Realizing she is stuck with Nick, she takes him back to her home in Tennessee to teach him how to walk, talk and behave like a real country star.

In the end, Jake gets her contract back and she and Nick begin to sing another song with the implication that they will continue their budding relationship together.

Paramount's interest evaporated after president Michael Eisner reviewed the project and liked it but not enough to get into a bidding war with another studio.

Fox production chief, Sherry Lansing, was enthusiastic enough to buy it out of turnaround from Embassy for about $60,000, telling screenwriter Phil Alden Robinson that it was the best love story and the best comedy they had read in years.

They loved the dialogue and talked of offering Robinson an overall deal in which he would write, direct and produce future projects.

They were concerned that they find someone who could be believable as a New York cab driver and have enough charisma that he would not be blown off the screen by the presence of Parton—who, some Fox executives thought, had done just that to Burt Reynolds in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982).

When Stallone declined to pursue the position, it was decided to let him direct the picture in fact, even though Don Zimmerman would be the director of record.

[4] Sylvester Stallone was tentatively set to do a film for Paramount before beginning production on Rhinestone for Fox.

The Paramount producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, were encountering the same problems as their Fox counterparts, after offering Stallone the lead in Beverly Hills Cop, Stallone told the Paramount executives he wanted to make a few changes and then proceeded to rewrite the script.

Simpson and Bruckheimer, with more experience producing big-budget, high concept projects, than the executives at Fox, responded by saying that they did not want to film the script as rewritten and promptly exited talks with Stallone and his representatives.

Robinson objected, telling Fox executive Joe Wizan that what was wrong with the script was the awful dialogue.

Robinson’s original Rhinestone script was a small movie about a strong-willed Southern woman determined to own a restaurant in Manhattan.

“And one of the reasons that they were able to take over was that Twentieth Century Fox at that time was run by people who weren’t strong filmmakers.

They had marketing directors, story editors and ex-agents, but they didn’t have filmmakers running the place.” By turning the project over to Stallone they were giving the movie to someone who had written and directed.

And they knew that if things didn’t turn out well, they could always lay the blame on Stallone.When the film started shooting, production problems immediately arose.

Nichols was still very loyal to his agent Sam Cohn, with ICM, throughout the 1980s;[9] and CAA oversaw principle talent (package) acquisitions on Rhinestone, during this time.

The first three weeks of filming were thrown out (all footage directed by Zimmerman, including location work in New York City and Nashville).

Knowing his reputation for problem sets, Sylvester Stallone was anxious not to be cast as the villain in this production switch so he told a reporter that the change had been made because studio executives were panicked when the film fell behind schedule.

Among other revisions, Stallone made his role larger than Dolly Parton's, a reversal of the original script, in which her character dominated.

Clark's performance as director was admirable, considering he had so little time to prepare himself and was directing the strong-willed Stallone in a script he was locked into.

Bob is a nice guy, but the film went in a direction that literally shattered my internal corn meter into smithereens.

[14] On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 36 out of 100, based on 9 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".

[15] Nonetheless, the soundtrack album gave Dolly Parton two top ten country singles: "Tennessee Homesick Blues" and "God Won't Get You".

Variety magazine wrote: "Effortlessly living up to its title, Rhinestone is as artificial and synthetic a concoction as has ever made its way to the screen.

[2] Robinson took the highly unusual step of mounting his own publicity campaign, criticizing the movie, saying that the humor and intelligence of the original script had been replaced with vulgarity, caricature and farce.