With the release of the first season of the Fame TV Series on DVD, Close-Up Film takes a nostalgic look back at the Fame Phenomena
Feature by Jean Lynch
Fame. They said they’d live forever and with the release of the first season of the NBC TV series on DVD, almost 25 years since the show first aired in the UK, it seems that the prophecy could hold true.
It was the summer of ’82 when the musical drama about the lives and tribulations of students at the New York High School for the Performing Arts leaped onto our screens. It played on a Thursday evening, in what was then the lucrative teen marketing spot, straight after ‘Top of the Pops’. To coincide with the release, the planners cannily released the Oscar-winning theme song, as sung by Irene Cara in the Alan Parker movie from which the series was spawned, hitting number one for three weeks. Fame fever was sky high as first we watched the effervescent video of decadent music and dance students, literally stopping the New York traffic as they spilled through the school doors and onto the streets, and then a second redition as the opening credits of the series rolled immediately afterwards. It was feelgood, exactly like the feeling you get on the last day of term before the six week holiday.
The Fame Phenomena began in 1980 with the big screen outing. At that time, we weren’t quite into our teens, so Fame the film passed us by. Not surprising, really, as Fame carried the ‘AA’ rating (it’s a 15 now) and we were too young and innocent to even think about sneaking in. However, with the sudden early proliferation of home video recorders and local video libraries who weren’t too worried about our age (plus, we were bona fide teenagers now), we were able to satisfy our curiousity.
Fame, the movie, was a very different beast to our beloved pre-watershed TV series. Although Debbie Allen as Lydia Grant uttered the classic ‘you got big dreams... you want fame... well, fame costs and right here’s where you start paying... in sweat’ at the start of the show every week, the series was perhaps the last of the wholesome mom-and-apple-pie shows that began with the Brady Bunch and took in The Partridge Family, The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie. Ok, these were much sassier kids (some even came from broken homes), but mostly they had good relationships with their parents, and huge respect for their wise teachers who likewise loved them in return. Of course they worked hard at the High School, but you just knew all of them were going to make it one day if they worked and believed hard enough. Heck, one episode was even their version of The Wizard of Oz.
But back to 1980, and the title ‘Fame’ was much more ironic, it’s lure being a harder taskmaster than the series would have us believe, and sometimes a mocking one. It decreed that talent and hard work wasn’t a guarantee to success, and that sometimes life had other plans for you. Rather than being a musical, the film was about kids who just happened to sing and dance as part of their lives, and so it followed that there should be music. Although some of the pieces seemed to appear spontaneously but yet perfectly performed and produced, nevertheless they fitted in with the film’s gritty realism. The film also allowed for greater character arcs, following the youngsters from their first entrace auditions throughout their years at the school. They are complex characters. Doris Finsecker (Maureen Teefy), timidly singing in a frilly-necked blouse, makes it in by the skin of her teeth, in spite of the pushy stage mother accompanying her. Her story sees her blossom into a confident, pot-smoking, Rocky Horror Show loving bohemian, with strength enough for problems of chip-carrying Raul/Ralph (Barry Miller). Ralph denies his Puerto Rican ethnicity, a wise-cracking pain, but we discover that, tragically, he is the loving father figure to his brain damaged younger sister, who fell foul of a local criminal. Smart Coco Henandez (Irene Cara) was a tough cookie, but that soon crumbled when her first screen test turned out to be a pervy photographer who wanted her to remove her clothes. Heartbreakingly, with tears streaming, she complies, so willing is she to do anything that just might lead to fame. Little signs along the way, such as the former star student – the guy most likely to succeed – is discovered by the students waiting tables, and the spectre of Freddie Prinze, another alumni who died tragically young, looms ominously, suggest that fame, both the pursuit and attainment, can be a (sometimes fatal) disease.
Back in our heady, optimistimic pubescent days, we still wanted to believe that the world was a friendly and hopeful place. In our class, we had a handful of people who yearned for a career on the stage, while some wanted to be models, some rock stars, some designers, some even journalists. One girl, inspired by Quincy, wanted to be a police pathologist. Even though most of us had different dreams from Coco, Doris, et al, dreams we had. And Parents we had. Strife with teachers we had. Despite the differences, in essence these kids were just like us.
Fame, the series, was big on the feelgood factor. Despite being set in the Big Apple, it was a lovely illusion, a cosy, cossetted ivory towers world, with love in abundance. Gene Athony Ray, as Leroy Johnson, was one of the few original cast members to make it to the show. His first incarnation saw him as a street kid, unable to read, irresponsibly getting his fellow students pregnant. This time round he could falteringly make a stab at Shakespeare, petulantly stick his lip out when wise English teacher, Miss Sherwood (Carol Mayon Jenkins), berated him for not doing his homework, and demonstrated his rebellious streak by refusing to wear tights in dance class.
