Grease: Music on Film Series

By Stephen Tropiano

In the summer of 1978, Grease was the word. On Friday, June 16, 1978, the movie musical made a major comeback when a big-screen version of the long-running rock-and-roll stage musical, Grease , opened in theaters around the country. With a talented cast led by John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John and a memorable score featuring a mixture of oldies-style rock and contemporary pop, Grease captured the look and the feel of an old-fashioned Hollywood musical while taking audiences on a nostalgic trip back to the days of poodle skirts, malt shops, drag racing, and sock hops. Stephen Tropiano takes a fascinating and revealing look at Grease as a cultural phenomenon from its humble beginnings as a fringe musical in Chicago, to its unparalleled success on Broadway, to the making of the film that became the highest-grossing movie musical of all time. You will get an in-depth, close-up look at the making of this Hollywood classic and the creative talent in front and behind the camera that made it all happen. Thirty-plus years after its release, Grease is still the word!

• Language: English
• Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
• Release date: Sep 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780879104207

Book preview

Copyright © 2011 by Stephen Tropiano

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2011 by Limelight Editions

An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation

7777 West Bluemound Road

Milwaukee, WI 53213

Trade Book Division Editorial Offices

33 Plymouth Street, Suite 302, Montclair, NJ 07042

Photos here, here and here are from Photofest. All other photos are from the author’s collection.

Book design by Mark Lerner

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-87910-389-7

www.limelighteditions.com

Contents

Acknowledgments

1: Grease and the 1950s Nostalgia Craze

2: From Stage to Screen: How Grease Became the Word

3: You’re the One That I Want: Casting Grease

4: We Go Together: Shooting Grease

5: Oh, Those Summer Nights: The Grease Phenomenon

6: Grease Is Still the Word

7: Life After Rydell

Grease-ography

Notes

Bibliography

Photo Insert

Acknowledgments

For their assistance with this project, many thanks to Guy Barile, Dann Gire, Christopher Jones, Steve Kerem, Randal Kleiser, and Barry Sandler.

A major thank you to my friend David Arthur for his invaluable help.

For their ongoing friendship and support, thanks to Jon Bassinger-Flores, Linda Bobel, Faith Ginsberg, Gary Jones, Ray Morton, Luke Reichle, Neil Spisak, Arnold Stiefel, Holly Van Buren, and Steven Ginsberg.

For the opportunity to write a book about a film I love, thanks to my agent, June Clark, and at Limelight Editions, John Cerullo, Marybeth Keating, Bernadette Malavarca, and Barry Monush.

This book is dedicated to the Class of 1980, Hendrick Hudson High School, Montrose, New York.

In memory of Jeff Conaway (1950–2011) and Annette Charles (1948-2011).

This book was made possible in part by a James B. Pendleton Grant from the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College.

A portion of the author’s proceeds will be donated to The Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization that operates the Trevor Lifeline, a national twenty-four-hour crisis and suicide prevention helpline for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth (866-4-U-TREVOR). Visit their Web site at www.thetrevorproject.org.

Chapter 1

Grease and the 1950s Nostalgia Craze

In the summer of 1978, Grease was the word.

The hit 1950s rock ’n’ roll stage musical, which was in the seventh year of its record-breaking Broadway run, was now a hit movie musical.

Over 30 years and $394.6 million later, Grease is still the highest grossing Hollywood musical of all time.

With its tuneful mixture of oldies-style rock and contemporary pop songs, energetic production numbers, and all too familiar boy meets, loses, and gets girl plot (with a slight twist), Grease is a nostalgic homage to life in the late 1950s that captures the look, the feel, and the spirit of an old-fashioned Hollywood musical. Some of the credit for the film’s popularity goes to its talented cast, led by two of the decade’s biggest stars: John Travolta, who had recently crossed over from television to movie stardom with the release of Saturday Night Fever (1977), and, in her American film debut, three-time Grammy Award winner Olivia Newton-John. Their combined talents turned Grease into a huge box-office hit and its double-record soundtrack into the #2 album of the year (Fever’s soundtrack was #1), selling over 24 million copies internationally. Fever and Grease would become the #1 and #2 biggest selling soundtracks of all time, respectively.

A long-running Broadway musical (1972–80), followed by two successful New York revivals (1994–98, 2007–09); a box-office smash with a hit soundtrack and two theatrical re-releases (1998, 2010); and top-selling VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray releases—these are all testaments to Grease’s enduring popularity. But box-office receipts and DVD sales are only one chapter in the story of Grease’s evolution from a fringe stage musical to a megahit movie to a bona fide international cultural phenomenon.

How much more nostalgia can America take?

That’s the question writer Gerald Clarke posed to Time magazine readers in his May 3, 1971, article, The Meaning of Nostalgia. Without question, Clarke observed, "the most popular pastime of the year is looking back. The sense of déjà vu is everywhere."

