Bridge Over Troubled Water - Background

Background

Simon & Garfunkel, initially "Tom & Jerry", were already successful in the music industry. Their Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, The Graduate and Bookends peaked at number three, two and one in the US Billboard 200, respectively, with the first and latter selling 3 million copies and 2 million copies in the United States alone. Garfunkel took the $75,000 role of Captain Nately in another Nichols film, Catch-22, based on the novel of the same name. Initially Simon was to play the character of Dunbar, but screenwriter Buck Henry felt the film was already crowded with characters and subsequently wrote Simon's part out. The unexpectedly long film production endangered the relationship between the duo; Garfunkel later stated in a 1990 interview with Paul Zollo on "Song Talk": "So I was gone, at first, for what I thought was just a little interruption... our way of working was for Paul to write while we recorded. So we'd be in the studio for the better part of two months working on the three or four songs that Paul had written, recording them, and when they were done, we'd knock off for a couple of months while Paul was working on the next group of three or four songs. Then we'd book time and be in the studio again for three or four months, recording those. So my thought was, rather than wait for Paul to write the next bunch of songs, I went off and did this movie. When Paul's songs were ready, he was ready to be in the studio before I was finished with Catch-22."