Thurm: Quite a few people auditioned for Rizzo, but something unusual happened when Stockard Channing came into the room. I think they thought that was pretty funny, which is probably how it all came together. They did a dance audition and I’m not a dancer, so I just kind of wriggled my way through it with my shoulders and my hips as best I could. I originally read for Frenchy but the casting director had me come back for Marty. I was only 20 when my agent put me up for an audition and Grease ended up being my first film. Allan said he’d bring me in the next day, so I went to audition and got the part of Sonny.ĭinah Manoff (Marty Maraschino): I saw the original version on Broadway and fell in love with it. She turned around and told them how I’d been in the stage version and that they had to see me. One night, though, Allan Carr and Joel Thurm happened to be sitting behind my mother and father at the opening night for another play of mine and my mother heard them mention Grease. ![]() Tucci: By the time the film came around, I was in my early 30s and too old for the role. Photograph: Paramount/Sportsphoto/Allstar She was so good that I didn’t have a back-up Sandy – if Olivia had said no, you’d see me in the film in a skirt and a blond wig! We set up a full film test of the drive-in scene and she was perfect. Unusually for a star like Olivia, she asked for a screen test because she was a singer, not an actor, and she was unsure about being quite a bit older than John. Thurm: It was John who wanted Olivia Newton-John for the role of Sandy. He has that magic.Ĭasting began in LA in 1977 over a three-week period of dance tryouts and callbacks. Certain people, when you’re with them, you can see the magnetism that the camera loves. ![]() Kelly Ward (Putzie) : I met John for the first time shooting The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. John had great faith in us and so he signed on to Grease, which wouldn’t have gotten made without a star name like his. Thurm: Two years before Grease, I produced the TV film Boy in the Plastic Bubble with John and the Grease director, Randal Kleiser. He couldn’t get out of the door to the theatre he was already getting mobbed by fans. He got unbelievable reviews and was nominated for a Tony. Tucci: I saw John’s career skyrocket when he went from his Grease stage run to another play across the street. He was an incredibly good-looking boy with wonderful eyes and had such poise at such a young age. Joel Thurm (casting director) : I had known John since he was 17 and, from the moment he walked into my office, I knew he would do well. ![]() Producer Allan Carr and screenwriter Bronte Woodard ’s adaptation of Grease was one of the projects he wanted to lead. In 1976, John Travolta’s star was rising and he signed a three-film deal with Paramount. I was in the show for six months and I did it eight times a week, so I knew it backwards, forwards and upside down. These relationships that you see in the movie are real. You could identify with these people, you wanted to be part of their group.īarry Pearl (Doody) : I was an understudy, which meant I got to know a lot of the different parts and, along with the other guys who had performed the show on national tour, we all built a real language together.ĭonnelly: Not only were the guys doing the show together all the time, they lived together on the road. The minute the curtain went up on my first performance, the audience just popped. Quite a few of the other male cast members made it on to the film, like John Travolta, who was playing Doody. Those early auditions for the tour were full of hundreds of guys. Michael Tucci (Sonny LaTierri) : Everybody wanted to be in Grease. Photograph: Hulton Deutsch/Corbis/Getty Images ![]() Richard Gere at the party to celebrate the opening of the Grease stage show in London in 1973. Countless spin-offs and revivals have been produced, including Grease 2 in 1982 and a forthcoming prequel series, Grease: The Rise of the Pink Ladies. In the decades since, though, it has amassed a committed following. “I’ve never seen an uglier large-scale musical,” wrote one critic for the Washington Post. Centring on the story of the car-obsessed T-Birds and their romances with the chain-smoking Pink Ladies, Grease was met with a mixed reception upon its release in 1978. Featuring star-making performances from John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, Grease immersed viewers in the camp melodrama of 1950s adolescence, replete with preening boys, blushing girls and explosive dance numbers.īased on the 1971 stage musical by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, which had starred actors including Richard Gere and Barry Bostwick, Grease the film swapped the original’s grittier Chicago setting for the steamy heat of the west coast. Forty-five years ago, audiences first glimpsed the sun-kissed, palm-lined campus of Rydell High, the school setting for the movie musical Grease.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |