1980 Week: One-Trick Pony

          Back in his Simon & Garfunkel days, Paul Simon wrote and recorded a tune called “Fakin’ It,” which speaks to the feeling many successful people have about being imposters in their own lives. The specter of “Fakin’ It” looms large over One-Trick Pony, to date the only film Simon has written and the only one in which he’s played a starring role. Although “Fakin’ It” doesn’t appear in the movie, the notion of being a poseur pervades the movie. On a superficial level, the film bursts with authenticity, because Simon plays a singer-songwriter and performs many songs that he wrote for the movie. Yet the layers of artifice are myriad. Whereas Simon emerged from a phenomenally successful duo in order to become a phenomenally successful solo artist, his character, Jonah Levin, endures a humbler experience. A one-hit wonder for a ’60s protest song, Jonah gigs in small clubs and delivers material his label doesn’t like. Therefore the movie’s antagonistic forces include not just the crass music executives who want to inhibit Jonah’s artistry but also Jonah’s bullheaded determination to follow his muse.
          Johah’s journey is believable and realistic, but Simon wrote himself into a corner. Had he told an autobiographical story about the travails of a successful musician, critics and fans might have eviscerated him for whining about life in an ivory tower. (That fate certainly befell Neil Diamond, who made his disastrous movie debut in a remake of The Jazz Singer about two months after One-Trick Pony was released.) By tacking the other way and telling a fictional story about a struggling musician, Simon invited accusations of condescension. After all, what does a guy collecting royalties for “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” know about privation? The damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t scenario is exacerbated by the sense of privilege innate to the film’s existence. Must be nice to write your own star vehicle and get a big-studio budget.
          If all this behind-the-scenes bitching seems tangential, there’s a reason to focus on backstory: The onscreen content of One-Trick Pony is so slight it barely exists. Jonah tours with his band, and the guys complain about rapidly dwindling paychecks. Jonah sorta-kinda makes amends with his ex-wife (Blair Brown). Jonah accepts a lucrative gig at a nostalgia show, bolstering his fear that he is, indeed, a “one-trick pony” whose best work is behind him. Jonah does some new recording with an asshole producer (played by real-life rocker Lou Reed) who tarts up Jonah’s simple songs with ghastly choirs and strings. Can Jonah reconcile his need for income with his quest for integrity?

          Some moments are quite interesting, with director Robert M. Young employing a sedate storytelling style that generates a strong sense of realism. Rip Torn does marvelous work as a callous record executive, and Simon fronts a hot band for renditions of solid tunes including “Ace in the Hole” and “God Bless the Absentee.” (The film’s best-known song, “Late in the Evening,” appears over the opening credits.) Additionally, the nostalgia-concert sequence features lively performances by the Lovin’ Spoonful and Sam & Dave, while the B-52’s show up in another scene. The problem, beyond the piffle of a storyline, is that Simon is merely adequate as an actor—everyone else is more compelling, except when Simon sings. So on nearly every level, Simon is fakin’ it: He’s not a real actor, he’s not a real screenwriter, and he’s not telling a real story. The irony is that One-Trick Pony doesn’t come across as a vanity project, but rather a sincere attempt by an important artist to explore the possibilities of a medium with which he is not familiar.

One-Trick Pony: FUNKY

Shampoo (1975)

          Here’s just one of the many fascinating details about Shampoo: Although it’s rightly considered a pinnacle achievement for the New Hollywood, the principal creative force behind the picture is very much a creature of Old Hollywood. Warren Beatty, the film’s leading man, producer, co-writer—and, according to gossip that’s surrounded the project for decades, uncredited co-director—was groomed for greatness by the studio system, even though his star didn’t truly rise until the counterculture era. And, just as Beatty is an inherently complicated Hollywood persona, the vision of late-1960s America he and his collaborators present in Shampoo resists simple classifications.
          On one level, the story of a lothario hairdresser who gets away with screwing his female clients because their husbands think he’s gay is a satire of social mores during a period of shifting sexual identities. On another level, Shampoo is a savvy political story examining various attitudes toward Richard Nixon at the time of his 1968 ascension to the White House. And yet on a third level, Shampoo is an ultra-hip study of Me Generation ennui, because nearly ever character in the film experiences some degree of existential crisis. Furthermore, the execution of the film is as classical as the content is brash—director Hal Ashby relies on elegant camerawork and meticulous pacing, rather than the flashy experimentation associated with many New Hollywood triumphs, even though the brilliant script by Beatty and Robert Towne breaks one taboo after another. (Let we forget, one of the film’s most memorable scenes involves costar Julie Christie drunkenly slurring, “I want to suck his . . .” Well, you get the picture.)

