Writing the Country Music Biopic: Abe Sylvia Discusses 'George & Tammy'

In the past, there have been some searing country music biopics. Sweet Dreams (1985), Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), and Walk the Line (2005) gave warts-and-all portrayals of their troubled troubadours. Country songs usually tell stories mined from the singer’s real-life experiences. Infidelity, drinking, heartache, and economic strife are common themes. These days, these types of intimate portrayals are more commonly found on television than on the big screen. Limited series offer a chance for a broader view of characters and their lives. One current six-episode series that gives us a brief entree into the world of a couple of legendary country music singers is Showtime’s George & Tammy, which takes a clear-eyed look at George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s turbulent relationship.

Starring Jessica Chastain and Michael Shannon, the series premiered on CMT, Showtime, and the Paramount Network on December 4, 2022. It took writer/director/producer Abe Sylvia several years to bring this stormy romance to life. The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021) scribe is as comfortable in film as he is in television. For him, a good story is a good story, no matter the format. He recently spoke with us about staying true to a story and writing vibrant stories that do their characters justice.

On His Writing Process

My writing process has always been organic. When I was a kid in high school, I started doing plays, which is the access point for people who want to be in the performing arts. You get to do everything. You're sewing the costumes. You're building the sets. You're rehearsing. And then the show goes up. Then you do another play. I thought my whole life was going to be that and I went to college for it. Then I got my first Broadway show, and I realized I was doing the same thing every night. Then I discovered that I like production. I like the making of the thing. I'm not that stimulated by the sustaining of it. That's a real talent. I have many friends in that world who do long-running shows. That's an art form. It’s just not something I’m good at.

I was in Cats on Broadway and my mind was wandering. I started writing very organically. Suddenly, I had three or four scripts that I'd written and that became important to me. My writing stemmed from an over-active imagination that wasn't stimulated by doing the same thing eight times a week. I had these ideas and these scripts and no one would take me seriously because every chorus boy has a script. 

9/11 happened and I started reevaluating my life. I decided that if people were going to take me seriously, I needed a formal education in this. I applied to UCLA Film School and got my Master's. I was in the production department there as a directing major but the big focus at UCLA is on the auteur theory so you are writing what you're directing. I continued to grow as a filmmaker. So now, sometimes I write, sometimes I direct. Sometimes I direct what I write, sometimes I write for other people. I wear many hats.

If I'm working on a television show that I'm producing, I'm in the writers' room as well. I've directed things that I haven't written but on a show that I've helped develop. I usually have a pretty close relationship with the development of the material. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from being in a writers’ room is don't let your ego get in the way of a good idea. Even if it doesn't come from you, support the best idea.

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When I write, I direct on the page. I'm very clear about what I want to see, when I want to see it, and where the breaths are. I keep my screen direction and action down to two to three lines tops. You have to make your scripts director-proof because you never know in television who's going to direct them. I try to keep action lines distilled to their most essential components.

I wouldn’t say that I have a particular style. I think if anything I have a style in the way that I work, not in the finished product.

Writing for Television vs Features

I feel like it's all the same. Writing a good story is writing a good story. The game of getting something made can be very different and in many ways the same. It's hard to get anything made, whether it's for a movie screen or television screen. I don't have a preference. I just want the story to be good and to work. I do like the immediacy of television. I do like that once a show is up and running, it's impossible for it to get overdeveloped because the script is chasing production at all times. Whereas, I do feel that in movies, it's always one more rewrite to that greenlight. Pretty soon, you've written for so many rounds of executives that the reason to do it has sort of left the script. I'm always trying to project the kernel of the project, the connection I have to it.

Giving Life to George & Tammy

I didn't have any rights to anything, but I wrote the first feature script on spec and very quickly attached Jessica Chastain to play Tammy. Then we were set up three different times with three different studios and with three different directors. Things are hard to get made. For whatever reason, it just didn't come to pass. 

At the same time, my stock was rising in television. One of the reasons it wasn't getting made was because it's a complicated story about complicated people that's made for grown-ups. It's about nuance of character instead of a big event. Movies are about big tentpole events. Or they’re very quiet works of art. Ours was an "adult" film. What I noticed is that people were taking more chances with these kinds of stories in television. That's where I'd started having my strongest development relationships and I was starting to make a name for myself. So, I broke the story into a limited series. When I asked Jessica, who doesn't do a lot of TV, if she'd be interested in doing it as a limited series, she said absolutely. We took it out and it sold very quickly, after developing it for ten years as a feature...!

The tentpoles of the screenplay are the tentpoles of the script. But now instead of having three pages to say something, I had forty-two. Our first go at mapping out the first season was for a ten-episode arc. Then the network said, "You can only have six." I think we benefitted from that because we had to choose wisely. George and Tammy had interesting lives well beyond what we cover in the series. We couldn't go down every rabbit hole. Hopefully, the show inspires people to dig deeper into their story.

Tammy Faye Baker and Tammy Wynette do have some similarities to the extent that they're both drawn to extreme behaviors. I think they're both iconoclastic women but very much individuals. They both had addictive tendencies. Their approach to love was so profoundly different that it really separates them. Both were performative women but performative in vastly different ways.

[Grounding the Emotional Experience with ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’ Screenwriter Abe Sylvia]

Jessica’s portrayal of Tammy Wynette is masterful. We'd get to set, talk through the day’s work, and then she'd get on set and kill it. She is an artist who is really in control of her gifts. It's exciting to be working near someone who's at the height of their powers. And to have them saying your words is a thrilling experience. The same goes for Mike. He acts from the core of his being. He can't do anything that isn't true. Because they're such good friends and they trust each other, we had a nice little triangle of creativity between the three of us and I hope that comes through in the series.

We'd spent so much time developing it that the creative riddle that had to be solved mostly involved working around logistics creatively. Like, if a prop didn't show up, how do you rewrite the moment so that we could keep going? It was that sort of creative problem solving from a production standpoint and trying to make those decisions and decisions you could live with. Staying on task and finishing on time was probably the biggest hurdle.

On Research Discoveries

I'm going to keep a couple of my finds to myself because I promised the family I would. There are some things that we found out that aren't published, that aren't part of the public record. They're very illuminating on a textural and subconscious level. But the biggest thing was...and forgive me George and Tammy's final spouses...that they were hooking up on the last tour. That wasn't part of any public record. Tammy's best friend told us that. To find out that the fire still remained between them at that point in their lives was very exciting and the fact that no one knew that before this and that in portraying that, we weren't just making something up, was thrilling. Everybody was on board with us sharing that.

On the Similarities Between a Hit Country Song and a Strong Script

Country songs involve a complicated story told in a straightforward manner. A good country song feels simple, but it's layer after layer after layer. With a good country song, they choose their words wisely and they have an impact. They're true poetry. When you take a song like "Two Story House," which Tammy wrote with a couple of other songwriters, it sounds like a song about a couple who got together and all they ever dreamed about was a two story house. And now they're not together and all they have is two stories. That is an impactful metaphor and a wonderful play on words. It's profound. We struck that tone in the writing of the series and hopefully, that's reflected in the scripting. 

George & Tammy is available on Showtime.

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