‘This was her time to tell her story. She’s not a sidekick, not an accessory,’ filmmaker Kristen Vaurio tells Postmedia
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After director Kristen Vaurio’s work on films dealing with Scientology, the National Enquirer and Robin Williams, Carlene Carter wondered if she was going to learn anything new when the Emmy-winning filmmaker decided to make a movie centred on her mother — the legendary June Carter Cash.
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But as it turned out, Carter, 68, didn’t discover any family secrets as Vaurio put together a life-spanning biodoc on her Grammy winning mom’s life and career.
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“I knew most everything,” Carter said in a recent Zoom interview. “But I did get to see a lot of footage that I had never seen. There were pictures I had never seen. I got to see my mother and father, Carl Smith, working, which was great. They had a playful, brother-sister thing going on. But underneath all that, it was all going to hell in a hand basket.”
Carter Cash’s first marriage (to Smith, a onetime country star) lasted four years and produced one child, Carlene.
Told through a series of archive conversations with the late star as well as interviews with members of Carter Cash’s family, her fellow country artists, including Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Ronnie Dunn, Larry Gatlin, actor Robert Duvall (with whom she co-starred with in the 1997 film The Apostle) and Reese Witherspoon (who won an Oscar for portraying her in 2005’s Walk the Line), June paints a portrait of a woman fueled by ambition to carve her own musical path.
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As a member of the Carter Family, who helped launch country music nearly a century ago, Carter Cash is one of the most famous voices in country music. But despite being a multi-hyphenate singer, songwriter, performer, comedian, actress and author, many know her as simply “Mrs. Johnny Cash.”
June, a new documentary now streaming on Paramount+, explores the life of the singer-songwriter outside of her marriage to the Man in Black.
“This was her time to tell her story. She’s not a sidekick, not an accessory,” Vaurio says. “Even though Johnny is a huge part of that story, you can see when she’s recording her album (Press On) in the latter part of the film, he’s playing backup. That’s what he’s doing here; he’s playing backup in this film.”
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Depicting her early rise through stints at the Grand Ole Opry and singing as part of the Carter Family, Vaurio follows Carter Cash as she decamps to New York City as a single mother to study acting after her first marriage ends.
Later, June recounts how Carter Cash opened shows for Elvis Presley, embarked on a second failed marriage (to Edwin “Rip” Nix) and eventually meets the love of her life — Johnny Cash. After their whirlwind romance, the film doesn’t shy away from showing the strains in their relationship — including how Carter Cash supported her husband as he battled substance abuse and a career downturn in the 1980s.
But the film goes to great lengths to show Carter Cash as a woman in search of her own identity, particularly as it relates to her legacy as a musician.
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Archival footage and new interviews show how Carter Cash (who died at age 73 in 2003) proved the industry execs — who all passed on new music from her — were wrong when she recorded her 1999 comeback album, the Grammy winning Press On.
Her mother’s steely determination to “press on” — a phrase she repeats throughout the documentary — is maybe not a new thing she learned, but it’s something that Carter, a musician in her own right, hangs on to.
“We’re almost up to one hundred years of Carter Family music. That’s amazing. I don’t know something similar,” she says. “When I was a kid, my sister and I were told from a young age, ‘When we’re all gone, you have to keep the music alive and pass it down to your children.’ So that’s been a motivation for me, particularly over the last 15 years. I want to keep that legacy alive in my life as an entertainer and keep spreading it around.”
“June is the thread that holds the entire tapestry of country music and American music together,” Vaurio adds. “If you look at the beginning to today, June is a common thread throughout. There are so many artists today that are influenced by her and her family. The Carter family is foundational in making country music what it is … there’s something in that name. It has to live on.”
June is now streaming on Paramount+
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