matlock” and “Touched by an Angel” as well as playing substantial roles in a lengthening list of cable TV westerns and similar projects.
He says he got the part of a combative jury member in the Coppola project through the efforts of actor Jon Voight, with whom he has been friends for more than a year. In the film, he says, he and Voight “have words” before the Travis character leaps over the front row of jurors onto lawyer Voight and they proceed to have a fistfight.
Voight directed a rough audition tape in which he worked with Travis off the cuff, eventually staging a version of the fight scene. Most such tapes go to the casting staff, Travis says, but Coppola demanded to see it himself and, after he did, was quoted as saying that “anybody who goes to this much trouble ought to have the part.”
“It’s the scene you’ll remember when you see the movie, I think,” Travis says, “and it’s a wonderful thing for me to be able to do.”
In “Steel Chariots,” which he describes as a cooperative Disney-Fox-NASCAR venture, he has what appears to be another memorable small role: that of a former racecar driver turned preacher. Travis says the production is to be a midseason replacement on the Fox network, where if it is successful, it will be picked up for a weekly series. In it, his character would reappear “every once in a while.”
This fall he expects to work in “Storm of the Heart” from Magic Garden Productions. He is set to play an unconventional psychologist who, rather than simply interviewing people on the couch, is much more demonstrative in pushing them toward solutions to their problems.
But film work isn’t the only thing Travis is looking forward to this fall. There also will be a dramatic change in his recording process. After some 11 years with Warner Bros. and producer Kyle Lehning, the singer is auditioning prospective new recording associates.
He purports to be “leaning toward” DreamWorks, the newly opened Nashville label connected with yet another film giant, Steven Spielberg. There he naturally would be expected to work with the label’s chief, prominent Nashville producer James Stroud, but he indicates the production chores may be a team effort that could include someone from beyond the pale of mainstream Nashville.
“I’ve given serious thought to producers that lean toward a pop sound some,” he says, while adding that he isn’t looking for “a heavy string sound and all that.” But he needs, he says, something different enough to be “really special” following his last Warner Bros. album, which he says didn’t work for country radio.
Possible non-mainstream people he mentioned were Robert John “Mutt” Lange, the pop-rock producer (and husband) of Shania Twain, and Chris Ferren, who produced Deana Carter’s “Did I Shave My Legs For This.”
Amid all these other activities, he continues to take his music to audiences across America during the summer months and on occasion during the rest of the year–while, he says, his absence from radio playlists leads much of the public to assume he has retired to his Maui vacation home.
With all the movie and TV labor and efforts to get his recording back on a productive track, he’d just as soon correct that misapprehension.
“I’m working my butt off,” he says.
