Posted on 02/07/2021 10:36:54 AM PST by SeekAndFind
This is a dumb story about dumb hot takes. We live in a dumb time full of overly serious people who left to their own devices will destroy art and usher in another dark age. That’s where we are thanks to social media, which was supposed to connect and enlighten us all.
Fortunately, Olivia Newton-John is having none of it.
Olivia Newton-John spoke out against fans who have recently slammed her iconic film “Grease” calling it sexist and misogynist.
“I think it’s kind of silly,” the 72-year-old said on the podcast A Life Of Greatness. “I mean, this movie was made in the 1970s about the 1950s.”
The BBC, which once aired the likes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Blackadder, and Yes, Prime Minister — which were all deliberately insane and often offensive on purpose — showed the anodyne Grease over the Christmas period. Grease is the tame-by-today’s-standards musical in which Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta played 1950s teenagers despite both being in their mid to late 20s at the time.
And John Travolta sang.
Granted, making John Travolta sing in public could be offensive. But it’s not what the haters are hating.
People with quicker fingers than their woke brains commented.
One person said, “The drive-in/botched make-out session between Danny and Sandy hasn’t aged well. Film kinda glides right into song (“Sandy”) before viewers register the date rapey vibe of the scene they just saw #Grease.”
Another said, “Ahhh man. Just watching #Grease one of my favorite films and it’s so of its time. Misogynistic, sexist and a bit rapey.”
The woke moment should have jumped several sharks and nuked a warehouse full of fridges by now. It’s annoying, scoldy, and played out. Newton-John agrees.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
People aren’t just being taught that this or that is “woke” they’re also being taught to weed out offenses and bask in the resulting glow of virtue. This’ll never end.
“Grease was gay kitsch.”
Mmmmm, No. Were you even around back then?
He Hee. I love your naïveté.
Yes I was a high schooler.
I had no interest in seeing it.
Me too, my girlfriend loved it so I did too, if you know what I mean. Nevertheless less, I never got a “gay” vibe from it at the time. The Bee Gees were cool until they weren’t. there you go. Still love Night Fever and Stay’n Alive, it’ takes me back to good times. Does that make me Gay?
She appeared on "Huckabee" this weekend, along with her daughter.
You didn’t have a girlfriend, I’m sorry.
Judging from the superbowl 50 or 60 %
“Still love Night Fever and Stay’n Alive, it’ takes me back to good times. Does that make me Gay?”
Yeah.
Lol. Just kidding. But I said nothing about the BG’s.
Do you have any Barbra Streisand CDs?
Sometime in the last 10-12 years I think I happened upon an SNL sketch that was pretty funny-—Andy Samberg was in it,that involved a tense session of cleaning up the Grease language for an upcoming production. WE had a REAL car that I “drove” every night. Since our production took place in a huge space that was actually a converted trolley barn with probably 20’ high ceilings, and it had enormous sliding barn doors in the rear opening on a typical Chicago alley, we were able to get our $40 bargain jalopy actually INSIDE the theater, and hidden in the dark alongside the raised stage when it wasn’t needed.It was a ‘49 Hudson, and was painted over with gray primer-—perfect touch was leaping orange flames painted OVER the primer, as if Miller couldn’t wait to get it properly painted and just HAD to get the flames on it.So the normal procedure was at the beginning of the scene I’d drive the car out from the darkness in the rear of the theater, jump out have some lines of dialog with Rizzo, then grab the mike and do that song with rest of the Burger Palace boys doing accompaniment in the background. Then Rizzo would get in the car w. me after a little dialogue she’s get in the car with me and I’d drive as slowly as possible forward and disapper behind a 15’ tall scrim. On that side of the theater the audience, on folded chairs was literally on the other side of the scrim. So I drove ahead, went to put my foot onthe brake about 10 feet or so behind the scrim and my foot somehow got wedged between the brake and the accelerator, and the car shot ahead and crashed into some mocked up wooden stairs we used in the opening , with cafeteria trays stacked up on them. As soon as it was clear what was going to happen, the girl who played Rizzo said Oh god, Bill!! I had to pretend it wasn’t my fault, so I got out, fuming under my breath-—Rizzo got out and stood there for a moment and then crumpled to the ground, fainting dead away. I thought my life and the show was over, but Susie came to in a few seconds and the burger palace boys covered up this mishap with a lame joke from the stage. So from that night on, I wasnt allowed to start the car up or drive it at all. We had to do a tape recording of the engine noise and have a couple of guys push the car out from the rear into the spotlight . The show’s lawyer forbade the car from being anything beyond a bulky prop. The amazing thing was, at the time, I didn’t even have a driver’s license!! I was old enough to have one but never got one So I may be the only person in theater history to have a car accident INSIDE a theater. I always tell my wife that if I ever was a contestant on Jeopardy ,THAT would be the story I would tell Alex (RIP) at that intermission segment. SO, you are one of the few people who weren’t actually there who knows what happened.Don’t tell anybody.
that’s because the movies were tailored to audiences quite a few years already beyond the original ones who still remember life in 1960, the timeframe of the original play.See my reply to jotmo below.
There was also a rumor that she was gay because someone capitalized on mention of her and her “partner” but it turned out to be her business partner, a male.
Yeah, Richard Price. The book and the movie were very good.
Destroy all old movies. Remember, they have men spanking their wives, carrying them, controlling them. They display the mores of their times as well as of older times they attempt to predict. Any film that didn’t correctly display future 2021 political correctness shall be burnt.
Sigh.
See my reply to jotmo below for a whole lot more Grease lore.
I knew both authors, having been in the show from its beginning in Chicago in 1971. One of the authors Warren Casey was gay, and was 35, and working at a record store downtown Chi, after having been a High School art teacher. Jim Jacobs 28 at the time, was certainly NOT gay, a very good friend of mine all during the show. Warren died of AIDS about 15 years later. Jim is a very rich man living probably in California. One of the producers of the movie lived in suburban Lake Forest and used to come into a little restaurant in Highwood where my mother was the cook. Very friendly guy whose nickname was “Bunny” and who was also very likely gay. And that is all you will ever need to know about the gay roots of Grease. No one in our original cast, male or female, was remotely gay. I knew them all.
The book version of “The Wanderers” was more explicitly racist by the standards of today, but keep in mind that Price was writing about the mileau he observed growing up in the Bronx at that time, as one of the few Jewish kids in a housing project with a large Italian and black population.
I still sing the lyrics to Lawrence of Arabia from HK to this day.
Alone at a drive in movie was another song that was originally MINE ( I played Miller in the original Chicago production.) Our show in CHicago was top heavy with songs, and I rehearsed that one for a week, but it was eventually cut. I wasn’t even aware it was put back in when the show went to NY. My original part, was the Teen Angel, who did Beauty School Dropout. I was cast as a main guy Miller, the one who had the hotrod Greased Lightnin’. when the guy who was cast as Miller, stopped showing up for rehearsals. I still wound up doing Beauty School Dropout a bunch of times when the guy cast as Teen Angel got sick.
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