Sunday Short Theatre – The Eagles Are A Country Band (2018)

Christmas is meant to be the most wonderful time of the year. In Cody Wagner’s short film The Eagles Are A Country Band, it starts like that. But things get heated and ugly when the dog dies.

Sunday Short Theatre this week’s choice of film shows how easy things can get out of hand. Was it the drink? Was it over zealous fans hitting boiling point? Was it something else? The question is does anyone really care in the correct answer?

They always say never work with kids or animals in film. Same goes with debating Sports and Music bands and a group of friends start to discuss is The Eagles are a Country or Rock band? Cue all out war!

When a group of old friends reunite for Christmas they bicker about country music and share harmless stories – but one story goes too far. A husband devastates his wife by drunkenly revealing that he mistreated her dog. She gets her revenge as husband and wife engage in a full-blown fist fight.

Here’s the director’s own statement on the film…

In the ’93 movie Short Cuts, three fishermen find a dead woman in the stream near their campground and have to make a decision – what do we do? What they do is nothing. They continue fishing and tie the body to a rock so it doesn’t float away. When the wife of one of these fishermen finds out what her husband did, or didn’t do, she’s rightly disturbed.

​One of the worst feelings a person can have, but a feeling that many of us experience, can be summed up in this phrase: is everyone pretending? Another way of saying it: does anyone care? If, say, your husband keeps fishing instead of pulling a dead body out of the river, you might experience this feeling.

​The genesis of this short film began with the thought, “how do we capture that feeling of betrayal?” From that thought, we found specificity: a husband disrespects the corpse of his wife’s dog. As Chloe and I broke open the idea, we became more and more excited. Our conversation went something like this:

​“Let’s not show what would actually happen, where she yells and cries, and he tries to apologize-”

“Yeah, let’s show what’s happening in her head. What she wants-”

Source: Film Shortage