In one of her last audio diaries before Townes Van Zandt died on New Year’s Day 1997, Susanna Clark pleads to the songwriter in her grief for the inevitability she recognized to come. That voice the world hasn’t heard before serves as the foundation of Tamara Saviano’s new documentary, Without Getting Killed or Caught, premiering at SXSW.
The relationship between Susanna, her husband Guy Clark, and Townes Van Zandt remains one of country music’s great and tragic love stories. Grief, addiction, creativity, and love forged a complicated bond among three extraordinary artists. Saviano, who penned 2016’s Guy Clark biography of the same title, focused on a different angle for her film after exploring Susanna’s unheard tapes.
“I feel like she’s been overlooked,” says Saviano. “[After] Townes died, in the last 15 years of Susanna’s life, she stayed in bed the whole time. She already had this deep grief over her sister’s suicide that she carried with her. When Townes died, she just gave up.”
Although a hit songwriter in her own right (“Easy From Now On,” “Come From the Heart”), Susanna remains overshadowed by the two best friends. As Van Zandt’s posthumous legacy became revered and Guy’s reputation grew in the new century, Susanna faded into heartbreak.
Saviano’s film not only exhumes a vital, unique artist, but reshapes one of the most formative periods in country music: the Seventies rise of Americana that catalyzed around the Clarks’ house in Nashville. The film draws on intimate interviews with songwriter contemporaries (Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle, Vince Gill) as buttressed by the director’s extensive interviews with Guy. Sissy Spacek provides narration in voicing Susanna’s written journals and interviews.
“I want people to know she was an artist,” says the onetime local. “She was the hit songwriter out of the three of them, and she was an incredible muse for all these songwriters. Every songwriter in Nashville of that era I talked to was in love with Susanna.”
Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark
2020 Spotlight
World Premiere
Available from 8pm, Thu. March 18
This article appears in March 12 • 2021.
