Fast Times and Excellent Adventures

The Surprising History of the ’80s Teen Movie

James King

Constable • London

CONSTABLE

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Constable

Copyright © James King, 2018

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.
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is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-47212-373-2

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Introduction

‘Only one thing bothered him and that was the passing of time. Already he was eighteen, almost eighteen and a half. Soon enough he would be nineteen, twenty. Then this golden age would pass. By natural law someone new would arise to replace him. Then everything would be over.’

‘Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night’, Nik Cohn¹

We all know what a teen movie is – high-school or college-age characters, youthful issues, maybe a prominent pop soundtrack, definitely an adolescent target audience. But those are just the facts, the boxes to be ticked. What else do they have? What is it that has kept young cinema-goers going to teen films throughout Hollywood’s history . . . and keeps them returning, even as adults?

Time certainly plays a part. Whether your teen movie centres on a Saturday detention, an era-hopping DeLorean car or desperate attempts to get laid, it is questions of time that unify the genre and perhaps provide the real pull. Life is short, they all say. Adolescence even shorter. So make the most of these few teenage years, this magic time. One day it will all be over.

The 1980s proved especially fertile ground for such alluring stories. Film-makers who flourished in the previous decade – themselves once known as young ‘movie brats’ – were now hitting middle age, with many facing both personal and professional crises. A new, more focused Hollywood emerged to counter their expensive indulgences and the teen audience that had flocked to see Jaws and Star Wars – streamlined yarns in which the selling point was the concept rather than brooding Method-acting or an award-winning cast – were ruthlessly targeted.

And, of course, even on the business side, timing was everything. Young writers and directors who came of age during the ’60s now found their poignantly autobiographical teen stories encouraged, often by studio executives of a similar age and taste. Meanwhile, relaxed moral codes let them get away with more cheeky rock’n’roll honesty than Gidget could have ever dreamed of.

If many young actors actually just wanted to be taken seriously and were hardly keen to be part of anything deemed a new ‘scene’, then at least they could take comfort in the fact that if you were a teenager – or even just looked like one – suddenly work was plentiful. Nineteen-seventy-eight’s triple teen whammy of Saturday Night Fever, Grease and Animal House had shown Hollywood exactly where it was heading – and it didn’t hold back on following up with new youth-centred product.

Over-saturation was inevitable. Surprise successes from the first half of the ’80s morphed into more calculated cash-ins, where the presence of a newly emerged star, popular fad or currently fashionable song on the soundtrack often outweighed emotional depth. The emergence of home video as a force to be reckoned with certainly contributed to quantity over quality and some of Hollywood’s hottest teen actors and super producers struggled to use their popularity wisely. In a time of heightened consumerism championed by a right-wing president, maybe it was impossible not to?

And then there was the problem of growing up. It happens to everyone (as so many teen movies liked to lament) but, in a youth-obsessed industry, actors maturing in public is no easy task. So if teen films remind us of our brief adolescence then they remind many of their stars of something else too: their own moment as the nation’s favourite pin-up, eventful but brief.

Happily though, authenticity nearly always won through, marking the difference between, say, Heathers (still talked about today) and Hot Dog: The Movie (thankfully forgotten). And it was authenticity that would be the natural buzzword come the beginning of the next decade, the packaging of the previous ten years now starting to look too slick – and just too damn white – for the 1990s. It was time for teen tastes to go full circle, allowing a grungier, more independent approach that owed much to the ’70s to once again find the spotlight.

But the best of the ’80s teen movies never entirely went away; forever frozen in time on TV, DVD and download. Their stories might deal with a fleeting period – a day off, a school year, a special summer – but their charm, it seems, is ageless.

This is their story. And it begins two years before the turn of the decade, on a brightly-coloured dancefloor somewhere in Brooklyn.

_________________

  1  New York magazine, Nik Cohn, 7 June 1976.

Chapter One

TRAVOLTA’S ’78

Saturday Night Fever and Grease rule the box-office; Hollywood falls back in love with teenagers; and the ‘movie brats’ struggle with the imminent new decade.

John Travolta was Hollywood’s last great star of the ’70s. Nineteen-seventy-eight was his year. Saturday Night Fever, released the previous Christmas, topped the US box-office until Valentine’s Day, still filling screens come early April when the actor attended the Fiftieth Academy Awards in Los Angeles, his performance as Fever’s Tony Manero up against heavyweight turns from Richard Burton and Marcello Mastroianni for Best Actor. He was just twenty-four years old, the category’s third youngest nominee ever.

Richard Dreyfus took home the Oscar that night, for his role as neurotic actor Elliot in Neil Simon’s The Goodbye Girl, but Saturday Night Fever mania wasn’t about to go away. Its soundtrack album was still No. 1 – would be for another three months – on its way to shifting fifteen million in the States and ruling charts around the globe. John Travolta, it seemed, had the whole world at his (disco-dancing) feet.

Really though, that was only the start. With barely a pause for breath Travolta was back on the big screen by the summer, this time in Grease and between June and October there was only one week when the ’50s-set musical wasn’t the most popular movie in America. Its soundtrack, meanwhile, knocked The Rolling Stones from the summit of Billboard’s Top 200 to eventually claim the year’s second biggest sales figures (behind only Saturday Night Fever). In just a few months Travolta had risen from small-screen favourite to the biggest showbiz pin-up on the planet, a one-man film, music and fashion industry, his turbo boost in popularity up there with Elvis post-signing to RCA in ’56 or The Beatles after debuting on The Ed Sullivan Show. And it all made sense. John Travolta was irresistible; a mix of macho bravado and boyish vulnerability, his masses of dark wavy hair framing a face that could barely contain the lethal combination of sky-blue eyes, sunny grin and the most famous chin dimple since Kirk Douglas.

Yet in just those two movies – films made back-to-back, on screens within moments of one other that fateful year – one phase of Hollywood history was ending, another just starting up. Here was a changeover period in Hollywood so significant that Travolta, the megastar conduit, would struggle for years with the impact.

John had been born to Salvatore and Helen – a tyre salesman and a former actress – in Englewood, New Jersey, on 18 February 1954; the last of six children. Maybe if he’d been a bit older, his rise and fall wouldn’t have been so great; a bit younger, on the other hand, and a new age and new decade of teen roles would have surely opened up to him. Yet by the end of 1978 and with his twenty-fifth birthday fast approaching, John Travolta found himself at the top of a pile yet with nowhere to go. Yes, he was Hollywood’s last great star of the ’70s, perhaps the decade’s most sparkling. But he was also the ’80s’ first victim.

In the early part of the 1970s it had been Travolta’s fellow Italian-American New Yorkers Robert De Niro (eleven years his senior) and Al Pacino (fourteen) who had hogged the headlines, turning film-acting asunder by redefining what it meant to be a leading man. Working within the so-called ‘New Hollywood’ – that group of independent, determinedly cinephile writer/directors such as Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Sidney Lumet – on projects with complex and damaged heroes (The Godfather, Mean Streets, Serpico), suddenly critical acclaim was no longer just about traditional epics boasting glamorous stars. Now that Vietnam, Watergate and social unrest filled the news bulletins, even the frequently frothy movie industry refocused on the personal and the flawed. The directors might have been nicknamed ‘movie brats’, a nod to their precociousness, but it was a label that belittled their achievements. Things had gotten impressively intense. ‘[De Niro] was raising the bar for all of us young actors,’ Travolta later remembered, ‘and that means if you were going to play a role, you had to really learn how to do the thing you were doing. If you wanted to box, you had to become a real boxer. If you were going to play a saxophone, you had to spend a year learning how to play a saxophone.’¹ The young John could only look on, close but not close enough.

In the summer of ’75, with low-budget horror The Devil’s Rain recently wrapped, his persistence finally paid off. Welcome Back, Kotter – a new ABC sitcom about a pupil returning to his old high school to teach – not only gave John an audition but also the winning break he’d been craving, casting him as rebellious student Vinnie Barbarino. Within a few weeks he was getting ten thousand fan letters a week and scripts were feverishly rewritten to give the new heart-throb more screen time. Born too late? It hardly seemed so.

