Honky Tonk Freeway

Honky Tonk Freeway is a 1981 British comedy film directed by John Schlesinger. The film, conceived and co-produced by Don Boyd, was one of the most expensive box office bombs in history, losing its British backers Thorn EMI between $11 million and $22 million and profoundly affecting its fortunes and aspirations.

In a small Florida tourist town named Ticlaw, the mayor/preacher Kirby T. Calo also operates a hotel and tiny wildlife safari park. The town's major draw is a water-skiing elephant named Bubbles. When the state highway commission builds a freeway adjacent to the town, Calo slips an official $10,000 to assure an off-ramp. The ramp does not come, so the townsfolk literally paint the town pink to attract visitors.

Meanwhile, tourists from various parts of the United States, shown in a series of concurrent, ongoing vignettes, are heading to Florida and will all end up in Ticlaw, one way or another. They include Eugene and Osvaldo, a pair of bank robbers from New York who pick up a cocaine-dealing hitchhiker; Chicago copy machine repairman and aspiring children's book author Duane Hansen, who picks up waitress Carmen Odessa Shelby, who is carrying her deceased mother's ashes to Florida; dentist Snapper Kramer and his dysfunctional family, vacationing cross-country in their RV; Carol, an elderly woman with a drinking problem and her loving husband Sherm, who are heading to Florida to retire; two nuns, mother superior Sister Mary Clarise and novice nun Sister Mary Magdalene; and T.J. Tupus, a wannabe country songwriter hauling a playful rhino and other wild animals to Ticlaw.

The film was the idea of British producer Don Boyd, based on his imagination of American life rather than knowledge. "I hadn't been to the United States since I was a child," he said. "My father worked for the British-American Tobacco Company and was assigned to New York for six months, but I didn't remember a thing about it." Boyd's New York agents put him together with Ed Clinton, an actor who wanted to write. The two of them toured the US for nine months, researching and writing the script. Boyd returned to London, showed the script to Barry Spikings of EMI Films who agreed to finance.

Boyd originally wanted to direct the film himself on a budget of $2–3 million but Spikings encouraged him to think on a bigger scale with a bigger name director.

"We could have done a fast road movie and still sold toys," said Spikings. "But to do this film right it had to be vast and expensive."

John Schlesinger, who was keen to try a comedy, agreed to direct in January 1979. Schlesinger later said "some of the charm comes from Clinton’s naivete, which was one of my original attractions to the script. Clinton’s writing is fresh and completely original. He is highly imaginative. It is not a smug or knowing film at all. In fact, it’s very charming. It’s also quite intelligent."

The director added, "If we had really wanted to make it totally surefire commercial, we would have hired six gag writers and I wouldn't have directed it. It would have been a series of gags, which is what the public seems to be oriented to... I wanted to do an affectionate comedy that had a dark side, and yet had moments when you could be absolutely serious... The only way to make it work, as far as I was concerned, was to go for whatever truth you could find in it...to give whatever human thrust dramatically to each of those characters that I could."