These posts are about the songs that just barely failed to cross the key line of chart success, entering the Billboard Top 40. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 41.

Before there was a single note of music, there was a title.

During the lengthy, soul-draining press junket for Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks decided to try his hand at writing. He tinkered with a story about a scrappy rock band called the Wonders that has a taste of fame with a surprise hit song in the nineteen-sixties. The name of the eventual screenplay and the fictional band’s single was the same: That Thing You Do!, with the exclamation mark in place, please.

Hanks used his recently rejuvenated movie star clout to parlay the screenplay into his feature directorial debut. The structure of the story necessitated that the song was going to get played a lot, so it was critical to get the tune right. To do so, Hanks and his collaborators launched a sort of contest within the music publishing community, inviting anyone to submit a contender, with only the title and adherence to the pop stylings of the film’s era as a guideline. Reportedly, over three hundred entrants poured in.

In the end, Hanks selected a song written by Adam Schlesinger, who was then in the early days with his band Fountains of Wayne. Schlesinger had recruited Mike Viola, of the band Candy Butchers, to sing on the demo, and Viola was retained to handle lead vocal duties on the version used repeatedly in the film. (Viola’s credit was buried in order to maintain the illusion of the Wonders, causing some consternation.) The effort to retain as much of the demo’s sound as possible shows just how close Schlesinger came to Hanks’s notion of the song.

“This one was right on so many levels — and right in that it wasn’t, also, the greatest song you’ve ever heard,” Steve Zahn, who played Wonders guitarist Lenny Haise in the film, told Entertainment Weekly. “It had to be right. It had to be something you would believe that these young guys would write, and at the same time, something that was good enough that you would believe that people would be totally into it.”

Although it’s become a premium channel staple in recent years, That Thing You Do! was only a modest hit at the box office. But original songs that were actual central to movies — as opposed to closing credits tack-ons — have long been a rarity. “That Thing You Do!” received an Oscar nomination, losing to a new number cooked up for the film adaptation of the stage musical Evita.

In the film, “That Thing You Do!’ rockets up the charts, reaching at least as high as #7. Out in the crueler real world, the single, credited to the Wonders, peaked at #41 on the Billboard chart.

Other entries in this series can be found by clicking on the “Top 40 Smash Near Misses” tag.