Grease is still the word (20 years on)
Today, movie's songs, style have lost their gum-snapping charm. Twenty years after its original release, the movie Grease is inspiring teenagers to don '50s outfits, repeat dialogue, hand jive and sing along with John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John and 'bad girl' Stockard Channing.
By Katherine Monk, Sun Movie Critic
GREASE 20th anniversary re-release. Starring John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, Stockard Channing.
Having never seen Grease. The Movie or, as it’s now generally known, Grease. The Phenomenon - when it was released 20 years ago, watching the film unfold before my virgin eyes conjured memories of my first sip of beer.
Giddy from the adrenaline of anticipation and sensitized to any phenomenological! effect, Grease slipped down my gullet with ticklish delight for the first five minutes, at any rate.
A film that begins with cartoon credits. How charming!
Director Randal Kleiser really grasps this whole idea of translating for the screen a cute ‘n’ nutty Broad way play about the unlikely romance between a greaser guy and a goody-two-shoes girl. He focuses on fun, immersion in gum-snapping ’50s cool and immediately demands a complete suspension of disbelief.
Good idea. Those little beer bubbles are working (tee hee). Initially, I could see why Grease went on to gross $340 million worldwide the most of any screen musical in history.
This movie wasn’t just about a bunch of high-school kids who sing and dance their way through America’s post-war neon rites of passage. No, this was Grease, The Phenomenon! - a movie that caught, and conquered, pop culture at a time of transition.
Fusing the coked-up remains of ’70s disco (via then dance king John Travolta and the slick Barry Gibb theme music) with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia for a simpler, clearer and non-threatening view of youth (via the 50s bobby-socks setting), Grease told moviegoers that kids are just kids no matter what the decade, and no matter how middle-aged they may be in real life.
One look at John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John’s (albeit nicely) aging faces on the screen is proof aplenty that Grease is Hollywood at its most subversive: Make the lie look good and people will want to believe regard-less of what common sense may be screaming at their cerebral cortexes.
Remember, that first beer is the sum total of every rock ‘n’ roll-laden, freedom-filled beer ad you have ever seen. Not once do those ads tell you beer actually tastes like mouldy ginger ale.
And so hundreds of thousands of movie fans drank up the lie again and again because it tasted good and made you feel even better.
All that wonderfully cheesy music! All that uninspired choreography! All that dreadfully dull dialogue!
After an hour under the influence, Grease is still intoxicating which, in the late ’70s, was a welcome condition. People could forget about the continuing erosion of the American political order, the tail end of the sexual revolution and the endless oil crisis.
By Ron Kampeas, Associated Press New York
Sara Wolensky has no idea who Sandra Dee is. But she and best buddy Amanda Philips know all the lines and moves to the song lampooning the 1950s Princess of Prude. The two teens have memorized all of Grease, the paean to hormonal longing that predates their births and ritualizes a time of ’50s innocence.
And they’re not alone. If revival, video and album sales are believed, millions have got the same chills, and they’re multiplying.
Twenty years after it first appeared on screens, Grease truly is the “The Word”. Paramount Pictures, hopeful the faithful will still come, is releasing a digitally remastered version today. Visiting New York from Pennsylvania to replay the ritual at a restaurant given over to Grease karaoke, Wolensky and Philips are ready.
After viewing bad girl Rizzo (Stockard Channing) saying, “Look at me, I’m Sandra Dee”, hundreds of times, they know exactly when to roll their eyes bemoaning the state of “lousy with virginity” and cross their legs, chiding Troy Donahue for saying, “What you wanna do?”
When they launch into the complex “hand jive” on screen, a coven of true believers in the audience join in the Gospel of Grease, hand-jiving with the actors.
“It’s so carefree, so easy,” says Wolensky, 15. “Music today is so full of problems. Everyone I know is into Grease.” “It’s up. It’s bubbly,” adds Philips. 17.
Why has Grease become such a cult? It continues to top video sales charts, re-emerged on Billboard’s album lists five years ago, and a recent Broadway revival enjoyed a long run with a bevy of celebrities rotating the roles of Rizzo, Sandy and Danny.
Even Randal Kleiser, the film’s director, is nonplussed by the phenomenon.
“I recently went to a midnight show with Olivia Newton-John and Didi Conn,” two of the movies’ stars, he recalled. “It was like Rocky Horror. The audience was in ’50s outfits, repeating dialogue, singing along, hand-jiving in their seats.”
The Rocky Horror Picture Show was deliberately post-modern, with actors addressing the camera and audience participation. Grease seems merely a relic of 1970s nostalgia that inspired TV shows and movies like Happy Days, The Waltons and The Way We Were.
“I never imagined it would have done this business,” says the movie’s producer, Alan Carr. Since its 1978 debut, Grease has grossed more than $340 million US.
Its success is attributed to the catchy score by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey with new songs for the movie by Barry Gibb, John Farrar and Louis St. Louis and the universality of the high-school experience it conveys.
Conn, who played Frenchy, explained that the cast which starred John Travolta as Danny, Newton-John as Sandy and Frankie Avalon as Teen Angel immersed themselves in the high-school zeitgeist for the 57-day shoot by speaking to each other only in character, on and off camera.
The archetypes were so successful, the cast and crew became typecast, and some careers were overwhelmed.
It took Travolta until 1994’s Pulp Fiction to recover. Newton-John never recovered. Channing, known for her versatility on stage, found it hard to get away from “troubled girls” on screen.
“People still greet me on the street and say, “Hi Rizzo,” she tells Conn in Frenchy’s Grease Scrapbook, a 20th-anniversary commemoration published this month by Hyperion Books.
But others now regard the film as a peak. “There was a teenage atmosphere, energy, naivete, Innocence.” Newton-John recalled of the shoot. “And a lot of knowingness.”
The word about Grease
“[John) Travolta is electrifying-part boy, part man and all the rest animal. After Saturday Night Fever and Grease comes Moment by Moment opposite Lily Tomlin. As of now, there is only one way for Travolta to go, and that’s up.” -Former Vancouver Sun movie critic Les Wedman in his June 16, 1978 review of Grease, (in his 1998 Movie and Video Guide, Leonard Maltin gave Moment by Moment a “bomb” rating.)
“The Travolta acting arsenal [in Grease) consisted only of an annoying pout and swagger-most likely the result of skin tight jeans cutting off circulation to Important body parts, Including the brain. Face it: the young Travolta was a whiny little puke with a ducktail you just wanted to muss.” - Montreal Gazette movie critic Bill Brownstein’s review of the 20th anniversary re-release of Grease.
“They would say things like ‘my kid has watched this 20 times and I could kill you because I keep having to listen to it over and over again!” -Olivia Newton-John on what parents have said to her recently about Grease.
“We have to beat the shark, we have to beat the shark!” - Producer Allan Carr on what a studio executive told him about Grease 1078 opening opposite Jaws 2.