In fashion, 1930s and 1940s retro was in: for women, slinky halter-neck dresses, wedgies, and chubby jackets; for men, double-breasted suits, two-tone shoes, and bow ties. Radio stations were rebroadcasting 1930s serials like The Shadow and The Green Hornet. Reprints of Dick Tracy and Buck Rogers comics and reissued recordings by Bessie Smith and Alice Faye were big sellers. Liberty, a popular weekly magazine that had ceased production back in 1950, was revived twenty-one years later as a nostalgia-themed quarterly.

Broadway also contributed to the nostalgia boom. Stephen Sondheim’s new musical, Follies (1971–72), included pastiches of production numbers reminiscent of The Ziegfeld Follies (1907–31). Debbie Reynolds made her Broadway debut in the 1973 revival of the 1919 musical Irene. The biggest hit of the 1970–71 season was a revival of another vintage musical, No, No, Nanette (1925–26), which reunited film director Busby Berkeley with Ruby Keeler, the star of his 1933 classic musical, 42nd Street. The cover of the February 19, 1971, issue of Life magazine, which was devoted to the current nostalgia craze, declared, Everybody’s Just Wild About Nostalgia, and featured photos of Keeler and five living Hollywood screen legends: Rita Hayworth, Paulette Goddard, Myrna Loy, Betty Hutton, and Joan Blondell. Seven years later, Blondell had a small role in Grease, playing Vi, the overworked waitress at the teenagers’ favorite hangout, the Frosty Palace.

As for Clarke’s question regarding America’s nostalgia intake—the answer, in hindsight, is simple: more than he could have ever imagined.

Defined as a yearning or longing for the past, nostalgia was certainly nothing new. The term itself was coined back in 1688 by a Swiss doctor named Johannes Hofer to define the sad mood originating from the desire for return to one’s native land. Derived from the Greek root nostros (one’s homeland) and algos (pain/longing), nostalgia was a medical condition that reportedly afflicted university students, soldiers, domestics, and others living far from home. According to medical reports, a patient’s obsessive longing to return home manifested itself in both physiological and psychological symptoms, ranging from nausea and loss of appetite to depression and suicidal thoughts. In the early onset of the disease, patients reportedly confused past and present, real and imaginary events, and some even claimed to have heard the voice of a loved one coming out of another person’s mouth. Today, even the most comprehensive medical insurance plan will not cover a bout of nostalgia, as the emotions the past can trigger are now considered healthy and normal.

In his book Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia, Fred Davis distinguishes between private nostalgia, which is specific to an individual’s past (e.g., the sound of your mother’s voice), and collective nostalgia, which includes images, sounds, and objects associated with the past that are familiar and widely shared by the public. According to Davis, collective nostalgia, under proper conditions, can trigger wave upon wave of nostalgic feeling in millions of persons at the same time. Davis believes the nostalgia orgy of the 1970s offered Americans a haven from the anxieties of the 1960s generated by a mixture of traumatic events (the Vietnam War, political assassinations, the Cold War), radical social changes (brought about by the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements) and the antiauthority attitudes of America’s youth. As society continued to change rapidly, an occasional trip back to a time and place when life was supposedly slower and simpler was a welcomed, albeit temporary, diversion.

Grease opened in theaters on June 16, 1978, at the height of the 1950s/early 1960s nostalgia boom that permeated American youth culture in the 1970s, beginning with the release of the low-budget box-office hit American Graffiti (1973). Set on a summer evening in 1962, director George Lucas’s semiautobiographical comedy-drama focuses on four recent high school graduates and their last night together in a small California town. The film’s triple-platinum soundtrack is comprised of original golden oldies from the 1950s and 1960s by artists like Chuck Berry (Almost Grown, Johnny B. Goode), Fats Domino (Ain’t That a Shame), Bill Haley & His Comets ([We’re Gonna] Rock Around the Clock), and Buddy Holly (Maybe Baby, That’ll Be the Day).

Television was also quick to capitalize on America’s fascination with the past. January 15, 1974, marked the debut of Happy Days (1974–84), a popular situation comedy about an all-American teenager growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the mid-1950s. Happy Days and its spin-off, the female buddy sitcom Laverne & Shirley (1976–83), were the two highest rated shows on television during the 1976–77 and 1977–78 seasons, right around the time Grease was released in theaters.

Grease offers moviegoers a triple dose of collective nostalgia. First, it’s escapist entertainment that makes no pretense of depicting the past in a realistic manner. Instead, the musical romanticizes American life in the late 1950s in a highly self-conscious style. In other words, Grease is not simply a film set in the past—it’s a film about the past, complete with all the 1950s iconography (leather jackets, poodle skirts, a drag race, the local malt shop, a sock hop in the gym, etc.) with which movie audiences were all too familiar by 1978. But like most nostalgia films, Grease also has a very selective memory. Sheltered from the social, political, and economic realities of the late 1950s, the kids at Rydell High School live a carefree life in a Technicolor utopia, where even a serious problem, like an pregnancy scare, is only a false alarm.

Second, part of Grease’s charm lies in its treatment of subject matter that is inherently nostalgic for most moviegoers—high school life. Grease belongs to a subgenre of nostalgia-themed comedies and dramas produced in the early to mid-1970s about teenagers and college students coming of age in