Yet Travolta, mid-decade and no longer a teenager, didn’t just want to be a pretty boy, releasing cash-in pop records to lovelorn adolescent fans. It didn’t matter that success in Kotter led him to having a hit single, 1976’s ‘Let Her In’.² It didn’t matter that ABC then cast him as the lead in top-rated TV movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. It didn’t even matter that Brian De Palma’s acclaimed operatic teen horror Carrie hit cinemas the same week as Bubble, with John in a supporting role as school bully Billy Nolan.³ That actors might kill for that much work wasn’t the point. When John’s heavy Kotter filming schedule reportedly meant he had to turn down the lead in auteur Terence Malick’s brooding Texan period piece Days of Heaven it was frustrating, pure and simple. The wannabe De Niro desperately wanted a real shot at grown-up film-making.

Then, for a brief moment, the stars aligned. Two sometime business partners – both vastly experienced, both masters of hype and both part of the so-called ‘velvet mafia’, the gay glitterati whose interests spanned multiple aspects of American showbusiness in the early ’70s – got John on their radar.

Allan Carr was the flamboyant one, a kaftan-clad Broadway producer and talent agent who ‘thought fast, talked fast, made decisions instantly’.⁴ Robert Stigwood was quieter yet arguably more ruthless; a toothy, wavy-haired Australian impresario who looked like an older brother to the Bee Gees boys he managed. Stigwood had played a key role in reshaping the British pop scene of the ’60s as a fearlessly independent manager, agent and producer. Now he was expanding into American theatre and film. Carr’s client list included the fabulous (Bette Davis and Playboy), Stigwood’s boasted the serious (supergroup Cream and the EMI corporation) but, ever the showmen, both liked to party. Bee Gee Barry Gibb summed it up: ‘If there is reincarnation Robert will come back as Louis XVI’.⁵

Carr and Stigwood clicked. They’d first worked together on Ken Russell’s movie of The Who’s Tommy in ’75, Stigwood producing, Carr across marketing and promotion. A surprisingly successful re-dub of a Mexican exploitation flick called Survive! had followed, generating good dollars for both of them and for distributor Paramount. They had been aware of the young Travolta’s charisma for some time, Carr first meeting him at a recording studio during the teen pop era, Stigwood from that Jesus Christ Superstar audition years earlier (the stage musical was one of his productions). Now Carr had a pet project that was crying out for John as lead: a movie version of the show in which the actor had once toured, Grease. Stigwood, meanwhile, had just bought the film rights to journalist Nik Cohn’s article on Brooklyn clubbers called ‘Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night’, a piece that had first appeared in New York magazine a couple of years earlier. He was also desperate for Travolta to topline.

Since Grease was still running in theatreland, Carr’s movie adaptation of the show was obliged to hold off for another year, allowing Stigwood to get going with his idea first, now renamed Saturday Night Fever; a tough look at young, working-class alienation and the weekly release that disco-going gave, to be made with an adult-skewed R-rating.⁶ He asked Allan to work on the marketing. More unusually, he signed Travolta to a million-dollar, three-picture deal: first Fever, then Grease, then a romantic drama called Moment by Moment.

Hollywood was aghast. Could a TV pin-up really lead three movies for such big bucks? It was early ’77. De Niro had just wrapped on New York, New York with Martin Scorsese, having already wowed in Taxi Driver and The Godfather Part II. Pacino was still basking in the success of Dog Day Afternoon. For John Travolta, it was finally time to show everyone what he was really worth.

Within just over a year, of course, he was priceless. Fever and Grease had shown he could sing, he could dance, he could even get award nominations. Welcome Back, Kotter continued on the television too, now as much a show about Vinnie Barbarino as Gabe Kaplan’s title character.

Yet as the decade came to a close, changes in Hollywood’s output were clear; the brooding anti-heroics of A Clockwork Orange, Mean Streets and Serpico were losing out to the smilier fun-andgames of Star Wars, Superman and Smokey and the Bandit. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was at the centre of it all, released in the summer of ’75 with unprecedented marketing, merchandising and screen count. Such saturation proved impossible to resist: Jaws became the first movie to hit a hundred million dollars in the States. The New Hollywood generation that had relished the complexities of The Godfather saga now discovered something much simpler: man versus shark.

It was a shift that made some sense. The constitutional crisis caused by Nixon’s Watergate scandal was now a year old and America’s involvement in the Vietnam War had officially ended in April 1975. After years of serious, adult-oriented drama that had matched the weighty stories broadcast each day on the nightly news, audiences now not only wanted simpler fun – they needed it.

Travolta, however, still needed credibility. ‘I want to show that I can do more than play safe, pretty-boy roles,’ he always liked to remind journalists when he was starting out.⁷ The success of Fever and Grease had been immense in ’78 but it had been a success that overwhelmed the original point of both their stories: gutsy, adolescent angst. Disco tunes, singalongs and John’s pin-up status had smoothed out the movies’ sharper edges and, whilst modern Hollywood audiences seemed to want more of that mainstream accessibility – the fun – Travolta the Method actor had different ideas. How could he stay valuable in a Hollywood that now boasted a new currency? If only he could hold back the ’80s a little longer.

Still, if late-’70s Travolta-mania diluted much of his dangerous power, it shouldn’t detract from the fact that Fever – before saturation turned it into a punchline – had plenty of ‘genuine’ on offer.

Travolta was determined and dedicated to De Niro-levels of authenticity, filling his spare time learning to dance – nine months training, he later claimed – helped by the snake-hipped choreographer Lester Wilson.⁸ For the ambitious actor, Tony Manero was the perfect chance to showcase his ‘Method’ and he fought with director John Badham to get his dance scenes recut in order to spotlight all that he’d learned: ‘I was crying and very angry because of the way the dance highlight was shot. I knew how it should appear on-screen, and it wasn’t shot that way. You couldn’t even see my feet!’⁹ After complaining to Stigwood, Travolta was allowed to recut the scene. Those millions who flocked to Fever during the early months of ’78 might not have known about the passions that ran high behind the scenes but they sure appreciated the end result.

Nevertheless, if Fever’s popularity threatened to overwhelm Travolta’s intensity then the shamelessly mainstream appeal of Grease – his second picture of the Stigwood deal and Allan Carr’s pet project – smothered it. It was mid-summer ’78 and the critics that had praised Fever just months earlier now complained that, in the shiny Grease, Travolta’s charisma had been seriously weakened, watered down from the Pacino-like swagger he’d shown playing Manero. It wasn’t the first and it wouldn’t be the last of many accusations about a sea change in the industry; a new era of dumbing down.

It’s hard to argue. Compared to the blue-collar passion of Fever, compared even to the gritty Jacobs and Casey musical on which it was based, Grease-the-movie, with its deliberate family makeover – innuendo-laden but ultimately innocent – was always going to be a disappointment for the broadsheets.¹⁰ What had centred, in its stage form, on earthy memories of high school in Chicago had now been retooled by the colourful Allan Carr into a movie fairytale, his own fantasy of what education was like in the late ’50s rather than the reality. Barry Gibb’s title song might have been sung by Frankie Valli, a former idol of the era, but its production was disco-tinged and slick; pure 1978. Insiders knew the deal: making his new, poppier version of Grease (co-written with Bronte Woodard) had been a very personal dose of therapy for producer Carr rather than an attempt at realism: ‘Like many kids, I was not too popular in high school. But producing Grease made me feel like I was president of my class . . . It was a movie I had to make . . . [and] it turned out to be as perfect a realisation of my dream as I could hope for.’¹¹

Still, Grease was a huge hit, its 159-dollar box-office million nearly forty million more even than Fever. Travolta’s dominance seemed unstoppable. So it was perhaps inevitable that after Grease’s success with younger teenagers, kids able to see it thanks to its family-friendly rating, Paramount looked again at Fever and made the obvious decision: release a new PG cut of that movie too, aiming squarely at the same youthful Grease fans who weren’t able to see John in R-rated disco mode the first time around. If the studio hadn’t been entirely supportive of either film during production (‘The executives at Paramount weren’t sure what they had,’ claims Grease director Randal Kleiser¹²) they were sure as hell going to get their money’s worth now they knew there was an appetite. This new Fever-lite included forty-seven cuts, forty-three audio changes and thirty-one scenes with alternative, ‘softer’ takes that Badham had shot in preparation for the film’s eventual TV broadcast.¹³

Not that the director had found his actors – all with their De Niro aspirations – exactly keen to offer up gentler, more mainstream interpretations of their feisty Brooklynites. ‘Initially, the cast refused to do it. “Oh, that’s bullshit, man!” I replied. “Have you guys ever heard of residuals? Every time this is shown on television, you guys will get paid.” They were all brand new actors, so they had no idea. Suddenly, they were all very game. In some cases, the TV version is what went into the original because the actors were so much looser and more natural, since they thought it was just a throw-away take.’¹⁴

The disco focus of Fever was always the point, of course; a way for blue-collar immigrant kids to lose themselves for a few hours at the weekend. Yet this new PG cut only made it more so, gutting the dirty talk and angst to highlight the hit songs, the pop and sparkle of the music way more digestible for young teens than R-rated bitterness and rape.¹⁵

Saturday Night Fever then Grease then a Fever re-release plus, of course, disco; endless disco. Mainstream mania for the guy at the centre of them all – John Travolta, with his contrasting dream of credibility – meant all four were all heading for overkill, scoring huge success whilst simultaneously signing their death warrants.

