Warning: this article contains spoilers for the podcast S-Town.
When S-Town’s seven episodes landed in one go on iTunes last year, it immediately became a podcast blockbuster, with 16m downloads in the first week. Unsurprisingly, then, it is being turned into a film, with Participant Media securing the rights. Spotlight’s Tom McCarthy is in the frame to direct. If anyone can bring such an offbeat story to the big screen, it’s probably an Oscar winner – but turning S-Town into a film won’t be an easy job.
The podcast was billed as a murder mystery, tapping in to the monstrously successful true-crime genre. But as S-Town unfolded, it took a different turn. There was no whodunnit. Instead, it gradually revealed the story of an eccentric and possibly gay horologist John B McLemore, a resident of what he termed “Shit Town, Alabama”. McLemore had emailed This American Life to claim the member of a wealthy family had gotten away with murder. When This American Life reporter Brian Reed started to investigate, he found a very different story. One that is atmospheric, moving and enthralling – and which, sadly, documented McLemore’s suicide early on.
If S-Town were a straightforward murder mystery, it would be ripe for a movie adaptation. McLemore would be depicted as the classic outsider who finds acceptance when he helps to solve a crime. He would be played by Owen Wilson or James Franco, but let’s not even get started on how podcasts are so evocative in creating mental images of their characters that any casting will disappoint. Maybe he would get a makeover at the end and ride off into the sunset with Jake Gyllenhaal, having been hailed a hero by the population of Woodstock, Alabama.
Putting together the pieces of the seven chapters of S-Town is a tough task. The story is fragmented, and it is the telling, rather than the way the plot moves on, that encourages listeners to keep listening. Reed is subtle and never judgmental in the way he unfurls the story, but S-Town’s cast of characters – some might be criminals, others are racists and plenty are downright nasty – is the sort that could easily come off as broad and caricatured when translated into movie shorthand.
To succeed, you suspect that S-Town the movie needs to signpost what it is from the off. Recent cinema history tells us that audiences who have parted with money in their local multiplex tend to like to get what they have promised. Despite getting rave reviews from the critics, Hereditary received a savage D+ CinemaScore rating by viewers for being slow-paced and arty rather than an in-your-face frightener, a similar fate to that which befell The Witch. There are moments of gothic horror in S-Town, with its chainsaws and inhalation of mind-bending mercury, but it’s so much more than that, and to suggest otherwise in its promotion would do the film a disservice.
There’s also a good chance that bringing S-Town to a wider audience could spark another backlash, centred on whether John B McLemore’s life should be examined at all. The recent hit podcast Missing Richard Simmons was criticised for being invasive and it is unlikely that a man as mysterious as McLemore would have felt comfortable seeing every facet of his life exposed on the big screen. His repressed sexuality and need for a “pain fix” from unusual sources seem like the details that the deceased might have liked to have been kept private.
S-Town the movie won’t offer a Hollywood happy ending, but it could make a life-affirming lesson. McLemore’s essay, Worthwhile Life Defined, in which he breaks down how much time the average person spends working, commuting and sleeping, is a powerful rejoinder to a busy generation.
And the suggestion that, despite his many demons and unhappy end, he led a satisfying life coaxing clocks back to life, playing records and looking up at the stars provides a powerful message of where real contentment lies.
