“I didn't want to make a film about music that I couldn't believe in,” Simon explained later. “That's the biggest problem I found with others [rock-related] Movie (s. They looked fake. Carry [the 1976 version of] 'A star has been born.' It didn't seem like a rock movie to me. …You really don't think Barbra Streisand is a rock star. You always know that she is actually Barbra Streisand.” The idea of Dreyfuss, or anyone else, lip-syncing her voice seemed silly to him.
Simon was in a position where he could make those decisions. Although he did not direct “One-Trick Pony,” he did have the final cut (according to the 1980 film). Rolling Stone profile). And he got to choose the director, which meant that certain filmmakers declined his invitation, thinking that they wouldn't be the ones making the decisions on set. “I remember having a conversation with Alan Parker,” Simon told Marsh. “He said, 'What would I do here? You wrote it, you star in it and you wrote the music. I don't want to be a yes man. What would my role be? “I think a lot of people had that feeling.” In the end, Simon opted for Robert M. Young, who He died last month at the age of 99.. “His ego didn't get in the way,” Simon suggested. “He saw room to function as a director and help the film and still feel like he was, you know, in charge.”
Up until that point, Young had worked primarily on independent films, such as “Alambrista!” from 1977, which told the story of a Mexican farmer (Domingo Ambriz) who tried to cross the border into the United States to ensure a better life for his family. By comparison, “One-Trick Pony” was a more conventional project, even if it somewhat reflected the New Hollywood era in its lament for an outsider standing up to an uncaring society. And Simon took his lead role seriously, even working with an acting coach to play this unhappy artist who must ultimately decide whether to allow his personal, rock-oriented songs to be corrupted by a shallow music executive ( Rip Torn) and the flashy producer (Lou Reed, of all people) who's only concerned with getting Jonah on pop radio.
The late 1970s were a prolific, if uneven, period for rock films. You had acclaimed concert films like “The Last Waltz” along with disasters of varying degrees like “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” (a jukebox musical that featured Beatles songs but not the Beatles) and “Renaldo and Clara” (the nearly four-hour Bob Dylan space melodrama that he wrote, directed, and starred in) . The same year “One-Trick Pony” came out, Hollywood released cheesy musical (or music-adjacent) works like “Xanadu” and “Flash Gordon.” Simon's old partner, Art Garfunkel, had made the leap into acting (he's fantastic in 1971's “Carnal Knowledge”), but Simon didn't have much experience in front of the camera. And unlike “Purple Rain,” which would be released a few years later, “One-Trick Pony” wasn't meant to catapult a rising star into the stratosphere, nor use a semi-autobiographical story to do so. This was music icon Paul Simon playing a guy who definitely it was not Pablo Simon. And yet, there was something about Jonah's disappointing career that Simon envied.
