How Dolly Parton became the first icon to win a Razzie for ‘Worst Original Song’
Sylvester Stallone has long been the most decorated actor in the history of the Golden Raspberry Awards, the bizarro Oscars where the most terrible performances of each year are spotlit for the purpose of ridicule.
This makes it somewhat less surprising that, among his more than 40 Razzy nominations over the course of his career, there was a random win for ‘Worst Original Song’ among them, but what is considerably surprising is that Stallone actually shared that 1984 disgrace with one of the most beloved and celebrated singers and songwriters of the era: the Tennessee spitfire and budding movie star named Dolly Parton.
The song in question was a clunker of a novelty booze tune called ‘Drinkinstein’, and the film, which few people saw and far fewer care to remember, was Rhinestone, an ill-fated attempt to adapt the hit 1975 Glen Campbell song ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ into a full-length comedy musical. It starred the can’t-miss, beauty-and-the-beast pairing of Parton, fresh off the breakout success of her first two film roles, 9 to 5 and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and Stallone, who was looking for something lighthearted in between Rocky III and Rambo II. Both were 38 years old and arguably at the peak of their career success. Parton’s duet with Kenny Rogers, ‘Islands in the Stream’, had been one of the biggest hits of 1983, and Stallone was now the face of two huge movie franchises. What could go wrong?
Well, for one thing, they didn’t let Dolly run the show. While she was asked to write a lot of the original songs for Rhinestone, Stallone was given carte blanche to rewrite the original script that writer Phil Alden Robinson had crafted, slowly sapping a lot of the witty and romantic elements out of the story until not even Parton herself could manage enough charisma to salvage it. The sights and sounds of a brooding action hero trying to sing country tunes and crack jokes were, essentially, part of the movie’s central comedic conceit; you just needed an action hero capable of making that leap, but Sly wasn’t it.
“Silly comedy didn’t work for me,” Stallone told Ain’t It Cool News in 2006, noting that he’d loved working with Parton, but regretted making the movie, “I mean, would anybody pay to see John Wayne in a whimsical farce? Not likely. [If I did it now], I would stay more true to who I am and what the audience would prefer rather than trying to stretch out and waste a lot of time and people’s patience.”
While the Rhinestone soundtrack performed far better than the film itself, with two of Parton’s songs becoming top ten hits on the US country charts, the Razzy-winning song ‘Drinkinstein’ was not among them. Sung by Stallone as he curses the evils of alcohol’s grip, the song includes plenty of Dolly witticisms, but they’re just not helped by a rough overall metaphor in which beer is a monster, and the Budweiser Corporation is a mad scientist, or something.
“Budweiser you’ve created a monster / And they call him Drinkinstein / And the tavern down the street is the labba-tor-eye-ee / Where he makes that transformation all the time.”
The Razzy for ‘Drinkin’stein’ made Dolly Parton the first A-list, celebrated songwriter to earn the dreaded badge of dishonour. She beat out three other iconic stars in 1984 to do so, as Prince’s ‘Six Shooter’ (performed by Apollonia in Purple Rain), Freddie Mercury’s ‘Love Kills’ from Metropolis 1984, and one of Dolly’s other songs from Rhinestone, ‘Sweet Lovin’ Friends’, were also nominated.
Rhinestone ended Parton’s winning streak in the early 1980s, but she was, of course, unfazed. She sized up the experience in her 1994 memoir Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business, writing, “I guess the public didn’t want to see Sylvester Stallone do comedy, or see me do Sylvester Stallone”.
