Summer’s over, kids, let’s go back to school and check out the prototype film for the performance company genre.
Fame provided no overall plot to keep me interested, nor resolved anything at the end. A bunch of kids attend a performing arts school, everyone has a terrible time, some of them graduate with prospects, but ultimately the entertainment industry destroys people, so feel bad for them, I guess.
This movie only exists because David de Silva saw “A Chorus Line” on Broadway. It was a hit show at the time, and de Silva wanted to know more about the characters backstories, more specifically how they trained to become dancers. He roped in Christopher Gore to write the screenplay about a rag-tag group of high school students attending real-life New York City-based LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts (PA). Gore wasn’t initially excited to write a screenplay as he’d previously only focused on theater, and it shows cause this definitely feels phoned in.
He does succeed in selling MGM on the script, however, and director Alan Parker signed on. I’m not sure what the original screenplay looked like, but Parker wanted to focus on the dark side of the entertainment industry. He rewrote a bunch of Gore’s original material and interviewed current attendees of PA to help inform the stories he told. The final draft is a bunch of disjointed vignettes of several students time at PA, and it sure focuses on the dark side, because that’s literally all we see.
Every article or videos I watched about Fame referred to it as gritty, and like, sure. It’s gritty. There are lots of sad people and underage tits. Maybe it’s the first gritty dance movie that’s ever existed, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just not into the slow, twisted movies made in the 1970s that take themselves so. fucking. seriously. Clichés have to come from somewhere, I guess, and this movie is ground zero for all of them.
So many teen performance movies are based off of this formula, but have a stronger narrative drive than this. Fame focuses on 8 main kids:
- Doris, A young girl who wants to change everything about herself to become an actress, and has an overbearing mother pushing her to succeed
- Leroy, a young black kid who is a great dancer, but is constantly mocked and pushed by his white English teacher to “do better”. Some of my favorite lines from the teacher include, “Speak English,” and “Try Othello; he’s black.”
- Hilary, a promiscuous young ballerina of well means who has to get an abortion.
- Lisa, a young female dancer who isn’t good enough to make it and gets kicked out of the program.
- Bruno, a talented young musician who butts heads with the orchestra teacher because he’d rather focus on electronic music. There’s a lot of discussion about what instruments Mozart would compose on today because he was a *rebel* which like… I couldn’t care less about.
- Coco, a talented young singer, dancer and actress who is Bruno’s muse, but is easily taken advantage of by a creep pretending to cast a movie.
- Ralph Garci, a young comic who lies about his family to hide his pain. He is weirdly obsessed with fellow Puerto Rican comedian Freddie Prinze, who attended PA in real life, and this informs a lot of his coping mechanisms, like alcoholism.
- Montgomery, a young gay man who is the son of a famous actress, but ultimately lives alone and finds solace in other people’s relationships.
We are haphazardly introduced to all of these characters through the PA audition process, and because nobody has names and I swear I have partial facial blindness, I couldn’t distinguish who I was supposed to care about. Kids perform monologues (Montgomery performs one where he talks about a weekend trip with his mother as if they were sweethearts, which like, good god, gross), they play instruments, they sing, and in Leroy’s case, he gets ogled by adults as an 8th grader because he has a 6 pack and dances like he works at Chippendales. The moment I questioned who wrote this screenplay came at the line “if you’re Black or Puerto Rican you have a better chance of getting in”, because a) it sounds fake and b) it sounds bitter. The students are encouraged to perform in multiple disciplines, which is kind of hilarious since they’re immediately asked upon acceptance to pick only one to focus on.
We finally learn everyone’s names in the kid’s English class, thank god, because my notes were getting messy. After class, we’re treated with this totally improvised song and dance number called “Hot Lunch”.
FUN FACT: Fame was originally going to be called “Hot Lunch” until it was discovered there was a recently released erotic movie by the same name, which is hilarious and absolutely expected because Hot Lunch definitely sounds like a porno.
The first year at PA is spent establishing everyone’s relationship to each other. Doris and Montgomery are friends and they both detest Ralph because he constantly makes fun of them. This, of course, is setting up an enemies-to-lovers storyline between Doris and Ralph and I can’t help but roll my eyes because girls in movies are expected to accept any form of attention as flattery instead of the blatant harassment Ralph lobs in Doris and Montgomery’s direction.
