Fame (1980) on Netflix
Coco Hernandez, Doris Finsecker, Montgomery MacNeil, Bruno Martelli and Leroy Johnson audition for New York City's High School of Performing Arts. They are placed in drama, music or dance.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.6/1026,709 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes81%
Trailer
Plot summary
Teenagers across New York City try out for the High School of Performing Arts, which places them in one of three departments: drama, music or dance. Montgomery MacNeil, the son of a famous actress, wins a drama place, along with Doris Finsecker, a shy girl with an overbearing mother, and Ralph, who has already failed music and dance auditions. Bruno Martelli studies music, where his electronic gear appalls the conservative teacher Mr. Shorofsky. Coco Hernandez and the talkative, nervous Lisa Monroe enter dance, and Leroy Johnson catches the teachers' attention while performing a routine for a friend. From their first classes the students learn that academics matter as much as performance, and Doris worries she is too ordinary beside her colorful classmates.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Fame (1980)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film had to drop its working title Hot Lunch after Alan Parker noticed a pornographic film of that name showing on 42nd Street and was told it was "New York slang for oral sex"; he renamed it Fame after the 1975 song performed by David Bowie.
- Gene Anthony Ray, who plays Leroy Johnson, had been a Performing Arts student himself but was expelled for disruptive behavior; casting director Margery Simkin found him breakdancing on a street corner in Harlem and asked him to audition.
- The Board of Education refused to let the film shoot at the Performing Arts school, objecting to the script's profanity, sexual content and depictions of drug use; after talk of moving to Chicago, Nancy Littlefield found two unused schools, Haaren High School and Performance Space 122.
- David De Silva met playwright Christopher Gore in Florida in 1977 and paid him $5,000 to draft a script titled Hot Lunch, supplying story ideas for the plot and characters; he then took the project to MGM, which acquired the script for $400,000.
- The New York Police Department demanded a 4:00 p.m. curfew for the cast and crew after complaints of traffic blockages, and the dancers demanded extra pay for performing stunts on top of taxicabs.
- When the street dance sequence was shot, the song "Fame" had not yet been written, so the dancers performed to the Donna Summer song "Hot Stuff" instead.
- Gene Anthony Ray struggled with drug and alcohol addictions and worked only sporadically after the Fame television series ended in 1987; he was diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1996 and died after a stroke on November 14, 2003.
