There are numerous links and similarities between the music world and the film world. Top acting stars like Will Smith, Ice Cube and Mark Wahlberg started out as musicians and have since moved seamlessly from inside the recording studio to the top of Hollywood's A-List. Conversely, big name actors like Jamie Foxx, Bruce Willis, Nicole Kidman and William Shatner have found fairly lucrative side jobs singing… and, believe it or not, have charted hit singles. Critics of both film and music are able to bash Paris Hilton with righteous indignation for her half-assed, near talentless attempts to enter both worlds and the heads of companies in both industries put an unexplained premium on the marketing and promotion of their product as opposed to its quality. Both industries are incredibly glamorous and, from my experience, they seem to be populated with the same exact types of executives, agents, publicists, developers and artists. The music industry creates entertainment for your ears and the film industry creates entertainment for your eyes; it's just that simple.
There are naturally some differences between the two fields; they are different mediums after all. There is no true music equivalent to a $100 million movie nor does the film world have an answer to groups like The Rolling Stones and The Eagles who don’t release a lot of new music (and haven’t necessarily released anything good in decades), but go out on tour every year and make hundreds of millions of dollars while playing to packed houses of aging baby boomers. Interestingly, there are a few uniquities in the music world that Hollywood could lay claim to, that would translate very well from one field to the other, but that she hasn’t quite accepted yet. One of the most prominent of these uniquities is the one hit wonder.
As self-explanatory a term as there can be, the one hit wonder is an artist who has one hit song... and then disappears. Think Vanilla Ice ("Ice Ice Baby"), Soft Cell ("Tainted Love"), Chumbawumba ("Tubthumping"), Dexys Midnight Runners ("Come On Eileen") or, well, even actor Bruce Willis (whose song "Respect Yourself" cracked the Top 5 in 1987 and who hasn’t been heard from musically since). Surprisingly, given the pejorative connotation of the term ‘one hit wonder’, the music world has lovingly opened their arms to these flash-in-the-pan groups as part of the industry’s overall culture. Numerous compilation albums have been released featuring the best of the one hit wonders–and really, is there any better way to listen to one of these groups?–and these one hit wonders are praised for the success that they achieved, for however a brief period of time it may have been.
One hit wonders can still hold their heads high when they’re introduced at parties and events because the songs they’re known for are generally well-written and well-made songs (unless you’re part of the Baha Men and you sang "Who Let the Dogs Out"); these songs are comparable, if not better, than a large number of songs that are released by far more established bands. Say what you will about A-Ha but "Take On Me" remains one of the catchiest songs of the eighties. Gerardo, of "Rico Suave" fame, has actually gone on to become a well-respected A&R executive and is credited with bringing Enrique Iglesias to the states. All things considered, this is a far better approach to take toward an artist’s brief period of stardom than the approach that Hollywood currently holds which can be summed up as follows: You sicken and disgust me; now where’s Angelina Jolie?
In a strange sense, this is part of a much larger esthetic in Hollywood. Where music embraces the artists who are only briefly part of its history and warmly revels in the "What-were-we-thinking?" nature of eighties hair bands like Poison, Bon Jovi and Motley Crue and the drugged out, fifteen minute long songs of the seventies, Hollywood has yet to come to any kind of reconciliation with its own awkward phases and one hit movie wonders. In the film world, it’s still considered gauche to like teen comedies, mention previous box office bombs like Cutthroat Island or Showgirls, question the validity of a ‘classic’ film’s designation or to talk about the fading images of certain stars lest you somehow further contribute to the problem.
A couple years back, I wrote a short column about Mira Sorvino and her post Oscar funk. She appeared in two made-for-TV movies in the year after winning her Academy Award for Mighty Aphrodite and she then went on to headline the poorly received series of films The Replacement Killers, Lulu on the Bridge, At First Sight and Free Money. (As a quick aside, the latter title, Free Money, might well be one of the biggest critical disappointments ever. It featured the three Oscar winners/nominees Marlon Brando, Sorvino, Thomas Hayden Church as well as performances by Charlie Sheen, Martin Sheen, David Arquette, Donald Sutherland and French star, Remy Girard and the movie never even got a theatrical release. Worse yet was the fact that Free Money’s DVD rights weren’t even picked up by one of the major or mid-major studios; they were bought by a now defunct company in the valley called Sterling Entertainment). Soon after the article ran, I received a phone call from one of Sorvino’s people who asked me how I could have written such a column. When I pointed out that there really weren’t any derogatory comments in it, I had basically just a listed what she’d done since she won the Oscar, Sorvino’s rep said, "I know!"
I don’t quite understand why Hollywood has this intense "What-have-you-done-for-me-lately" attitude either. If VH-1’s Behind the Music has done anything, it’s shown that there is a large market for embracing these one-time phenomenons. Ralph Macchio shouldn’t be viewed as a has-been, he should be celebrated for his work on The Karate Kid or, if he follows in Gerardo’s footsteps, offered a job as an executive in charge of development at Paramount or Universal. Now that I think about it, this might even be a marketing hook for a studio, a Ralph Macchio Presents… label. Not only that, but the process itself would be good for an accompanying 13-episode reality TV series that the studio could premiere 13 weeks before the first Ralph Macchio Presents… film hit theaters. And you just know that by the second Ralph Macchio Presents… release, Quentin Tarantino would be clamoring to have something to do with it, bringing forth an additional audience. But I’m getting off on a tangent here.
In this column, I want to celebrate the ten biggest cinematic one hit wonders of the last twenty years (which is why Macchio and his co-star Pat Morita won’t make this list for their contributions to The Karate Kid. Ditto George Lazenby, Mark Hamill and Michael O’Keefe, who played Danny Noonan in Caddyshack). I’m not including child stars like Haley Joel Osment, Dakota Fanning, Macauley Culkin or Anna Paquin on the list either because the incredibly short nature of their careers as child actors dictates that they’d almost all be considered one hit wonders.
In order to have had a ‘hit’, I decided that the actors in question needed to meet at least one of the following three categories: 1) they needed to win or be nominated for a Best Actor or Actress Academy Award, 2) win the Best Supporting Actor or Actress Academy Award or 3) play one of the leads in a major, studio motion picture.
