Songs - they don’t get a lot of respect as adaptation material. And why should they? Most movies based on songs are terrible! Convoy ring any bells? How about Harper Valley PTA? Alice’s Restaurant doesn’t even begin to redeem these horrors.

But I still think that a great song can become a great movie - and here are four songs that are aching to be adapted.

1. “Decoration Day” by The Drive-By Truckers

It’s almost unfair to choose a song by the Truckers, since intricately detailed narratives are such an important part of their songcraft. This is probably the most compelling of their original narratives, a modern-day Hatfields and McCoys set in the anonymous South. The battle of the Lawsons against the Hills seems to be a losing one, but that doesn’t stop our unnamed narrator from fatalistically driving on, trying to redeem his father’s death. Some of the incredible images, all of which work perfectly (perhaps too perfectly) within the visual shorthand of cinema, should speak for themselves:

“Daddy said one of the boys had come by,
The Lumber Man’s favorite son.
He said, ‘Beat him real good but don’t dare let him die
And if you see Holland Hill, run.’”

“My Daddy got shot right in front of his house
He had noone to fall on but me.”

So how would I make “Decoration Day,” the movie? I’d resist the temptation to produce some sort of faux-Malickian elegy of the South and go the straightest route possible, just classical craftsmanship, a long ASL, and a moderate amount of unappealing violence. Maybe - maybe - I’d soften the image by flashing the film before hand. Films I’d study: McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Electra Glide in Blue, Cockfighter.

2. “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” by Bob Dylan

They’ve tried! This is a song that both Dylan and a major studio have tried to commission into a screenplay. What is it about this song that plays so cinematically? As with the above Drive-By Truckers song, there’s an emphasis on visual imagery in the lyrics that isn’t always there in Dylan’s work. Again, with the neo-western, though this film, based on Dylan’s epic narrative about the title characters (and Big Jim) and their various romantic/criminal entanglements coming to a head. Not only is the song itself written in such clearly visual terms, but the themes and actions play especially well to film - the romantic facades put up by all the players, the shot/reverse shots of our figures sizing each other up, the continuing visual analogies being drawn to playing cards. Probably not enough plot here for a major feature, but someone could make an awesome long short of this. Films to study: Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (duh), High Plains Drifter, Death Rides a Horse.

3. “Out in the Streets” by The Shangri-Las

Those of you who know me might know that “Out in the Streets” holds a special place in my heart. It’s my favorite song by one of my favorite artists, and it’s a pretty astonishing mini-suite about a good girl who must let her bad-boy boyfriend return to his urban station, because she realizes how miserable he is trying to go legit. This is all, like a lot of the best girl group songs, mildly offensive, but there’s an incredible melodramatic power to Mary Weiss’s vocals, and the song itself shifts through enough emotional registers for two Universal melodramas.

So what would I do? Start with a dab of Sirk - ebullient Eastmancolor, sweeping camera moves, and extreme emotional manipulation. Perhaps a shot in which the boy - gifted a job and dressed up in finery supplied by the girl’s titan-of-industry father, sees himself reflected in a silver spoon, his face distorted in the elegant flatware. But I also want a healthy touch of over-the-top eroticism, and for that, let’s look at Kenneth Anger’s “Kustom Kar Kommandos” - maybe some slow-mos of The Boy and his friends running through the streets, the camera lingering fetishistically on their well-toned bodies. Also to study: Ray’s treatment of Dean’s body in Rebel, Benedek’s treatment of Brando’s face in The Wild One.

At the end of my film, of course, the couple would get back together, but only after the tragic death of one of the boy’s friends and the rejection of the girl by her father - and there’d be a majestic stag (or some urban equivalent - a pair of pigeons?) looking in on them together as they reject society’s constraints.

4. “Atlantic City” by Bruce Springsteen

“Atlantic City” is a good pairing with “Out in the Streets,” actually. It’s another song about a man trying - and failing - to go legit in an America with a retardedly overdetermined class system. It also evokes a time and a place in American history very well - I’d set this back in Reagan’s 80s, after Atlantic City became hopeless but before it became useless. Gritty, black-and-white (hand-held?) camerawork. 16mm.

Alternately, I could see using this song as the anachronistic backdrop for an adaptation of Lawrence Block’s nasty little crime novel Grifter’s Game, seen above.

As a point of fact, when I was young and the type to read books by screenwriting gurus who weren’t Alexander Mackendrick, at least one used Springsteen’s lyrics as an example of how to write action in a screenplay.

Films to study: Killer of Sheep, Border Radio, On the Bowery, early Frederick Wiseman documentaries, “Carnival” (Natalie Merchant video - and a stunningly shot one, at that!).

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