“It wasn’t a long friendship, about a year and a half,” Khouri (pictured at top) had explained to MediaVillage last summer during an interview at the annual Summer Television Critics Association tour. But it was memorable and powerful. "They saw themselves in each other,” Khouri said.
Patsy (Megan Hilty, pictured below right) -- ambitious, confident and already a rising star -- invited Loretta (Jessie Mueller, below left) to visit her when she was in the hospital, recuperating from a car crash. (You can read Steve Gidlow's interview with Hilty and Mueller about the making of the movie here.) Loretta was singing at dive bars, where no one listened, and in her kitchen, where she listened to her domineering husband. She adored Patsy as a fan does a star, but when they met, a true friendship developed, albeit a relatively short-term one.
“I love telling stories about women that are different and still find a way to have a friendship that obviously is as deep and lasting as -- well, unfortunately, this wasn't as long-lasting as it should have been,” Khouri said while at TCA. “But that’s kind of what I started out doing, and I just love telling those stories, because I have a lot of those kind of friendships with women that are very different than me. We kind of draw on each other's strengths and make up for each other's weaknesses.”
This movie was written by Khouri’s stepdaughter, Angelina Burnett. (Khouri is married to the Grammy-winning music producer T Bone Burnett.) Angelina told her, “I have written this script about Patsy and Loretta for Lifetime, and I think you’d be great for it,” Khouri recalled. “I read the script and loved it. It was right up my alley.” No surprise there. Khouri famously wrote Thelma & Louise -- one of the finest films about female friendship ever produced -- while breaking into the business. She later won an Oscar for it. And she was the creator of and creative force behindNashville,that rarity of a TV series with plenty of great music and high drama, which also had an intense relationship between two talented, hard-working female country music stars at its core.
A theater major at Purdue University, Khouri worked in children's theater in Nashville, and then headed to Los Angeles, where she studied acting. While there, she realized, ">