A modern-day classic, Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), starring Sissy Spacek, is the story of country star Loretta Lynn and is considered one of the best films to use the country music industry as its background. It and Sweet Dreams, a 1985 movie starring Jessica Lange as Patsy Cline, evoke a sense of what downtown Nashville was like in the early years of country music during the late 1940s and 1950s.
Back in 1975, director Robert Altman trained his baleful and ironic eye on the city in another classic film, Nashville, which covered a day in the life of the city and several typically Nashvillian characters. A few decades later, River Phoenix portrayed a struggling Music City songwriter in The Thing Called Love (1993). Sadly, it was the young actor's last on-screen appearance. He died of a drug overdose a few months after the film was released.
Brief but memorable Music City scenes can also be spotted in Spike Lee's Get on the Bus (1996) and the satirical Wag the Dog (1997). Perhaps best known of all, The Green Mile (1999), starring Tom Hanks, was filmed at the abandoned Tennessee State Penitentiary outside Nashville. Robert Redford and James Gandolfini followed suit, filming their prison drama The Last Castle (2001) at the former prison.