Come the summer of ’79, barely a year after Fever had soared and concurrent with the rejigged PG cut of the film getting its first airing (‘Because we want everyone to catch Saturday Night Fever’ ran the new, more inclusive tagline), the infamous Disco Demolition Night took place in Chicago, rock fans snapping and burning disco vinyl, even rioting. It was an over-the-top and reactionary response for sure, but it was clear that the genre was being strangled by ubiquity. If it wasn’t actually dead then it was certainly a musical style in need of some medication.

When, in 1980, Paramount reissued the recut Fever for a third time, this time in a blatant double-bill with Grease, the industry’s intentions for the new decade couldn’t be any clearer: forget serious grown-ups, get the teenage dollar fast – at whatever the cost. It didn’t matter that Travolta might have wanted to move on from his teenybopper status. The studio execs weren’t ready to let him go.

For Paramount, catching the disco wave just before it crashed had proven to be a vital reboot. As America’s oldest-running studio it had long stopped being considered youthful but now boss Robert Evans, who’d overseen adult classics The Godfather and Chinatown during his tenure, was gone and his replacement chairman, Barry Diller, had hired new execs (nicknamed the ‘Killer Dillers’) with more experience in television than in film. Paramount’s owners Gulf and Western might have had the legendarily demanding Martin Davis at the helm, a bullish businessman who liked to breathe down his studio’s neck, but with the no less high-flying Michael Eisner – Diller’s former ABC colleague – as Paramount’s president, the film company successfully reshaped itself to include more shorter, lighter product that didn’t need a prestige movie brat director and that, crucially, would make money even if they didn’t win awards. Here was the beginning of a new approach that would change ’80s Hollywood for ever: ‘highconcept’ film-making, where a movie consisted merely of one simple idea which could be summed up as briefly as possible. Eisner, in particular, had that common touch, in tune with the middle-of-the-road tastes of everyday Americans (at ABC he had come up with the idea of Happy Days, a huge TV hit). He knew well that in the post-Jaws, Star Wars and Grease world of ’78, seventy-four per cent of the movie audience were aged between twelve and twenty-nine¹⁶ . . . and they were targeted ruthlessly. So whilst Fever might have started out as much more than simply ‘Travolta + disco = hit’, that’s how it ended up. It had high concept beaten into it. Perhaps the signs were even there from the early days: Fever’s original director John G. Avildsen was considered a risk and the suits at Paramount simply fired him. It didn’t matter that he’d just been Oscar-nominated for directing Rocky.

Late 1980. With the tweaked-clean Fever now on cable TV, its origins as a sweary, misogynistic, true ‘New York story’ were finally swept from people’s minds as well as on to the cutting-room floor. Kids at the start of the new decade considered Fever to be something very different. It didn’t matter that its gutsy roots had always been clearly spelled out in Barry Gibb’s downbeat lyrics: ‘Life going nowhere, somebody help me . . . ’ It didn’t matter that John Travolta’s performance had been perhaps the decade’s most charismatic and influential portrayal of adolescent frustration. Fever had been bleached clean for the young teen revolution just as Grease had been by Carr and now it was simply a fun film about disco dancing starring a pin-up in an ice-white suit.

As Hollywood refigured its plans around him, Travolta also found the bright glare of limelight did him no favours. Questions about his private life refused to go away, fuelled in part by the unconventional romance he’d had with Diana Hyland – an actress eighteen years his senior with whom he’d worked in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble – and not helped by the campiness of romancing the openly lesbian Lily Tomlin in his third film of the 1978 Stigwood deal, Moment by Moment.

Hyland died in John’s arms in the spring of 1977 from breast cancer, the star taking a few days off from shooting Fever – a movie she’d encouraged him to be part of – to be with her in Los Angeles one last time. He returned to work heartbroken. ‘The pain was on every inch of his body,’ Badham remembers, ‘but John didn’t want people to feel sorry for him. He knew the best thing was plunge completely into what he was doing. Some of the best scenes in that picture were done in that advanced stage of grief.’¹⁷

Travolta wasn’t seriously linked with anyone after Hyland, although the press relished his relationship with Newton-John (fuelled, of course, by Allan Carr’s marketing flair) and a platonic friendship with teenage ingénue Brooke Shields, the star of Randal Kleiser’s next film after Grease, The Blue Lagoon (‘There are lots of women with physical beauty,’ John explained to People magazine, ‘but Brooke exudes goodness. She’s untainted. You don’t want anyone to hurt her or say the wrong things, because she’s special.’¹⁸) Travolta was bluntly questioned about his private life in Rolling Stone magazine but didn’t get annoyed: ‘The gay rumour about male stars is such a classic that it didn’t surprise me to hear it because I’d heard it about the others,’ he explained before answering a clear ‘No’ to the question ‘Are you gay?’¹⁹ One scene in Fever certainly didn’t do him any favours, the moment where he is lovingly shot grooming himself in front of the mirror, wearing just skimpy black briefs and a gold chain. ‘We got all kinds of hassle,’ remembers Badham. ‘We were letting some man walk around in his underwear, showing his body off.’²⁰ Production designer Charles Bailey was told to add another poster to Tony’s wall to allay any talk: Farrah Fawcett, smouldering.

Yet the gay question never left Travolta, his associations with the openly gay Carr, Stigwood, Kleiser and manager Bob LeMond doubtlessly adding to the debate. LeMond’s client list read like a list of pretty boys: Travolta, his Rydell High classmate Jeff ‘Kenickie’ Conaway, a twenty-something all-rounder from the Grease stage show called Patrick Swayze and Jon-Erik Hexum, a blond-haired and blue-eyed model that LeMond ‘discovered’ when he came to clean the agent’s flat in 1980.²¹ It wouldn’t be until the next decade that John finally married: to Kelly Preston, an actress who’d once been considered for the Brooke Shields role in The Blue Lagoon.

There was also something even more controversial: Scientology. Travolta explained to Rolling Stone that although he hadn’t been ‘audited’ (a form of complex interviewing integral to the religion’s own ‘science’, Dianetics) for a year and a half he was still involved in the organisation, something to which he’d been introduced during a low period in his life by actress Joan Prather during the shoot for The Devil’s Rain. He continued to regularly donate money, especially after crediting the organisation with helping him succeed in his Welcome Back, Kotter audition.²²

Yet under the microscope Travolta’s personality could seem confusing, almost empty (‘I [first] met with him in his high-rise apartment on Doheny Drive where the most memorable piece of decor was a model airplane suspended over the kitchen table,’ recalls Randal Kleiser²³). With a seeming determination to make unusual lifestyle choices, not to mention the arrival of a new decade suddenly making his star-making disco connotations seem dated, how could Travolta ever be cool again?

In those early years of the ’80s John Travolta already seemed filled with regret. People magazine of 23 June 1980 described him having ‘slipped into disappointment and depression’²⁴ and as the retro charms of Raiders of the Lost Ark energised audiences around the world and the futuristic MTV prepared for its imminent launch, the twenty-seven year old was out of sync with the times; a ’70s leftover, trying to grow up. Moment by Moment came out at Christmas in ’78 . . . and tanked. Critics complained of the lack of chemistry between John and co-star Lily Tomlin, the mature widow with whom his drifter character is supposedly infatuated, and audiences stayed away. Even a theme tune by Yvonne Elliman, the wife of Stigwood’s music supervisor Bill Oakes and already a hit-maker with Fever’s ‘If I Can’t Have You’, failed to stir up interest. Leading lady Tomlin described the picture in blunt terms – ‘a total failure’²⁵ – and no one disagreed. Was it a low-key character study or a modern romance? Like its star, Moment by Moment appeared unsure which path to take. That holiday it had seemed everyone was reverting back to childhood and watching the season’s latest post-Star Wars blockbuster, Superman. If the godfather of the Method, Marlon Brando, would take 3.7 million dollars plus a cut of the profits for a cameo in the comic book movie (he played Jor-El, Superman’s father) then the times really were changing.

