“I didn’t need to do a movie about music that I couldn’t imagine in,” Simon defined later. “That’s the most important downside I discovered with different [rock-related] movies. They appeared false. Take [the 1976 version of] ‘A Star Is Born.’ It didn’t seem to be a rock movie to me. … You don’t actually imagine Barbra Streisand is a rock star. You at all times understand it’s actually Barbra Streisand.” The thought of getting Dreyfuss, or anybody else, lip-synch to his vocals simply appeared foolish to him.
Simon was ready the place he may make such selections. Although he didn’t direct “One-Trick Pony,” he did have last reduce (based on the 1980 Rolling Stone profile). And he acquired to decide on the director, which meant that sure filmmakers balked at his invitation, figuring they wouldn’t be calling the photographs on set. “I keep in mind having a dialog with Alan Parker,” Simon informed Marsh. “He stated, ‘What would I do right here? You wrote it, you’re starring in it, and also you wrote the music. I don’t need to be a sure man. What would my function be?’ Lots of people, I feel, had that feeling.” Finally, Simon went with Robert M. Younger, who died final month on the age of 99. “His ego didn’t get in the way in which,” Simon urged. “He noticed room for him to perform as a director and be of assist to the film and nonetheless really feel that he was, you realize, in cost.”
As much as that time, Younger had labored totally on unbiased movies, like 1977’s “Alambrista!,” which chronicled a Mexican farmer (Domingo Ambriz) making an attempt to cross the border into America in an effort to safe a greater life for his household. By comparability, “One-Trick Pony” was a extra mainstream challenge, even when it did considerably replicate the New Hollywood period in its lament for an outsider going through off with an unfeeling society. And Simon took his lead function critically, even working with an performing coach to play this sad artist who, finally, should resolve whether or not he’ll permit his private, rock-oriented songs to be corrupted by a shallow music exec (Rip Torn) and the flashy producer (Lou Reed, of all individuals) who’re solely involved about getting Jonah on pop radio.
The late Seventies was a prolific, if uneven, interval for rock motion pictures. You had acclaimed live performance movies equivalent to “The Final Waltz” alongside disasters of various levels like “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Membership Band” (a jukebox musical that featured Beatles songs however not the Beatles) and “Renaldo and Clara” (Bob Dylan’s spacey, nearly-four-hour melodrama that he wrote, directed and starred in). The identical yr as “One-Trick Pony” got here out, Hollywood launched tacky musical (or music-adjacent) opuses like “Xanadu” and “Flash Gordon.” Simon’s previous associate Artwork Garfunkel had made the leap to performing—he’s terrific in 1971’s “Carnal Data”—however Simon didn’t have a lot on-camera expertise. And in contrast to “Purple Rain,” which might open just a few years later, “One-Trick Pony” wasn’t meant to catapult a rising star into the stratosphere—and use a semi-autobiographical storyline to attain it. This was music icon Paul Simon taking part in a man who most positively wasn’t Paul Simon. And but there was one thing about Jonah’s disappointing profession that Simon envied.
