I looked up a description on Amazon. I like music-centered movies and ordered a VHS copy for one cent (plus $3.99 s/h): "Tom Hanks's debut as a writer and director is a lively, affectionate account of the shooting-star career of a forgotten (fictional) '60s pop-rock band called The Wonders--as in "one-hit wonders." Hanks plays the manager of the group. The movie traces their meteoric rise and fall, from cutting their first record, to going on tour with a Phil Spector/Motown-type revue, to the internal tensions that lead to the band's disintegration, which comes when they fail to follow up their smash hit single, "That Thing You Do!" And that song, by the way, is so catchy it would definitely have been a hit in 1964--and deserves to be one today. This delightful movie would make a great double-bill with Allison Anders's wonderful Grace of My Heart. --Jim Emerson
Grace of My Heart was described as "An homage to the Brill Building era (the late 1950s to the early 1970s) of pop-music glory. Illeana Douglas plays a singer-songwriter (loosely modeled after Brill recording artist Carole King) whose life runs emotionally parallel to popular music trends. John Turturro is a stand-in for "wall of sound" producer Phil Spector and Matt Dillon is a thinly disguised version of maverick Beach Boy Brian Wilson. It's a lively and loving tribute to timeless music and the colorful characters who created it. --Jeff Shannon"
That sounded good also, so I ordered a 50-cent VHS copy.
As a point of trivia, producer Phil Spector was convicted of murder about a year ago. He said that a woman committed suicide in his house but a jury said that he shot her.
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