Summer ’81. Travolta’s Urban Cowboy had been out a year and did OK, albeit almost universally described as merely ‘Saturday Night Fever with country music’. Whilst in Chicago to promote his new thriller Blow Out (helmed by Carrie director Brian De Palma), John was interviewed, along with co-star Nancy Allen, by Roger Ebert. The film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, Ebert’s own national fame was growing, thanks to the PBS-syndicated review show Sneak Previews that he presented with fellow film buff Gene Siskel. ‘Grease, of course, started here and should have been filmed here . . . ’ the actor pointedly reminded Ebert,²⁶ in reference to the musical that had begun its stage life at the city’s Kingston Mines Theatre ten years earlier, before its Broadway success and that Allan Carr Hollywood rewrite.

Ebert admired Travolta – ‘an enormously likeable man whose face lights up when he smiles,’ he wrote – but that sense of ‘should have’ which Travolta briefly voiced in the interview was significant. Things were not going to plan. Such regret seemed to echo in Ebert’s writing about the star for several years after, more resonant with each new flop he fronted (’83’s Two of a Kind: ‘This movie should have been struck by a lightning bolt’; Staying’ Alive, from the same year, ‘A disappointment’²⁷).

The last thing Travolta ever wanted to be was a nearly man. Yet, as he sat opposite Ebert in the Park Hyatt Hotel that July, just four years since he’d spent ’77 filming Fever and Grease back-to-back, the kind of films he wanted to make were simply, in Hollywood slang, not ‘hot’ any more. Heaven’s Gate – an over-budget western epic helmed by De Niro’s Deer Hunter director Michael Cimino – had been released, in a butchered cut, a few weeks before Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and bombed so big it virtually destroyed United Artists, a studio still recovering from Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (which had been a hit but only after years of draining production difficulties). ‘Heaven’s Gate was a movie about a war and was one itself,’ admitted the former United Artists exec Steven Bach,²⁸ a likeable studio man caught at the centre of the storm. So as the post-Star Wars era entered the ’80s it was no surprise that the straightforward flourished whilst the complex wilted. Spielberg and Lucas, once at the forefront of that free-thinking New Hollywood of the late ’60s and early ’70s, found success by moving on from the grey areas of their younger work and – in making high-concept action pieces instead – proceeded to kill off the very movement they’d helped to create. Many so-called auteurs still commanded intellectual respect but studios increasingly no longer had the patience to take big gambles on these layered labours of love. Why risk another Heaven’s Gate? Producers who had once championed the integrity of director-led projects and the power of all-encompassing Method acting began to keep their mouths shut.

Born too late . . . just as Travolta’s De Niro dreams got close they were slowly being taken away from him.

Blow Out managed only cult success in ’81, not garnering anywhere near the media attention of Richard Gere’s American Gigolo, released a few months earlier (and which Travolta had turned down). The films he declined – the should-have-beens such as Gigolo and An Officer and a Gentleman – were making bigger splashes than the ones to which he assented. Feathers had been ruffled when Travolta left Gigolo only shortly before filming was due to start, replaced by the cooler, more dispassionate-seeming Philly-native Gere (who had also taken the lead in Days of Heaven). The star’s discomfort with the material was cited, some say because of Gigolo’s homosexual undertones, although writer/director Paul Schrader was ultimately relieved. ‘In one day,’ he later admitted, ‘Richard Gere asked all the questions that Travolta hadn’t in six months.’²⁹ Gigolo was another to feature a disco-flavoured soundtrack, by Italian producer Giorgio Moroder, that smartly moved the genre forward from its US soul origins in Saturday Night Fever. Moroder fused the synthesiser sounds he had pioneered in Munich – and perfected with Donna Summer – with American rock. Blondie’s throbbing theme tune, ‘Call Me’, was a US No. 1.

An Officer and a Gentleman, meanwhile, had been written by Douglas Day Stewart specifically for Travolta (Stewart had also written The Boy in the Plastic Bubble). Larger-than-life producer Jerry Weintraub had tried to whet Paramount’s appetite to no avail, eventually offering the project to the keener team at Lorimar. It was their interest which then revived Paramount’s; after all, if Lorimar wanted Officer, maybe it had something after all? Paramount ultimately won out, although by now Travolta was complaining that the part of Paula (eventually played by Debra Winger) had all the best lines, rather than the male lead Zack, a training naval officer battling with both his drill sergeant and his emotions. Again, Travolta quit the project and again Richard Gere – coincidentally himself an alumnus of Grease, playing Danny during its run on the London stage – stepped in with his soon-tobe-trademark style of cerebral detachment. The movie survived considerable on-set tension to strike gold as the third biggest hit of 1982. As it packed out cinemas around the world, Travolta sacked his longtime guru Bob LeMond and signed with the powerhouse Creative Artists Agency. It still wouldn’t be enough.

Gere was older than Travolta but image-wise seemed more contemporary; as slick and robotic as the latest ’80s computer technology. If John was the friendly guy you knew from high school or the nightclub, Richard was more stand-offish and distant; a glamorous modern movie star, not ‘one of us’. It was exactly the quality Paramount’s thirty-nine-year-old executive Don Simpson was looking for. Officer was an old-fashioned story but with a contemporary high-concept edge: big fights and shameless romance, soundtracked by pop artists who could get on radio and MTV to fuel the film’s appeal. Here was something with Fever-ish grit (that also got a cleaner cut for TV broadcast) yet tidier than Travolta’s unpredictable New York bluster; a crisp, white, naval uniform instead of a polyester suit. Gere had just the right coldness hidden behind his smoulder.

Like Allan Carr before him, the persuasive Don Simpson would also use his power in Hollywood to rewrite his own history and transform himself into the player he’d always wanted to be (Simpson grew up in Alaska, described by his classmates as a studious type, although according to his own high-concept polish he was a tough guy, ‘the Baby Face Nelson of Anchorage’³⁰). For Simpson, unlike Travolta in the early ’80s, the time was just right: his bravado plus America’s new decade – optimistic, futuristic – proved an ideal match.

It wasn’t just Travolta who got left behind; Allan Carr and Robert Stigwood also found themselves increasingly out of fashion. The former ploughed on with his singalong flamboyance, following Grease with 1980’s Can’t Stop the Music, a musical starring the gay dance act Village People that flopped thanks to disco overkill (not to mention being terrible). His next project, Grease 2, he hoped, would save the day.

Stigwood, meanwhile, watched both his bizarre Bee Gees-starring film of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album, a project on which he’d focused whilst Carr had worked on Grease, and 1980’s Times Square bomb at the box-office. Stigwood had envisaged the latter as a punk-ish Fever, the story of two teenage girls – rich kid Pamela and snarling drifter Nicki – who escape from a mental health institution and live on the streets of Manhattan, wandering the rooftops, clubs and porno theatres of a city then crippled by violence and poverty. When the duo start writing songs and calling themselves the Sleaze Sisters they gain cult fame, thanks also to regular mentions on the radio show of local nightshift DJ Johnny La Guardia (Tim Curry). Thirteen-year-old Trini Alvarado played nice girl Pamela but it was Robin Johnson, all husky voice and attitude as Nicki, that Stigwood signed up to a Travolta-style deal; a contract that never paid off for either of them. Disputes with Canadian director Allan Moyle also led Stigwood to recut the film himself and Times Square eventually came out with little fanfare. Its soundtrack was largely forward-thinking, all new wave acts such as Talking Heads, Gary Numan and The Pretenders but Stigwood’s insistence on including a disco-tinged track by Bee Gee Robin Gibb³¹ for the film’s finale spoke volumes. Times Square was unsure whether to be like the R or PG cut of Fever; one eye was on raw anger (‘We don’t need antidepressants! We need your understanding’), one was on shifting albums. Cult success beckoned.³²

Even Travolta’s angelic Grease co-star Olivia Newton-John found early ’80s Hollywood in a state of flux. Her 1980 film Xanadu aimed to keep everyone happy by blending vintage MGM musical panache with contemporary roller-disco sparkle. Unfortunately, it didn’t know how to handle either. The soundtrack sold but it was the movie’s weak box-office and all-round incomprehensibility that landed it the first Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Film of the Year (shared, appropriately, with Can’t Stop the Music). The Bee Gees, meanwhile, realised the need to ditch traditional disco for their Fever follow-ups; albums that met with initial success (1979’s US No. 1 Spirits Having Flown) before the band’s ’70s associations proved just too much of a turnoff for young record buyers (1981’s Living Eyes could only scrape to No.41). Time had simply moved on. The Broadway producing nous of Carr and Stigwood had undeniably helped to make Grease the biggest live action movie musical ever and Fever the biggest soundtrack but now it was the moment for a different style of entertainment. Don Simpson’s tastes were arguably no less camp but in a smoother, sharper, more macho way; as suave as the USA’s new president, former movie star Ronald Reagan. Everything suddenly felt so much more modern.