Similarly, by Sophomore year, Leroy is sleeping with two dancers, Coco and Hilary, the former of which is a rich white bitch who is definitely fetishizing Leroy for being black. He doesn’t seem to like either of them, though, as his main conflict is between him and the white English teacher who is shaming him for never learning how to read and being embarrassed because of it.
Coco, our talented singer, moves on from Leroy to focus on her singing career with the help of Bruno, who thinks of her as a muse. She tries to convince him to form a band with her, and suggests they may book more gigs or make more money if the underage girls showed off their goodies. Paired with the gawking the boys did into the girls’ locker room, the 1960s/70s were fucking wild for sexualizing children, that’s for sure…
Bruno, while he wants to foster Coco’s talent, is hesitant to share his compositions because he is his harshest critic. This comes to a head when his father, who has spent 7k of his 1980s cab-driving earned dollars on electric musical instruments, decides to drive up to the school and blast Ralph and Coco’s latest recording.
I would lose my mind if I were driving in NYC and a street was completely blocked off so a bunch of kids could jump around in front of a building that literally has multiple rooms dedicated specifically for dancing. Bruno’s cab driver dad should have known better and absolutely should have been fought on site for pulling a stunt like this.
Apparently this scene was a pain in the ass to film because people were pissed 46th street was shut down to shoot, disgruntled union reps didn’t like the fact the director of photography was running the camera because their original camera operator had to leave because of a family emergency, and the dancers were requesting hazard pay because they were being forced to dance on top of cars. This specific scene took 3 days to shoot and it kind of looks like a mess because 8 different choreographed routines are being simultaneously performed over a song that is NOT “Fame” and is, in fact, Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff”.
Meanwhile, our friend Lisa, who I haven’t talked about at all because she’s completely forgettable, is told her dream of being a dancer is never going to come to fruition. Instead of walking in front of a subway car like they tease she’s going to do, she decides to become an actor, which I didn’t even know she was interested in being at this point.
Doris and Ralph start dating, making Montgomery a third wheel, but he’s weirdly OK with it because one of Ralph’s little sisters was beaten, and the other molested, so the only way he can be comforted is by a grief bang from Doris. I’m generally perplexed at their relationship in the first place, but it does include this wholesome scene of them going to a viewing of Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time.
Doris’ obsessive stage-mom warns against Doris getting pregnant, which she scoffs at, because clearly the ballerina is the one who is going to get knocked up and have to have a *gasp* abortion if she wants to continue to perform. I honestly saw this coming from a mile away, which lead me to google “movies where ballerinas get abortions” because I was convinced other movies have done this afterward, and the closest I got was that girl in Dirty Dancing, so maybe that’s why it felt familiar.
Let’s take a breather and watch Irene Cara sing, because honestly, these were the only moments of respite I found in this movie. She was previously in the Electric Company before being cast in Fame, and she is truly the standout star of this entire thing.
Speeding toward the end because I’ve had enough, Ralph, like every comedian, develops a drug problem and screams at Doris and Montgomery about not supporting his shitty career because he is NOT funny. Doris lectures him about being himself, which is rich coming from her, because earlier she decided she wanted to change her name to Dominique to seem more exotic. Montgomery comes out to his class, Leroy harasses the English teacher at the hospital while her husband is dying to get her to pass him in her class so he can graduate, and Coco gets taken advantage of during a fake casting couch situation where she is asked to get naked in front of a clearly non-French dude with a video camera in a sketchy apartment. This scene was genuinely hard to watch, and I am kind of disturbed by the fact this was the only scene I knew of this movie ahead of watching it because it has been referenced in pop culture a million times, parody or not.
Then the movie ends on their senior graduation with absolutely none of them set up for success in the real world, but the song is vaguely optimistic for unknown reasons because the tone of this movie has been nothing but grim since the first few frames.
Peep former dancer Lisa singing, even though I had no idea she could do that, either. Also, I think its my least favorite trope to watch choirs start clapping while singing to make things seem more causal and peppy because I have had to do this and it feels as cringe as it looks.
Michael Gore (Leslie Gore of “It’s My Party” fame’s brother) collaborated with Dean Pitchford to compose the songs for Fame, beating out John Williams’ work on The Empire Strikes Back for Best Original Score, further proving the Academy Awards are truly smoking something.
Would I recommend watching Fame? No. This was so extra it was exhausting. But I am introducing “I don’t relate to that” into my everyday vernacular.
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