On Location with: FAME (1980) watch online HD

. . . then this short, produced before the movie came out in 1980, will be enough to jog your memory, if not satiate your need for a FAME fix. Running slightly more than 12 minutes long, this preview not only manages to cram in a lot of interview snippets from 30ish-looking director Alan Parker, but it also has sound bites from eight cast members and the movie's choreographer. Better yet, there are clips of many of the flick's more memorable dance outbreaks, including the title number and the famous and often copied boogie-on-the-table-tops impromptu lunch room ensemble song. During one behind-the-scenes segment, it is somewhat hard to tell if the Ryder truck driver was a REAL irate motorist caught up in a traffic snafu caused by the filming (remember, this was well before the Oklahoma City Bombing). There's also the clip of the Literature teacher informing the illiterate student, "If you can't learn to read, you can't learn to dance." The tie-in to New York City's renowned Julliard School of Music at the beginning went by too fast for me to catch it (I did not have a pause function available), but if I am able to see FAME again the connection might be made clear.

In the 1970s and 1980s companies stopped making just short trailers for movies. To bring in irregular film goers and to puff up the importance of likely blockbusters, they made one-reel pictures about the pictures, basically "Making of" features. For MGM the umbrella title was 'On Location with' and this one is about FAME, the Alan Parker musical drama that, along with Saturday NIGHT FEVER, briefly redefined and revived the movie musical.

It didn't take, of course and the whole thing collapsed with Steven Bochco's disastrous TV series COP ROCK. Today in 2012 the corpse occasionally twitches and we get a film version of a Broadway stage musical, usually with the stage choreography annoyingly unchanged for the movie screen. That's the subtext of this short subject: it's not about the aspiration of making a musical about kids who desire to be performers. It's about giving them and the audience musicals. One should applaud the effort if not the result.