The most devastating moment of Billy Bob Thornton’s career: “I think I’m obsolete”
Besides their shared first name, Billy Wilder and Billy Bob Thornton have nothing in common other than their shared status as filmmakers. And yet, a harsh truth from the former sent the latter on the path to joining him as an Academy Award winner.
Living the cliché, Thornton worked as a waiter to make ends meet while trying to make a name for himself in Hollywood. A chance encounter with the legendary director saw the six-time Oscar winner bluntly inform the young upstart that he was too ugly to be a leading man and too unmemorable to be a character actor.
Instead, Wilder suggested that Thornton create his own material, which is exactly what he did. He’d been working solidly for over a decade by the time it was released, but it wasn’t until Sling Blade that it felt like he’d arrived. He won the Oscar for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’ and earned a ‘Best Actor’ nomination for a movie he also directed, proving Wilder right.
Unfortunately, he never recaptured those heights. 2000s literary adaptation, All the Pretty Horses, was hacked to pieces in post-production by Harvey Weinstein, bombed at the box office, and fared miserably with critics. The following year, Daddy and Them received some acclaim, but it was barely promoted, and they spent three years sitting on the shelf after being branded as too uncommercial.
It would be over a decade before Thornton stepped behind the camera again, and when he did, the results weren’t great either. 2013’s Jayne Mansfield’s Car was another middling effort that lost money, and after three misses in a row, the star eventually realised that maybe Hollywood politics meant he wasn’t destined to be a director after all.
Describing it as “another heartbreak”, Thornton was crushed by its failure. “This movie I did a couple of years ago that nobody saw, and a few bloggers said bad things about it, and nobody ever heard about it,” he lamented to Entertainment Weekly. “It’s pretty damned good.”
As a result, despite one of the industry’s all-time greats telling him to seize his opportunities as a filmmaker, Thornton realised he was better off as an actor-for-hire. “I think I’m obsolete as a film director,” he confessed. “I don’t think there’s a place for me as a film director, or a writer.”
Since Jayne Mansfield’s Car was released, Thornton has embraced his fate. He hasn’t been credited as a writer or director on anything since, and maybe he never will be again. For someone who created their own luck and used Sling Blade as the launchpad to mainstream success, it’s a kick in the teeth for someone who became well-known for writing and directing their star vehicle to be left on the outside looking in after a couple of flops and some shifty studio politics killed the dream.
