How ‘Song Sung Blue’ Director Craig Brewer Went From Barnes & Noble to the Big Time
The filmmaker on how ‘Hustle & Flow’ changed his life and what to make of the Oscars’ jump to YouTube: ‘We are moving into a different age’
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Song Sung Blue writer and director Craig Brewer isn’t concerned about the news that the Academy Awards will leave ABC after 52 years to stream live on YouTube starting in 2029.
“My kids are really getting so much of their information on YouTube,” Brewer, 54, told me on the latest episode of Rushfield Lunch. “We are moving into a different age — or, I would offer that we’ve already moved, and we’re probably just now trying to know how to feel about it. But the days of maybe just turning on ABC and having the family gather around the TV — I think sports is the only thing really now that is giving people that experience.”
Still, he does have one complaint to share with the Academy’s leadership. “I loved, back in the day, when a best picture nominee was being announced, that they chose a scene to show. Now, it’s kind of like a trailer,” Brewer said, noting how he can still recall the scenes shown for 1980s best picture winners Gandhi and The Last Emperor.
“Don’t show me a trailer. Give me a scene that is the essence,” he added. “Not that I have any sway over the Academy programmers, but I miss the old scenes.”
Brewer is one of our great storytellers with a body of work that, since his Sundance hit Hustle & Flow in 2005, has focused on humanity and empathy. Song Sung Blue might be the best example of that yet, a movie I’d recommend to anyone, young or old, without reservations. It’s about an ordinary couple from Milwaukee (played by Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman) who experience highs and lows as a pair of Neil Diamond tribute artists.
“I feel it’s a uniquely American story,” Brewer told me about the Focus release, out on Christmas. “To be dreaming so incredibly outside the bounds of reason, and yet that journey ultimately spurs you into action…. There’s something about those kinds of dreamers that I really respond to. Perhaps it’s because I got into filmmaking and experienced that American dream in a very unique way.”
Born in Virginia, Brewer’s breakout feature, Hustle & Flow, is one of those legendary Sundance Film Festival stories: It entered the festival with little buzz, and left with a multi-million-dollar deal and the fest’s audience award. The movie later won an Oscar for best original song (“It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” by Three 6 Mafia) and received another nomination for star Terrence Howard in best actor.
“I did live the archetype of the dream, so to speak, of having a movie like Hustle & Flow that we were just hoping would get a Walmart DVD release. And then this bidding war started, and my life changed,” Brewer told me. “I was working at Barnes & Noble shelving books. And I remember 5 a.m. after they’d made the sale, and me going outside, and the snow is falling, and I’m just thinking, ‘That was really wild what just happened, I hadn’t planned on anything like that.’”