How difficult is it to write a convincing hit record for a film or TV show? Just take one look at the Harry Connick Jr rom-com Find Me Falling, streaming on Netflix…
There are all kinds of elements that, even in the best-written or best-directed films or TV shows, can pull the viewer out of the moment: it might be an off-key performance, an unconvincing prop or a special effect that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. One thing that can be particularly difficult for filmmakers to get right, though, is to write a song that, in the movie or show’s fictional world at least, is a much-loved, multi-platinum hit.
This brings us to Find Me Falling, a romantic comedy by writer-director Stelana Kliris that appeared on Netflix on the 19th July. The premise is quite a good one: Harry Connick Jr plays John Allman, a creatively exhausted, middle-aged rock star who retreats from his life of fame and buys a little clifftop house in Cyprus.
The problem is, the house happens to be located right where the island’s miserable and desperate go to take their own lives. It’s the kind of idea that could theoretically be in bad taste, but Kliris finds the right mix of sensitivity, black comedy and pathos to make it work – at least until the plot largely sets the point aside for an hour and heads off into boilerplate rom-com territory. (Old flames, trust issues, arguments based on simple misunderstandings, etc, etc.)
A particularly difficult hurdle for the filmmakers, however, emerges in the opening credits: we hear a few bars from a song called Girl On The Beach, which in the film’s universe is the massive hit that turned John into a world-famous rocker. Appreciating that all art is subjective, it’s difficult to imagine a version of reality where this blandly up-tempo bit of guitar pop – which sounds like the sort of thing you’d hear in the background of a reality TV show – would become a number-one sensation.
Even if you like the tune, there’s the lyrics to contend with: “Girl on the beach! Don’t talk about love until you practise what you preach!”
Or consider another line, which goes, “Do you hear the bells? Do they ring true?”
In the case of Find Me Falling, the answer’s no: John’s song doesn’t ring true at all. I’d argue, in fact, that you’d have to look back as far back as Bill Nighy’s incredibly awkward performance of Christmas Is All Around in 2003’s Love, Actually to find a more unconvincing fictional hit record – though in that film’s case, the song was intended to be an awful cash-in; even Nighy’s character, Billy Mack, was openly scornful about it.
Another unconvincing fictional hit emerged from TV’s Lost in 2004 – one of the survivors of the crashed Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 was rocker Charlie Pace (Dominic Monaghan), whose band Drive Shaft had supposedly found global success with You All Everybody, which sounds like a bunch of drunk relatives covering Oasis’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Star at a wedding. It’s certainly catchy – and showed up in early seasons of Lost a lot – but not necessarily for the right reasons.
Given how difficult it is to come up with a convincing hit record, it’s sometimes a shock when a movie shows up with a truly impressive soundtrack. That Thing You Do, the title song from Tom Hanks’ debut as a writer-director in 1996, was such an effective pastiche of swinging 60s guitar pop that it was nominated for an Oscar.
Meanwhile, Josie And The Pussycats, the 2001 comedy about the fictional band of the same name, featured a collection of songs that really sounded like authentic pop-punk singles from the early 2000s. Written in part by Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont – who co-directed the movie itself – its songs are three-minute slabs of fuzzy guitars, catchy melodies and defiant vocals. The sort of stuff you could imagine people who like Jimmy Eat World, Avril Lavigne or Green Day buying. (The soundtrack itself was a success, selling in the region of 500,000 copies.)
More recently, there was Amazon’s TV series Daisy Jones & The Six, in which stars Riley Keough and Sam Claflin performed some convincingly 70s-sounding soft rock numbers co-written by Blake Mills and Chris Weisman. An entire album’s worth of material was written for the show and released as Aurora in 2023, and much like Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga’s music for their remake of A Star Is Born, it actually sounds like music people would go out and buy. Shallow, written by Lady Gaga, Andrew Wyatt, Anthony Rossomando and Mark Ronson, even ended up becoming a real-world hit single in 2018, and won an Oscar for Best Original Song.
So much of Find Me Falling, meanwhile, hinges so heavily on the audience believing that Allman is a millionaire rocker that it might have been wiser to avoid playing his biggest hit entirely. If it were left to our imagination – save for an intro or a guitar solo, say – we could have simply guessed at the sort of song a grizzled, tattooed chap like Allman might come up with. (Tellingly, the film’s trailer doesn’t play a single note of Girl On The Beach, nor is the song on YouTube.)
The iffiness of that opening song is particularly unfortunate, because the ditty Connick Jr’s character comes up with later in the film – the Find Me Falling of the title – is far more delicate and sincere:
It goes without saying that writing a hit single is difficult – if it wasn’t, we’d all be rich by now, or at least be receiving 10p royalty cheques from Spotify each year. With this and Find Me Falling in mind, perhaps film and TV writers are best advised to go down the route taken by filmmaker Jeremy Saulnier in his 2015 cult horror thriller, Green Room: allow your characters a few seconds to rock out, and then besiege them with so much violence and mayhem that they never have the time to pick up a guitar again.