‘In my teens, I fell in love with the movies,’ Sean Penn once confessed. He was six years younger than Travolta but his influences were the same: the raging bulls of complex ’70s cinema. ‘And so when I got involved I was a genius in terms of how the movies that were made in the generation that inspired me got made. But the financing wasn’t there to do ’em anymore. Trauma. I’m caught in a business that I’m in love with the idea of . . . the whole process that’s possible. Only now they’re not making movies. They’re representing them.’³³

Come the turn of the decade, Travolta found himself in a similar position; a fan of the old guard, struggling with the new. Unlike Travolta though, Penn hadn’t already experienced the highs and lows of fame the way that John had. He wasn’t tainted goods. Not so for John Travolta though. Nineteen-seventy-eight already seemed a lifetime ago. Once too young to be part of the ‘New Hollywood’ crowd he so admired, by the 1980s he was already beginning to look old-fashioned compared to the decade’s fresh intake of acting hotshots. Now it was their time.

_________________

  1  The Huffington Post, 14 August 2014.

  2  Sample lyric: ‘I look at her face / and there isn’t a trace / of doubt in my mind’.

  3  De Palma cast Carrie at the same time as his friend George Lucas was choosing actors for Star Wars. Amy Irving – Sue in the horror pic – was close to getting the Princess Leia role, whilst William Katt (Tommy) tried out for Luke Skywalker.

  4  The Big Show: High Times and Dirty Dealings Backstage at the Academy Awards, Steve Pond, Faber & Faber, 2005, p.4.

  5  Interview with Simon Fanshawe, www.simonfanshawe.com

  6  ‘R’ officially meant that under-17s had to be accompanied by an adult.

  7  See the front cover of Bob McCabe’s excellent Quote, Unquote book on Travolta, Random House, 1996.

  8  Cohort of Bob Fosse, Josephine Baker, Liza Minnelli . . .

  9  ‘Fever Pitch’, Vanity Fair, Sam Kashner, 15 August 2013.

10  British reviewer Derek Malcolm wrote of Travolta in Grease for the Guardian, ‘He poses like some forlorn young stud in a bedroom full of chastity belts,’ 14 September 1978.

11  Frenchy’s Grease Scrapbook, Didi Conn, André Deutsch, 1998, p.5.

12  Author interview.

13  As detailed on movie.censorship.com

14  John Badham interviewed at thehollywoodinterview.blogspot.com

15  An in-depth look at the film’s oft-overlooked moodiness can be found in Nathan Rabin’s ‘Existential Panic at the Disco: There’s an Alluring Darkness Beneath Saturday Night Fever’s Disco Floor’, Vanity Fair, 2 May 2017.

16  High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood, Justin Wyatt, University of Texas Press, 1994, p.29.

17  McCabe, p.33

18  People, 10 August 1981. Quoted in ‘The Many Men in Brooke Shields’s Love Life’, Laura Lane, people.com, 12 November 2014.

19  ‘Sex and the Single Star’, Rolling Stone, Nancy Collins, 18 August 1983.

20  ‘Fever Pitch’, op. cit..

21  Hexum would die in a tragic accident on the set of TV show Cover Up in October 1984, joking about with a prop gun loaded with blanks, putting it to his head. When he pulled the trigger, wadding from the blank cartridge shattered his skull.

22  According to Lawrence Wright in his book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief, Scientology teacher Sandy Kent instructed everyone at a group meeting to point in the direction of ABC studios and send out good vibes with the command ‘We want John Travolta for the part’, (Going Clear . . . , Knopf, 2013).

23  Author interview.

24  ‘Even Cowboys Get the Blues’, Arthur Lubow.

25  Quoted on Destined to Denver blog.

26  Chicago Sun-Times, 19 July 1981.

27  Both from Ebert’s reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times.

28  There’s more – much more – in his glorious exposé Final Cut: Art, Money and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s Gate, Newmarket Press, 1999.

29  BBC news profile on Gere, Chris Jones, 27 December 2002.

30  Do yourself a favour and find out more about Simpson’s self-mythologising in Charles Fleming’s seminal High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess, Bloomsbury, 1999.

31  The song was called ‘Help Me!’ and was a duet with one Marcy Detroit, ten years later one half of duo Shakespears Sister.

32  Times Square is now a favourite of film festivals and punk bands. Many of its ideas – radical DJs, impromptu gigs – revisited by Moyle himself in his later works Pump Up the Volume (1990) and Empire Records (1995).

33  Esquire, Scott Raab, 12 December 2012.

Chapter Two

BABY BOOMERS

All change in the boardrooms of Burbank; American Graffiti and rock’n’roll nostalgia; Animal House delivers retro raunch; and over at the National Lampoon office, John Hughes starts writing.

As Travolta dealt with the glare of his teen heart-throb status in ’78, a thirty-five-year-old journalist was chronicling something going on behind the scenes: the undeniable changes taking place in Hollywood boardrooms that would set the scene for the decade to come. Forget the traditional image of the brash, balding, cigar-chomping producer; suddenly here were twenty-somethings taking charge of studios, liberal and forward thinking in their outlook, fuelled by the social revolution of the ’60s to make films in a newer, less formal way. The ‘baby boomers’¹ were running the show.

Maureen Orth was the writer of the exposé, a Berkeley graduate and one of the first women at Newsweek before becoming senior editor at sister publications New York and New West magazines (the former of which had first published Cohn’s ‘Tribal Rites’ article two years earlier). Both magazines were bold bi-weeklies, home to much of the so-called ‘new journalism’ from the early ’70s, wanting to pack a punch with their wit and insight. Orth had something of the wide-eyed Diane Keaton look about her yet her writing was anything but flaky. When New West published her article, appropriately titled ‘The Baby Moguls’, the impact in the summer of ’78 was immediate.

‘This new breed is young and well-educated,’ Orth wrote. ‘Many of them come from radical backgrounds and are trying to resolve their past with the present. Their sensibility is already starting to have some impact on the way people at the top live in Hollywood, on the films we see and, at a most critical time, on the future morality of the movie business.’ Of the many that could have been mentioned by Orth, seven were singled out: Paramount’s playboy Don Simpson, young Universal execs Thom Mount and Sean Daniel, the multi-talented Claire Townsend and Paula Weinstein from Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Bros’ Mark Rosenberg (Weinstein’s partner, whom she met in New York whilst planning an anti-Vietnam War demonstration) and finally Michael Black, an agent at the recently formed ICM and well known for his sharp one-liners.

‘The baby moguls story was the talk of Hollywood, and the industry establishment hated it,’ wrote LA Times journalist James Bates in a retrospective of the infamous article.² ‘In the summer of ’78, in such Hollywood haunts of the day as Le Dome, Ma Maison and Imperial Gardens, a button appeared on lapels that read “Free the baby moguls”. It was an inside joke, or as inside as jokes can be in Hollywood, which is to say a few thousand people probably got it.’

Allan Carr certainly got it and wasn’t happy. Thanks to the teen-themed Grease, he thought he should also be a baby mogul but really he was way too old. Thom Mount, Carr’s friend and colleague, was only twenty-six when Universal’s colourful chairman Lew Wasserman put him in charge of the studio. Carr was a full eleven years older.

