“She had a brilliant voice, and I didn’t think there could be any more correct person for Sandy in the universe,” he told Vanity Fair, likening her genius casting to giving the role to Taylor Swift today. “I was very anxious about making another film, because my music career was going well,” she told Vanity Fair in 2016, having admitted to Record Mirror in 1981 that she was “very frightened of losing my traditional following in the States” where she had “almost been a country singer”. Newton-John was also concerned that the throwback genre might harm her wholesome, Grammy-winning pop career. An inexperienced actor with a couple of flop movies behind her (most ignobly 1970’s sci-fi turkey Toomorrow) she was, Farrar says, “kind of nervous that she was older than the part”. And Sid Caesar’s role as Coach Calhoun was originally given to porn star Harry Reems of Deep Throat fame.įor Sandy, producers considered Marie Osmond, Carrie Fisher and Susan Dey of The Partridge Family before deciding on the 29-year-old Newton-John, who was initially wary of taking the part. Similarly, Donny Osmond and Elvis were both rumoured for the role of the malt shop Teen Angel before it ultimately fell to Frankie Avalon. A one-time T-Bird in the touring show of Grease, Top Ten recording artist and star of ABC sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, Travolta had been signed up for a three-movie deal with Carr’s co-producer Robert Stigwood: the first would be Saturday Night Fever. After Winkler declined the offer of essentially making Fonzie: The Movie, Paramount turned to 22-year-old rising star Travolta. The casting process alone speaks to the movie’s ramshackle construction, soundtrack included.
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Five years later, once the film rights came free and Carr had become a name at Paramount thanks to his success in marketing the plane crash cannibalism flick Survive!, Grease was greenlit as a lowbrow punt on a budget of $6m (£4.8m). Theatre producer Allan Carr caught it off Broadway in 1972 and smelt cinematic junk food. Grease opened in Chicago in 1971 and, on the back of jitterbugging classics like “Summer Nights”, “Greased Lightnin’” and “We Go Together”, proved a touring hit.
Combining their own high school experiences – Jacobs was a greaser, Casey a studious do-gooder – they concocted a gritty Fifties rock’n’roll teen musical peopled by gangs of slick-haired drag racers, Pink Ladies, and beauty school drop-outs. The pair dreamt up the musical after the sound of Led Zeppelin blasting from speakers at a wrap party made them pine for the doo-wop of the 1950s. Tell you more? Grease originated as a stage musical conceived by advertising copywriter Jim Jacobs and art teacher Warren Casey, both am-dram regulars in Sixties Chicago. I just happily watched from the sidelines in amazement.” It affected young people greatly, it seems. “I still don’t know why it was such a hit. “It was one of those lucky things, being in the right place at the right time,” Farrar says today. A year later Farrar’s “emergency song” would hit No 1 across the world as the 6 million-selling second single from a soundtrack that would go on to become one of the biggest albums of all time, released 45 years ago this week.
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The movie was the 1978 musical smash Grease.
The scene went in the can inside seven hours, and so wrapped this hokey teen musical presumably bound for oblivion. A choreographer threw together a dance routine on the spot. The director took one listen and hated it, but the last-day-of-school shot was already set up and they were all out of options. Farrar hadn’t exactly been inspired in scratching it together – “desperate is probably the word”, he says. The call had only come in the previous day, crying out for a last-minute number to plug a hole in the musical score for when the greaser with heart gets the good girl turned bad.
When John Farrar turned up to a movie set at dawn clutching a demo of his hastily written “emergency song”, he didn’t have high hopes.
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