MTV. Punk, New Wave and Rap. The VCR. Miami Vice. Cocaine. Crack. AIDS. Reagan. Chernobyl. The Cold War ramps up and wraps up. Gorbachev. The Iron Curtain falls.
This was an MGM film about the New York High School for the Performing Arts, but due to the subject matter the New York City Board of Education wouldn’t let the producers film in the actual school. There were also problems with local unions because their cut wasn’t big enough. The film used a cast of unknowns, and it made a fortune for everybody.
This Orion film gave star turns to Dudley Moore, Liza Minnelli and John Gielgud. Liza plays a simple girl from Queens and not the kind of role people had expected from her. Gielgud steals the movie with his acerbic wit.
Bacharach had ended his marriage to Angie Dickinson, and this was his first effort with Carol Bayer Sager, who was to become his next wife.
Richard Gere, Debra Winger and Lou Gossett headlined this chick flick about the training of Navy flight officers.
Jack Nitzsche was a longtime keyboard player with the legendary Wrecking Crew and later for Bread. Buffy Sainte-Marie has recently been outed for being Italian, not American Indian. Another Crockajawea.
Thomas Hedley based his story on the lives of strippers in Toronto. Basically it was a strip club story with dancers doing something more creative than just working the pole. It was nothing like what was presented in the film. Hedley sold the idea to Jon Peters, who had started as Barbra Streisand’s hairdresser and had parlayed that connection into a major career as a producer. Paramount picked it up but put it in development hell.
Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson rescued it by bringing in Joe Eszterhas, an A-list writer, to beef up the script. Bruckheimer and Simpson were to use the success of this, their first film, as a springboard to major producing careers in film and TV that lasted to this day.
Despite mostly negative reviews, this chick flick made a fortune for everyone concerned and started careers.
MTV had changed the movie music landscape. Back in the 1950s there was a perception that a popular song would increase the recognition and box office draw of a film. Tom Lehrer had made fun of this with his reference to “The Ten Commandments Mambo” in 1959. By 1981 MTV offered the opportunity for a musical trailer that would be aired many times a day. Now it became almost mandatory for a film to have a song attached to it for advertising purposes.
This was Gene Wilder’s remake of a French film.
Ballet and the Cold War. Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines. Helsinki standing in for Leningrad. Critical failure but financial success.
Patriotism made a massive comeback in Hollywood thanks to the Reagan presidency. Tom Cruise had become the epitome of what today is called “toxic masculinity,” but it was a refreshing change from Hollywood’s usual formula of sensitive wimpishess. Despite being panned by the liberal movie critics of the time, the film tapped into what people wanted enough to be the biggest grossing movie of the year. This was Bruckheimer and Simpson at their best.
The original script went to MGM’s development hell and was then sold off to a small outfit, Vestron. The chick flick made a fortune for everybody involved. Abortion rights advocates called the film the “gold standard for cinematic portrayals of abortion.” It’s quite a change from 1963's “The Cardinal.”
This was supposed to be a Melanie Griffith vehicle, but Fox demanded two bankable stars, Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver, before they would green-light it. It was the era of Big Hair for women. The film ended up being nominated for a whole slew of awards and making a fortune.
When Walt Disney died in 1966 from lung cancer, his son-in-law Ron Miller took over and slowly ran the studio into the ground. The moment of truth came in 1982 when Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.” became the highest grossing film in history. Family members demanded of Miller, “Why didn’t we make that film?” All hell broke loose when they discovered that Miller had taken a pitch from Spielberg for “E.T.” and turned him down flat. The family went to the Bass brothers of Texas to launch a proxy war to get Miller out and get someone who knew what he was doing in. That turned out to be Michael Eisner, formerly of Paramount, who turned the studio around.
One of his priorities was to get the animation division back on track. There was little going on in the film industry with respect to animation, and Eisner thought this was the ideal niche for Disney. It was an inspired move on Eisner’s part because it not only brought Disney to the fore but launched a whole new trend in animation at other studios.
The story originated with Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote it as a tragedy. Dvorak had even written an opera, “Russalka,” that stuck to the original tragic story. But animated tragedies don’t sell, and the studio turned it into sheer fun and gave it a happy ending. It was a massive moneymaker.
Thanks, Publius, for the “stars” of the 80s. Love reading the stories.