‘When I heard about it [The baby moguls article] I was not thrilled,’ remembers Mount. ‘But the thing that was important about that article, I thought, is that it really did signal a changing of the guard in the studio system.’³ Mount had employed the older Carr just after Grease to help with marketing Universal’s downbeat Vietnam epic The Deer Hunter. The fact that he shepherded it to Oscar wins and box-office dollars in the early part of 1979 even led to the boyish executive offering the veteran showman a permanent job with the studio (Carr turned it down). After all, The Deer Hunter had been no easy task. Director Michael Cimino – hinting at what would happen with Heaven’s Gate in 1980 – had run over-schedule and over-budget. Carr had done a good job.

However, like his fellow baby mogul, Don Simpson at Paramount, Thom Mount was also giving Universal bosses big hits with simpler stories. Not everything had to be a weighty award winner. If Paramount’s teenage focus in the late ’70s was as much to do with perception – Barry Diller and Michael Eisner being seen as TV-influenced, streamlining bosses – then Universal’s was more blatant. Mount was Lew Wasserman’s wunderkind, a Cal Arts graduate who’d previously worked for names as varied as low-rent producer Roger Corman, actress and campaigner Jane Fonda and the high-flying Kennedy brothers, Bobby and Ted. He joined Universal in early 1973 as a reader and assistant to head of production Ned Tanen.

‘Mr Wasserman started bringing me to board meetings, as the kind of “house hippy”. As the representative of a new generation,’ remembers Mount.⁴ Wasserman first gave Mount the responsibility of making films for a young black audience and challenged him to win an NAACP⁵ Image Award for the studio.⁶ Within three years of joining, Mount was president of the company, creating the studio’s own stand-alone ‘youth unit’ along the way, moulding more ground-breaking urban hits such as Car Wash (‘I like to think I was the only one inside Universal that had actually met anyone who was black’⁷), ultimately moving on to bona fide teen-issue movies.

Mount could see that the landscape needed to change. ‘When I got to Universal they were making W. C. Fields & Me and Gable and Lombard. Creaky, dreadful potboilers. I walked to the commissary and I saw a vaguely familiar older fellow hobbling across the lot. And I realised it was John Wayne. I thought John Wayne was dead! The generation gap was so huge at Universal. [And] this studio . . . had no identity. Warner Brothers owned action . . . they were good at it and they had a system, they had people who appreciated action pictures and that’s what they did . . . that’s why it was the home of Eastwood . . . Paramount, under Eisner and Diller . . . they were making all kinds of films but they were darker, harder-edged . . . and Fox owned romance. I looked around the landscape and realised no one was making comedy.’⁸

During his tenure at Universal, Mount increased the studio’s output from six to twenty-five movies a year, half of which were comedies. The boss was happy. ‘Lew loved it that we disturbed the system in those days. I’m not saying we didn’t make mistakes. I mean you are talking to the man who gave Xanadu the go-ahead. So we did some stupid things too.’⁹ Of the successes though, the hottest was a picture whose contrasts summed up perfectly the mindset of this new group of youngsters – these baby moguls – who were increasingly running Hollywood. The setting was nostalgic, looking back to their own youth in the early ’60s, but the mood was chaotic and raunchy enough for Hollywood’s new favourite target audience: contemporary teenagers. The film was also branded with a name familiar to the millions of students who read the satirical magazine which bore the same title. National Lampoon’s Animal House scored the biggest laughs of 1978.

Though released only six weeks after Grease in ’78, Animal House was the anti-Rydell High. Whilst Allan Carr had polished the Casey and Jacobs musical into his own perfectly coiffed teenage dream, Animal House – championed by Mount, one of the few Universal execs to ‘get’ its humour – was a ramshackle riot about college fraternities. The era was similar (Animal House was set in 1962, Grease 1959–60) and both boasted rock’n’roll as their backbone but Universal’s comedy showed how Hollywood’s new interest in a teen audience was a varied process. Grease’s wholesome revisionism of the past was one way of doing things, perfect for the entire family. Fever’s social punch, meanwhile, was a way of catching the R-rated crowd. Both styles were entirely absent in Animal House.

For Animal House and the many films that entered the 1980s in its wake, there was a much simpler buzzword: raunch. The mood was raucous, the jokes dirty, the sex cheeky; more than enough to get hormonal teens rushing through the cinema doors. And in his position of power at Universal, Mount was perfectly placed to champion this youthful approach: ‘This was where being a founding member of the baby-boom generation was really helpful.’¹⁰

If Animal House, Grease and Happy Days showcased a late ’70s love of repackaging the past for a young audience, it wasn’t a fad that came out of the blue. Perhaps none of the earnest movie brat directors from the early ’70s would have made anything quite as frothy as those three, yet the very existence of characters such as Danny Zuko and the Fonz in 1978 owes much to the success of an iconic movie from the early days of the feisty New Hollywood era: George Lucas’s American Graffiti.

Five years before Animal House soared to great heights for Universal, the same studio had seen American Graffiti establish its foundations. Here was the story of four teenage friends over one night in 1962, about to head their own way after graduating high school, in a story written and directed by the twenty-eight-year-old former USC (University of California) film student Lucas in order to get rid of frustrations after the failure of his experimental sci-fi pic THX 1138.¹¹ Lucas also wanted to prove to himself and his film-maker buddies Francis Coppola and Steven Spielberg that even a self-confessed nerd could make a film which appealed to a mainstream American audience, especially since commercial movies weren’t really his thing. Actually, Lucas wanted to make what he referred to lyrically as ‘tone poems’ rather than regular stories, yet Coppola told him straight: ‘Stop with the artsy-fartsy stuff.’¹² The result? American Graffiti was a huge popular success, setting the stage for Animal House and many more. Over the next ten years or so, Hollywood – and beyond – couldn’t get enough of revisiting the movie’s early ’60s rock’n’roll setting.

Despite Graffiti being made to prove a point, Lucas also wrote it from the heart, basing the story on his own cherished teenage memories of cruising in cars in his home town of Modesto, California. The plot might have been slight yet Graffiti wasn’t just a film about how young lives always change. It was also about how America itself would change. In Graffiti’s ’62, the peak years of the war in Vietnam and of civil unrest were still to come, Kennedy was still alive and the radio had yet to be overtaken by the ‘British invasion’ of The Beatles and The Stones. Here was a requiem as much as a celebration; a look back at a specific moment in US history that was perched on the edge of a rude awakening with a packed retro soundtrack to match.

Still, if American Graffiti was the past then it was the past with a twist; the old days with the benefit of hindsight. Lucas had even managed to turn the relatively mindless teen pastime of cruising in cars into something elegiac. Over at the offices of National Lampoon magazine, as the twenty-something writers penned their own cheekily nostalgic articles, many providing inspiration for what would become Animal House, they came up with their own less romantic spin on history: use the past to push the limits of taste.

Their reasoning made sense. Sure, life ten or fifteen years earlier might have seemed sweeter, more carefree, but it was precisely that carefree attitude that had made fertile ground for all kinds of outrageous pranks and stunts. Just because, for many years, the nation’s moral guardians at the Motion Picture Association of America hadn’t allowed those teenage pranks to be shown on the big screen didn’t mean they hadn’t happened. Come the mid-’70s, however, movies could get away with more; way more. Counterculture had been testing the boundaries throughout the ’60s and the new decade boasted a very different mood to its predecessor, with the MPAA loosening its guidelines. Now the baby boomers were in charge and the guys at Lampoon wanted to remind everyone that, as much as American Graffiti was hugely influential, growing up in the early ’60s was a lot more raucous than just sweet-faced Ron Howard and doo-wop.

*

National Lampoon magazine was born in April 1970, the brainchild of former Harvard Lampoon editors Doug Kenney, Henry Beard and Rob Hoffman and published by Matty Simmons. Simmons – a wannabe mogul with a penchant for gold jewellery – had originally planned on a counterculture fanzine called Cheetah making him his fortune. Instead, when Cheetah failed, it was the slightly less rebellious Weight Watchers magazine that gave his company Twenty First Century Communications the cash to back Lampoon. Ultimately the Harvard boys would be bought out by Simmons but along the way the chaotic, daring and – crucially – hilarious writing that constituted Lampoon hit big with the baby-boomer crowd. An early issue featuring a naked Minnie Mouse on its cover got them much needed publicity (and, naturally, a lawsuit from Walt).

