Touchstone Plus-Or-Minus: Country

With its very first release, Splash, Touchstone Films proved it could take a hoary genre like the Disney gimmick comedy and make something fresh and enjoyable for modern audiences. For its next trick, Touchstone took on a genre that Walt Disney had assiduously avoided his entire life: the contemporary issue drama. Walt had been a firm believer in the old maxim that if you want to send a message, use Western Union. But the movies had been chipping away at that philosophy for years. If Touchstone was going to compete, they were going to have to get their hands dirty. And what better place to get down in the dirt than the family farm?

The Farm Crisis of the 1980s was the worst to hit the American farmer since the Great Depression. Since the title of this column isn’t Agriculture Plus-Or-Minus, I’m not going to get into the nuts and bolts of how and why this happened. Suffice it to say that record numbers of family-owned farms found themselves drowning in federal debt and foreclosures reached an all-time high. Once the story grew big enough to leap from the Sunrise Farm Report to the nightly news, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood took an interest.