          Beatty, who often cleverly capitalized on his personal reputation as a Casanova, plays George Roundy, a Beverly Hills hairdresser beloved as much by female clients for his way with their bodies as for his way with their tresses. At the beginning of the story, he juggles relationships with his long-suffering girlfriend, Jill (Goldie Hawn), and with a rich housewife, Felicia (Lee Grant). Eager to open his own shop, George uses Felicia to get to her husband, Lester (Jack Warden), a wealthy businessman—who has a mistress of his own, Jackie (Christie). Smart and strong-willed, Jackie beguiles George, who somehow imagines he can have everything he wants—Felicia’s support, Jackie’s affection, Jill’s devotion, Lester’s patronage.
          Woven into all of this sexual farce is a bitter thread of class warfare, with Lester representing the arrogance of financial power and nearly every other character representing the desperation of financial need; Beatty and Towne draw provocative parallels between the cynicism of Nixon’s politics and the way various characters pursue skewed versions of the American Dream. The people in Shampoo are players and strivers, right down to Lester’s adolescent daughter, Lorna (Carrie Fisher), who has been taught by the unforgiving world to embrace her sexual power at a young age.

          Shampoo has moments that some find screamingly funny, such as the scene in which Christie makes the aforementioned startling declaration, but this is character-driven comedy of the most brittle sort, riding the fine line between humor and pathos. And that, among so many other things, is what makes Shampoo endlessly interesting—the film captures myriad facets of a confusing time. How appropriate, then, that the unobtrusive score is by pop star Paul Simon, one of the most important musical voices of the ’60s.

Shampoo: RIGHT ON

Annie Hall (1977)

          Whether it’s viewed as the climax of Woody Allen’s early career as a self-deprecating comedian or the beginning of his later career as a serious filmmaker, Annie Hall is an extraordinary piece of work. Among many other things, Annie Hall is Allen’s first attempt at a Big Statement, simultaneously a deep exploration of one specific relationship and a microcosmic study of relationships in general. Furthermore, the picture contains two of the most vividly sketched characters in ’70s cinema, both of whom are fictionalized versions of the actors playing them: Annie Hall, the eccentric singer portrayed by Diane Keaton, and Alvy Singer, the neurotic comic portrayed by Allen.

          To the filmmaker’s great credit, neither character gets off easily, because both are depicted as fascinating people capable of infuriating behavior—and both are shown to be almost pathologically incapable of subverting their identities into the collective identity of a couple, despite being very much in love. (Allen had a lengthy real-life affair with Keaton, his costar in a string of beloved ’70s films.) Yet the bond between Alvy and Annie isn’t the film’s only romance; Annie Hall illustrates Allen’s devotion to the island of Manhattan by creating several hilarious fish-out-of-water scenes depicting Alvy gasping for air whenever he’s taken off the bedrock of New York City.

          The bits of Alvy disastrously trying to cook lobsters in a beach house and trying to drive in Los Angeles are tiny comic masterpieces, just as the interaction between Alvy and his sitcom-producer pal, Rob (Tony Roberts), articulates Allen’s contempt for the assembly-line approach to creating Hollywood pabulum. Some of the most vivid material in the picture involves Annie’s WASP family, particularly the unforgettably funny/creepy scenes of Annie’s brother, Duane (Christopher Walken), giving a speech about vehicular suicide—and then taking a terrified Alvy for a car ride.

          As the title suggests, however, the movie’s most memorable invention is Annie herself, a character so individualistic she inspired a fashion craze as women tried to mimic Keaton’s offbeat wardrobe of repurposed men’s clothing. Whether you find Annie appealing or irritating is a matter of taste, but it’s impossible not to appreciate moments like the scene in which Annie magically leaves her body during sex because she’s bored.

          Beyond Allen and Keaton, both of whom are at their very best, Annie Hall features a deep well of colorful actors in supporting roles, from featured performers Colleen Dewhurst, Shelley Duvall, Carol Kane, and Paul Simon (yes, the singer-songwriter) to bit player Sigourney Weaver, who makes her blink-and-you’ll-miss-it screen debut at the end of the picture. Yet perhaps the funniest mini-performance in the picture is given by author Marshall McLuhan, who appears in a quintessential Allen moment: As Alvy waits in line at a theater, listening to a windbag pontificate about McLuhan’s media theories, Alvy wishes he could set the guy straight, so he yanks the real McLuhan from behind a poster, upon which McLuhan says to the windbag, “You know nothing of my work.”

          It’s a given that Allen’s movies aren’t for everyone, but Annie Hall winningly sets his intellectualism, narcissism, and neuroticism into a palatable framework by dramatizing the perils of being opinionated about everything; in a very important way, Annie Hall is the Allen movie for people who don’t like Allen movies, since it depicts the inability of a character very much like Woody Allen to comfortably exist in everyday life.

Annie Hall: OUTTA SIGHT