Producing Lampoon magazine from its tiny New York office often involved writers clashing but Doug Kenney’s spliff-soaked charm was always there to soothe the bruised egos. Friends said Kenney was a genius: crazy-haired, eccentric, whip-smart but an outsider, at home and at school. He rewrote his suburban Cleveland childhood in short stories for the magazine, tweaking reality for comic effect, then put months into the creation of the now iconic 1964 High School Yearbook parody (co-written with P. J. O’Rourke). Childhood friend Robert Sam Anson remembered Kenney’s obsession with his teenage years in education, even after they were over: ‘High school had always had a special hold on him. In some respects, he had never really left. He still wore his high-school jacket to work, still played high-school games, still told the same dumb high-school jokes. Indeed, he even walked like someone in high school, the step springy, the gait bumptious and jocky. As his classmate and National Lampoon collaborator John Weidman put it: “He would have used Clearasil if he could.”’¹³

Lampoon was shifting a million, being read by millions more, entirely in tune with the post-Jack Valenti, post-American Graffiti sex-and-nostalgia boom. The brand even crossed over to stage revues, radio shows and albums. Boss Matty Simmons was all too aware that Kenney – the fast-thinking, hard-drinking creative provocateur of middle-American values – needed constant stimulation, else he’d quit. He’d already disappeared on a few occasions, spending a mysterious year in a tent on Martha’s Vineyard. A Lampoon movie was the obvious next step to keep him busy.

Inspiration struck when Doug Kenney hooked up with Harold Ramis, a Chicago-born Marx Brothers fan in John Lennon glasses who’d worked his way from writing jokes for Playboy to scripting Lampoon’s Radio Hour. Together they tried to get a movie from the Yearbook spoof, ultimately deciding to move the action from high school to a raunchier college setting – sex sells, after all – bringing in fellow Lampoon regular Chris Miller to add in his own memories. Miller’s story ‘The Night of the Seven Fires’ had already been in the magazine, detailing his former Dartmouth fraternity’s bizarre vomiting ritual (‘There is sick and then there is sick with elegance, inventiveness and innovation’) and the trio hooked it into their story, adding in the ‘Animal’ of Animal House – the silently psychotic character of Bluto – as a part for Second City and National Lampoon stage regular John Belushi. Each writer worked on ten pages at a time, then handed them over for one of the others to discuss and polish. Meanwhile, Matty Simmons pitched the idea to studios endlessly. The response was always the same though: the treatment was ramshackle and sprawling, obviously the work of inexperienced film-writers. It also featured way too much throwing up.

Thom Mount certainly thought so when he found the idea for Animal House in that pile of unwanted scripts at Universal. And yet, there was something there; something retro like American Graffiti, yet modern too, daring enough for the young audiences who loved to see recognisable institutions from the past mercilessly mocked. After all, thirty-year-old Canadian writer Lorne Michaels had just made his satirical TV sketch show Saturday Night Live – a replacement for Johnny Carson reruns – a hit on NBC, proving sharp enough to warrant its position on network television at the same time as being zany enough to feel fresh and dangerous, a middle finger to the establishment.¹⁴ So when Mount read the pages of Kenney, Ramis and Miller’s script describing endless vomiting at Dartmouth College he wasn’t entirely put off. The success of SNL convinced him that the mood of the nation felt right. Not to mention, as a fellow baby boomer, reading National Lampoon had just always made him really laugh.

Mount was never quite sure how his boss Ned Tanen would react to his ideas (‘Today we would say he was bipolar’¹⁵) and, even though the National Lampoon project eventually got a green light, as things moved forward Tanen had his own idea for a director – James Frawley, who’d helmed The Monkees’ TV shows. Mount found the choice baffling. He wanted John Landis, a Chicago film-maker still only in his twenties but who’d already worked in jobs as varied as mail boy, stunt double and assistant director, as well as helming his own low-budget horror pic Schlock in 1971. Landis had also just finished Kentucky Fried Movie, a sketch-based movie written by future Airplane! scribes David Zucker, Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, featuring improv comics from both Chicago’s Second City and LA’s Groundlings troupes. In other words, Kentucky Fried Movie already had the air of a National Lampoon movie – not to mention Monty Python or Saturday Night Live. Thom Mount’s assistant Sean Daniel also had a girlfriend who’d worked on the set with Landis and thought he was great, so what was the problem?

Mount decided not to outwardly disagree with Tanen, preferring instead to subtly suggest to Frawley that directing Animal House wouldn’t be the right movie for him. Meanwhile, he got John Landis to begin a charm offensive aimed at Tanen: ‘Knowing Tanen’s take on life and that he was very interested in “statuesque girls”, let’s say, I asked Landis to put together a few comic sequences, particularly ones with girls with no tops on, and let me run it for Tanen, ten minutes in a screening room. Tanen saw that and pronounced it genius film-making and we were able to hire John.’¹⁶

James Frawley instead went to Barry Diller at Paramount and helmed The Big Bus for them, a disaster movie spoof that predated Zucker, Zucker and Abrahams’ Airplane! and which Landis himself had once been in discussions to direct. It bombed.

‘It had a sense of anarchy and real wit and it was brilliantly funny – but it was kind of hateful,’ remembers John Landis of the Animal House script he eventually sat down to read.¹⁷ At his suggestion – his main contribution to the writing, he claims – the conflict between rival frat boys in Animal House became simpler, a basic good-versus-bad. He also made sure that Belushi’s Bluto, the story’s comic beast, drifted in and out of scenes rather than being overused (‘He’s like a meteor, flashing across the sky’). What’s more, Animal House lost all its barfing jokes. ‘Doug Kenney was by far the smartest,’ believes Mount of the writing team, ‘but Harold Ramis was utterly the heart and soul of the operation. Chris Miller always likes to refer to himself as “the typist” but he’s much more than that.’¹⁸ With a new script in place, all that remained was for this bunch of screwy twenty-something filmmakers to convince their older bosses that they knew who to cast.

Landis had already had trouble convincing Paramount that The Big Bus would be funnier if traditionally serious actors were cast in the comedy roles (Frawley’s released version went the other way and featured comedians) and now he had the same problem with Ned Tanen at Universal. Tanen wanted famous names for Animal House – Belushi wasn’t yet well-known enough to headline a movie on his own – but Landis felt filling his film with well-known comedians such as Chevy Chase and Dom DeLuise would throw the story’s earthiness off balance. The compromise came in the form of Donald Sutherland, acclaimed after the success of M*A*S*H, Don’t Look Now and The Eagle Has Landed. Landis knew Sutherland from his cameo in Kentucky Fried Movie and offered the actor either $40,000 or a cut of profits to leave shooting Invasion of the Body Snatchers in San Francisco for a couple of days and head over to the Animal House set in Eugene, Oregon to play pot-smoking English tutor Professor Jennings. Thankfully Sutherland agreed, saving Mount and Landis from any more high-level interference for a while.¹⁹ Animal House might have been at heart a teen movie about horny students but in the forty-three-year-old Sutherland, they finally had a star.

Filming, though, was often shaky. Aside from Thom Mount and Sean Daniel, Universal wasn’t packed with youthful Animal House fans and the production was low-budget and under-theradar (costume designer Deborah Nadoolman sewed togas with Judy Belushi, John’s wife, for the infamous party scene). Tanen continued to blow hot and cold, as always, so Mount deliberately kept him in the dark, the Universal boss only discovering at the premiere of the movie that some scenes he’d wanted cut had actually been left in.²⁰ Still, this was a film with youthful, antiestablishment spirit and the tough filming conditions only added to its confrontational attitude. Animal House thrives on its roughness.

Universal released Animal House at the close of July 1978 in only twelve theatres but word spread fast. By the end of its run it had clocked an astonishing 140 million dollars, for many years America’s highest grossing film comedy of all time. And the formula was simple: a dash of American Graffiti with a hit of counterculture rebellion, happily nostalgic whilst simultaneously dealing openly with the issues of sex, generational politics and race that the previous decade had opened up for it. More importantly though, Animal House was funny, teen cinema’s earliest declaration of hilariously arrested development. Even Tony Manero seemed mature by comparison. American Graffiti had started a fad for adolescent remembrances but it was Animal House that dropped its trousers and pushed the craze into the next decade.

