The writer Billy Bob Thornton called the Lennon to his McCartney: “We’re at each other’s throats”
Having fallen in love with The Beatles at an early age, it makes sense for actor, filmmaker, and musician Billy Bob Thornton to forge a longstanding friendship with echoes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
The mop-topped Liverpudlians made such an influence on the impressionable Arkansas native that he was convinced they were too good. Thornton maintains that “the bar had been set so high” for the next generation of musicians that there was no chance anyone would be able to reach it, never mind clear it.
He was only eight years old when John, Paul, George, and Ringo changed the industry forever with their seminal performance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, with the Academy Award winner revealing that he “just lived and breathed The Beatles my whole life after that.” In his case, art also imitated life, with one of his closet friends and confidants becoming the other side of his creative coin.
Having grown up together, Thornton and Thomas Epperson moved from their home state to Los Angeles at the same time with hopes of making it in the industry. The former became a successful actor and occasional director, while the latter collaborated with his buddy on several projects and carved out his own career as an author and screenwriter.
The duo co-wrote the scripts for Carl Franklin’s One False Move, Richard Pearce’s A Family Thing, Sam Raimi’s The Gift, James Keach’s Camouflage, and Thornton’s third feature as a director, Jayne Mansfield’s Car. They’ve been close since the ’60s, but as the Landman star confessed to The Playlist, it hasn’t always been plain sailing between them.
“We always had a pretty good working relationship,” he explained. “We’ve had our Lennon/McCartney times where we’re at each other’s throats, but we’ve known each other since I was eight and he was 12; that’s just gonna happen. It’s not hard for us to know who should write what. We know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, so we don’t even usually have to discuss it.”
Thornton suggested that the reason they’ve worked so well together over so many years is “because ego doesn’t come into it about that kind of thing.” If he doesn’t like one of Epperson’s ideas or thinks he can make it better, then he doesn’t have to skirt around the issue to risk hurting his friend’s feelings, and vice versa, and it’s served them well when they’ve teamed on close to half a dozen scripts so far.
Obviously, it isn’t quite the same as Lennon and McCartney putting their heads together and crafting some of the most indelible songs that have ever been written. Some of Thornton and Epperson’s team-ups have turned out better than others, with One False Move a sorely underrated and overlooked cult classic, while The Gift, which was written before Sling Blade and inspired by its creator’s memories of his mother having psychic experiences, ticks many of the same boxes.
Still, everyone would love to find the Lennon to their McCartney one day, and he found his when he was eight years old.
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