Both Gleason and Zaentz also recognized the importance of Carpenter’s only choice of actor to play Maury Dann. “Rip Torn was a friend of his,” Zaentz remembered, and Torn’s non-budgeable presence in the lead role sharply narrowed the list of directors that Gleason, Carpenter, and Zaentz felt comfortable approaching. Recently, on another low-budget independent film set, that of 1970’s Maidstone, Torn had taken a hammer to director Norman Mailer’s head, splitting the Great American Author’s scalp open on camera, in full view of Mailer’s justifiably horrified family. Payday would hold Rip Torn front and center for nearly its entire running time, and the necessarily quickly made, low-budget enterprise called for a director that could handle the quantity and quality of interpretive goods that the actor would inevitably bring to the gig. Torn had already made it clear that his participation in Payday was, in part, contingent on his doing his own singing.

When he signed on to direct Payday, Canadian-born and CBC trained director Daryl Duke had both documentary experience and a literature degree under his belt. And while Duke’s prior directorial outing—a turgid, stage-bound ABC Movie of the Week potboiler called The President’s Plane Is Missing—was a universe away from Maury Dann’s life and times, the film proved noteworthy for two reasons. Firstly, it had remained shelved for more than a year to separate the story’s fictional villains (spoiler alert: the Chinese Communist Party) from the reality of President Nixon’s surprise trip to China. More importantly, the acting ensemble in The President’s Plane Is Missing included Rip Torn as a nefarious, pipe-smoking policy wonk. Mailer’s experience to the contrary, Duke considered Torn “a director’s dream come true.”

Duke’s passion for his leading man was in lockstep with his affectionate but unsentimental foreign-born eye for the turbid extremes of non-Canadian North American life. Per Duke, prior to Payday mainstream audiences “might’ve seen Elizabeth Taylor popping pills,” but never an average Joe abusing drugs in the unglamorous service of getting the business of music done, or at least not without some kind of finger-wagging moralism coming into play. Up to that time, according to Duke in his commentary for the 2008 DVD release of Payday, “most of America was left on the cutting room floor… Don Carpenter’s extraordinary script gave me a chance to enter an America that I had read about and that I had touched on in doing documentary films and in circling around news events, but never [approached before] in the form of drama.”

Duke’s smooth, gently incisive direction gilds Payday with a glass-bottom boat view of Maury Dann’s roughly 36-hour decline and fall, made vivid and livid by Torn’s absolute commitment to the righteous cause of his character’s self-immolation. (“I’ve always seen the world with a frame around it,” Duke explained to an interviewer a few years before his death in 2006.) Dann’s handful of deviations from the lost highway—chiefly a pair of visits to an ex-wife, in which he comes across as a sort of ghost haunting a previous life, and a booze-and-pill amped encounter with his beloved bird dog, hunting buddies, and mother—are played clean and straight. Everything is framed in near-porn-movie-ugly lighting revealing an American South that, at least as I remember from being transplanted below the Mason Dixon line at around the time that Payday was made, was near-porn-movie-ugly in reality. Slight, unostentatious, and emotionally explicative camera moves and zooms unpack the film’s Sisyphean dramatic circumstances. Motel room parties and couplings, or a restaurant confrontation and ensuing parking lot tussle, are largely shot from seated heights, making the audience an uncomfortable addition to Maury Dann’s touring entourage. It’s a position Gleason knew from hanging out with Williams and company at San Pablo Hall back in ‘52. Another remembrance from his 1969 Rolling Stone piece could’ve been pasted into nearly any page of the Payday script:

“He was a little stoned and didn't seem to remember our conversation earlier in the day and the party was beginning to get a little rough. They were whiskey drinkers and so I gave them room, looked around a while, and then went on back out.”

Alas, Payday flopped at the box office. The majors passed on distributing it and Cinerama releasing, just a few years short of folding, thought they had another Willard on their hands. The only person I know who saw Payday in first release did so at the Thunderbird Drive-in in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. A handful of positive reviews did little to help. Hindsight being 20-20, I wonder if foregrounding a pull quote from Nick Tosches review in Creem magazine—“Payday is a great fucking movie”—might have filled a few additional seats. Too sordid for broadcast TV, I’d never even heard of Payday until the same friend commanded me to see it when it surfaced for a night in the 1980s at the old Thalia. His pitch at the time included the observation that the view of c&w music and musicians in Payday made it the antithesis of Robert Altman’s universally better-known and revered Nashville. Sure enough, as soon as the lights went up after Payday at the Thalia, the curtain rose on Nashville. Payday is movie (white) lightning in a bottle: a weirdly dated yet timeless celebratory stake in the heart of sentimental, country-fried Americana. And where Altman’s condescending social mosaic could just as well have been set in the world of primate research or professional tennis, Maury Dann’s Lost Highway belonged only to the scrubby dirt backroads of country music. •

Bruce Bennett is a musician and recovering film critic who scripts unscripted TV from inside a shed in upstate New York.