Also returning is Lee Curreri, who plays the sensitive music genius, Bruno. A gifted musician, he argues that the orchestra is dead and that a synthesizer is the future. He has many run-ins with Mr Shorofsky (Albert Hague), another Fame movie original, a shrewd old sage who has escaped Nazi Germany. And finally, there's Lydia Grant (Debbie Allen), the cool dance teacher. Grant choreographed all the show's dance routines.
The pilot episode begins with Julie Miller (Lori Singer), a gifted cellist, looking like a fish out of water in her posh clothes as she joins the students for the first time. Montgomery (P.R. Paul), who could be having struggles with his sexuality but that's never made clear, takes her under his wing and teaches her 'in 10 easy lessons' how to fit in. It matters, he says, what shoes you wear, what clothes you wear, that you don't draw attention to yourself... he spoke for senior school kids the world over and held secure a place for the series in our hearts.
The Doris of the series was now called Schwartz, rather than Finsecker (as in the movie), a short, tough-on-the-outside-heart-of-gold-on-the-inside Jewish girl. Valerie Landsberg, who played the character, gave us the show's first bona fide hit, in the music store, with the poppy 'hi fidelity'. Doris became the unlikely sex symbol of the show, along with her sparring partner, wise-cracking would-be comedian, Danny Amatullo (Carlo Imperato). Although these were the two characters we could probably most associate with, one of the Strengths of Fame was that there stand-out plastic pin-ups and you could pass every one of them unnoticed in the street if you met them in the real world. The last of the line-up was Coco Hernandez (Erica Gimpel). She was still determined - 'I'm famous already just not enough people know it yet' - but never once did she let her integrity drop so spectacularly as it had in the movie.
Fame the series was manufactured pop and, in the days of new romantics and Stock Aitken and Waterman, we liked the cheesy safety of that. We liked knowing that success would triumph over adversity, that there would always be a happy ending, and we liked the music. Many of them fell into either the Barry Manilow/Burt Bacharach style ('I Still Believe in Me' 'Be My Music') or else pre-empted SClub7 ('Hi Fidelity'), but the Kids from Fame, with all the cast strutting their stuff on the cover, still holds a special place in many a thirty- and forty- something's record (yes, record) collection. Not so long back, I was in a store with my best friend from school, and over the in-house radio came the opening bars of a song I probably hadn't heard for some 20 years "the moon's up and the sun's down..." and spontaneously we both quietly sang: "and a thousand starry eyes have caught me crying". 'It's gonna be a long night' wasn't even one of the hits.
Fame continued until 1987. By that time we had all grown up, few of the original cast members from the first season remained, and along the way had been joined by such people as Janet Jackson, Jimmy Osmond, Nia Peeples and Cynthia Gibb. It never bettered that first, magnificent season.
The stand-out moment of the show was the final episode of that season. 'A Special Place' sees the school falling foul of cuts and being forced to lose a teacher, namely the much loved drama teacher, Mr Crandall (Michael Thoma). Luckily for Mr Crandall, under pressure from the other teachers, the board agrees to not let the school have the new lighting it was promised but Mr Crandall back instead. What we didn't know then, but now makes this an unbearably poignant scene, was that Thoma was leaving the cast for good that day. He was diagnosed with cancer and didn't have long to live. As the gang sat him down and gathered round to sing 'Starmaker' (the big hit of the series), the tears we see are all real - they were saying goodbye in real life.
Since Fame ended, the cast have kept a low profile. Debbie Allen is perhaps the most successful, having choreographed five academy award shows, run her own X-Factor style 'Fame' show, and winning a Golden Globe. Lee Curreri has produced songs for Natalie Cole and arranged for Olivia Newton-John, Martha Davis and Sly Stone, as well as working with Jeff Rona on the music for 'Chicago Hope'.
Erica Gimpel has appeared in Veronica Mars, ER and Roswell, and Valerie Landsburg has followed a similar tv career, with appearances in Nip/Tuck and Dream On. Carolo Imperato is on the comeback trail with 2005's 'Crazy Love' and has also appeared in an episode of Friends.
Lori Singer went on to appear in Footloose, a film that rode the tail of the fame phenomena. She won a Golden Globe for her performance in Robert Altman's Short Cuts, and she also works for a pediatric AIDS charity.
In April 2003, much of the cast were reunited for 'Fame Remember My Name' for the BBC. Many were shocked by the appearance of Gene Anthony Ray. The former testosterone-fueled dance had been diagnosed with HIV. In June 2003 and, sadly, passed away in November of that year.
But, schmaltzy as it may sound, the names and characters of the Kids from Fame will forever be etched into our memories and hearts. It's legacy lies in the slew of upbeat teen movies that followed in the eighties, most notably Dirty Dancing and Flashdance (for which Irene Cara again sang the theme song) and, thanks to the frenetic dance classes of Lydia Grant, in aerobics classes up and down the country. It also lives on in those of the generation it inspired to believe that it was possible to follow and attain your dream.
Fame. Maybe it IS going to live forever.
Fame, the first season, is available to buy on 5 disc DVD, courtesy of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Fame: Season One
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