When Did It First Start To Burn?

By Josh Tyrangiel

Johnny Cash wrote two very entertaining books about his life--Man in Black and Cash: The Autobiography--that don't suffer much for not being entirely candid. But when director James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted; Cop Land) and his wife and producing partner Cathy Konrad (Scream, Identity) started to mine Cash's tales for a screenplay about his early struggles with drug addiction and his relationship with wife June Carter Cash, they hit dead ends. "There are enormous holes in those books," says Mangold. "We wanted to dramatize a period of several years, but all we had to go on was his saying, 'I was taking a lot of pills and doing a lot of shows.' We needed more than that, obviously."

The problem was that Cash and Carter, both devout Christians, were married to other people while they toured together for almost 10 years. June may have written the lyrics for Ring of Fire ("it burns, burns, burns") about her feelings for Johnny, but over the course of their 35-year marriage, they stuck to the story that they didn't get together until the earlier relationships ended. "We're all for star-crossed lovers," says Konrad, "but a decade of nothing?"

To get Cash and Carter to open up, Mangold spent hours with them on the phone and at their Hendersonville, Tenn., home. He asked general questions (To Johnny: What did it feel like to do drugs? To June: Do you recall the first time Johnny touched you?), tape-recorded the answers and worked them into his drafts, which he shared with the couple. And finally, a few months before Carter and Cash died (within four months of each other in 2003), he found out that they had given in to temptation one night after a show in Las Vegas, that Carter had ended it abruptly, and Cash sank deeper into drug addiction as a result. Mangold admits he was incredibly relieved to get the full story. "I knew that we finally had the pieces to make the movie feel genuine and compelling, but I was also secretly thrilled that they got to a place where they trusted us to do that story justice."