And all around the world. In West Germany, dubbed and re-titled Ich Glaub’, Mich Tritt ein Pferd (loose translation: You’re Pulling My Leg!), Animal House pulled in 800,000 Marks; a decent amount, but such was the popularity there of crazy movie teens obsessed with tits, ass and Bill Haley that Animal House actually had competition. Yes, late ’70s teen cinema in West Germany certainly enjoyed Bluto, Otter and Boon and their antics at Faber College but actually it was even more interested in the boys from Lemon Popsicle.

Lemon Popsicle – or Eis am Stiel, as it was known in the kinos of the Bundesrepublik – was Europe and the Med’s own Animal House, an Israeli movie written and directed by Boaz Davidson. By 1978 the film-maker was already a veteran of his local industry, sometimes helming as many as three pictures a year, frequently for the well-known showbiz moguls (and real-life cousins) Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan. Tellingly, Davidson was only a year older than Harold Ramis and a year younger than Chris Miller, so when he got the chance to make his own autobiographical take on baby-boom nostalgia, his teenage memories of Tel Aviv were pretty much the same as the Animal House boys’ all-American reminiscing: rock’n’roll and sex.

But Lemon Popsicle’s obstacles were arguably even greater than those that Animal House had to overcome. Firstly, it would be filmed in Hebrew, hardly the universal language of teenage horniness. Then Menaham Golan had a sudden change of heart, proudly declaring that he wasn’t keen on handing over his money to fund such a lowbrow project, thinking himself a weighty film producer above such teenage smut (he wasn’t).

It was Golan’s younger cousin, Yoram Globus, who could understand more of what Lemon Popsicle was saying about being a teenager and who ultimately gave it the go-ahead. It was a smart move. By the end of 1978, Boaz Davidson’s story of his adolescence had not just hit big in Israel but had also miraculously crossed the sea and given Europe something both decidedly ruder and yet – in the story’s emotional third act – also something more sensitive than the States had to offer with Animal House. Indeed, it was a tough abortion storyline and downbeat conclusion that hindered Popsicle ever seeing a major release in America (‘The whole making of the movie was like therapy for a little wound that I had,’ admits Davidson of the film’s melancholy mood²¹). Not that the lack of US interest ultimately hindered Davidson, Globus and Golan. Yes, they worshipped Hollywood movies and dreamed of working there but for a while they could wallow in the fact that Lemon Popsicle had played at the Berlin Film Festival, was nominated for a Golden Globe and during its first run alone was seen by over a third of Israel’s population.

Animal House was riotous but Lemon Popsicle flashed more flesh. America had flirted with porno chic of course, yet it seemed that Europe was the real home of softcore teen comedies in the ’70s, sex catching on there in mainstream cinemas in a way that the States could only replicate on the sleazier ‘grindhouse’ circuit or later with the rise of home video. And in Popsicle, nudity was all just part of the nostalgia; simultaneously crude and innocent, authentic fumblings supposedly indicative of gentler times whilst still giving modern teen audiences a cheap thrill. Popsicle’s characters were younger than Animal House’s and arguably even more horny but there was no moral outrage over its content, just a lot of retro soundtrack albums sold.

Around a third of the movie’s budget was used to pay music royalties but it made back over four times its cost in Israel alone. Even the German box-office added up to 2,700,000 Marks; less than Nur Samstag Nacht (Saturday Night Fever) and Schmiere (Grease) but still enough to make this little Jewish pic the eleventh biggest of 1978.

Germans, in particular, flocked to see teenage naughtiness that year. Popcorn und Himbeereis (Popcorn and Raspberry Ripple) was a homegrown sex comedy whose name obviously riffed on Popsicle’s and even featured the Israeli film’s Zachi Noy. Summer Night Fever, meanwhile, was a teen road-trip movie about contemporary lads heading to Ibiza, bearing little resemblance to the Travolta hit it ripped off in its title. Meanwhile, Italy’s high-school based La Liceale series – known as Teasers in English and Flotte Teens und Heiße Jeans (Loose Teens and Tight Jeans) for the German market – made a star of former beauty queen Gloria Guida that year.

The UK tended to keep its sex comedies in the private cinemas of Soho but the Confessions series was one mainstream hit; a saucier, younger version of the established Carry Ons, featuring rubber-faced Robin Askwith as a boyish, randy oik from Clapham called Timmy. It’s true that most of these European offerings concentrated more on cheeky smut than genuine youth issues, yet they showed that this new focus on teen sex comedy had gone global. And, outside of Hollywood’s big-business restrictions and still relatively tight moral reins, it could be considerably dirtier too. At the end of the decade and flush with their Popsicle success, Boaz Davidson, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus finally crossed the Atlantic to see what they could achieve by buying the B-movie production house Cannon Films in California. At last they were in their dream location and they wasted no time in stating their intentions, splashing press ads all through Hollywood that shone with optimism: ‘Cannon Films – with the ’80s in mind!’

Over in New York in 1978, a twenty-eight-year-old advertising exec was spending more and more time at the National Lampoon magazine offices. He came from Chicago but luckily had clients in the Big Apple that he visited every week and when he eventually got to know the right people at the magazine and showed them his comedy writing, they were seriously impressed. Anyone could see that this chubby guy with a mop of brown hair and round glasses could really tell a story. So it was that National Lampoon employed John Hughes.

‘Getting into the Lampoon was like a Boy Scout initiation or something,’ Hughes always remembered. ‘They’d be very cruel to you until you made someone laugh, then they welcomed you into the fold. As it turned out, my timing was perfect, because once Animal House came out in the summer of ’78, breaking all sorts of box-office records and so on, Hollywood, in their infinite wisdom, came knocking and gave every writer at the magazine a development deal, including myself. I looked at that, thought, Hell, this is easy, and flew out to Los Angeles and got four more development deals like that. Again, it’s Hollywood jumping on the hot property – tell them you just got a deal, they’ll want a part of you sight unseen. “We want to offer you a deal.” “Hey, great, I just got two this morning!” I went back home and there was a gigantic snowstorm in the winter of 1979, couldn’t leave the house for two weeks, so I just hunkered down and wrote.’²²

What John Hughes wrote would continue in the vein of Lampoon’s focus on family life and hapless adolescents but, on the other hand, he wasn’t all about sex and nostalgia. On 13 April 1980, Grease the stage show significantly closed its initial run on Broadway after eight years and Hughes was certainly one baby boomer pleased to leave behind that cultural obsession with the past and pick up on the mood change of a new decade. After all, the ’80s was a time of fresh music, groundbreaking technology and energising politics so why just focus on how things used to be? American Graffiti, Animal House and Lemon Popsicle had undeniably made their point and put millions in the bank for Lucas, Universal and Golan and Globus . . . but what about teenage life right now?

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  1  There was sharp rise in births in the US immediately after 1945. Relationships that had been torn apart by World War II were rekindled, marriage rates soared and the image of the ‘nuclear family’ became an industry as much as an ideal.

  2  LA Times, 22 March 1998.

  3  Interview magazine, September 1984. Actor Margot Kidder – in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls – described that change of guard in cheekier terms: ‘None of us were prepared for the ’80s. Our heads were still in the ’70s and we were at sea in a business run by young agents with blow-dried hairdos.’

  4  Author interview.

  5  National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

  6  Which he did, when Billy Dee Williams triumphed in the Outstanding Actor category for 1976’s baseball comedy The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings.

  7  Author interview.

  8  Ibid.

  9  Ibid.

10  Author interview.

11  A reworking of one of Lucas’s student films, THX just about covered its 800,000-dollar budget when released in 1971.

12  Interview with Charlie Rose on charlierose.com, 25 December 2015.

13  ‘The Life and Death of a Comic Genius’, Esquire, Robert Sam Anson, October 1981.

14  The young stars of SNL – including Lampoon show veterans Belushi and Chevy Chase – were rebelliously named the ‘Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time Players’.

15  Author interview.

16  Author interview.

17  ‘Animal House: The Movie That Changed Comedy’, Chris neumer, Stumped, 2003.

18  Author interview.

19  But Sutherland lost potential millions by accepting the flat fee.

20  Tanen had worried that a sequence where the Delta boys turn up at an all-black nightclub was racist but Mount showed it to his friend Richard Pryor who insisted it be left in. By the time of the premiere, there was nothing Tanen could do to change it.

21  Commentary on the Blu-ray of The Last American Virgin, the US remake of Popsicle, also helmed by Davidson.

22  ‘John Hughes: Straight Outta Shermer’, Lollipop, Issue 47, William Ham, spring 1999.