My Love of Fame by Emma Brockes

U.K. newspaper "The Guardian" article from Tuesday 8 September 2009

My love of Fame. Remember the legwarmers, the table dancing, the anti-Reaganite values? Emma Brockes on whether a new film version of Fame can live up to the 80s original

There are some things you might not remember about Fame, the TV series that ran between 1982 and '87 and has lingered on in various guises ever since. Like the fact that Doris, the "acting major" and warm, beating heart of the show, wore not only a beret but an actual bow tie for much of the first season. And that Bruno, the music visionary, really did say things like, "If you've got a keyboard and some oscillators and the right combination of waveforms, you can . . ." And that the rapport between Leroy and his dance teacher, Lydia, violated if not the letter then the spirit of teacher/pupil codes of conduct, specifically those governing sexy dancing in the hallway.

The thing you will not, of course, have forgotten, is that while watching Fame you were "in the hot burning centre of the galaxy", as Coco the dancer put it, and not, for example, leaning against the swings in a park off the Aylesbury Road, listening to the soundtrack on a Walkman the size of a small encyclopedia.

It is 30 years since Alan Parker's original film came out and spawned the TV show and now there's a new film version being released this autumn. I was seven when Fame first aired and no wonder the pupils at the High School of Performing Arts seemed sophisticated – some of them were pushing 30. The school, based on the Fiorello H LaGuardia High School of Music and Art, was set in an authentically grotty institution and opened with a new girl enrolling from Grand Rapids, Michigan. This was Julie, the posh one with blonde hair who played the cello and had divorced parents ("They just kind of grew apart") on account of which she had to go to school by cab – no part of which sentence was less than miraculous.
It was through Julie's provincial gaze we first saw the banks of lockers, trashed decor and exposed heating ducts of the school and in the corner of one's eye, always, someone in a brown leotard, pirouetting. Standing in for all of us, Julie said: "In Grand Rapids, my friends are preparing for college. Here, everyone's preparing for life." Bravo!

There's a danger in revisiting things from one's distant past. They tend to disappoint. But rewatching the first season of Fame last week it was all there, better than I remembered because this time I got the joke about it being a School for Gays and appreciated its stout positioning against Reagan-era values.
At the time, the trick of the show was to temper its glamour with just enough homely detail to ensure that, despite there being a grand piano in the canteen, the weekly cliffhangers were more or less familiar; would Leroy hand in his English homework? Would school inspectors make everyone do PE with the promise of – horror! – squat instead of star jumps? Would Doris ever take her beret off?

Above all, like Henry V's address to the troops at Agincourt, would Lydia's speech in the opening credits inspire them and us to live up to our potential? Even seven year olds at this point dimly understood that showbiz and the efforts it involved were being used as a metaphor, rather than offered up, as in the celebrity culture to come, as the single worthwhile goal in life.

The curious thing, looking back, is how the suggestion and even the dignity of failure was incorporated into the show. In modern incarnations such as High School Musical, self-doubt is permitted because it flatters the performers when they overcome it (and they always overcome it). Self-deprecation is something else entirely. The original Fame was practically unconstitutional in the way its characters were allowed to fail in small ways every week without dying. The school was divided into dance, drama and music departments, ensuring that as well as being brilliant, everyone was rubbish in at least one class. Non-singers were made to sing; Leroy was made to read; Doris, Mr Shorofsky pointed out with heavy sarcasm, "played the violin like Rubinstein". While everyone was serious, they were deeply scathing, too, about themselves and each other, in a way the self-esteem movement would more or less outlaw.

They were also terrific snobs. Early on in the first season there is a gratuitous shot of Lydia choosing the New York Times over the New York Post at a news-stand and when Doris went up for a hamburger commercial, everyone thought it a hilarious abuse of her talent. The show was unashamedly partisan in politics, throwing itself behind the teachers in a strike storyline (on the picket line, the English teacher, Miss Sherwood, carried a placard reading "I love NY, but pay me enough to live here") and without labouring the point, it was more multiracial than any other show on TV. It turned out that fame wasn't even the primary goal. When Bruno said, "I'm not into showbusiness. I'm a musician," the show was only half-laughing at him.

Bruno: he of the big hair and audacious knitwear, who like a young Leo Sayer stalked the corridors with his tiny white keyboard, stopping occasionally to mash the keys and look off in a reverie of composition that resulted in such classics as High-Fidelity ("hi, hi, hi"), Mannequin ("I love your frozen grin"), and the only turkey on the album, Desdemona ("I want to own ya.") As he pointed out, "Mozart wouldn't orchestrate today, he'd overdub."

It was Bruno's mentor, Mr Shorofsky, who provided the show with its moral weight, summed up in his oft-repeated statement: "Mr Martelli prefers to use a synthesizer." Like Kovac in ER, Shorofsky was there to bring an air of accented cynicism to the show. He sang the song of Old Europe and you could see it in his countenance: millennia of war, deprivation and the understanding, inconceivable to Americans, that the fashions in Fame wouldn't be available in River Island until 1991, at the earliest. Like Wittgenstein in a fawn cardie when the teachers went on strike, Shorofsky reassured Miss Sherwood that it was fine for them to take a coffee break within school walls because, "Elizabeth, how can a picket line cross a picket line?"

If Shorofsky was the ballast, the pupils were so high that their outbreaks of joy in the corridors looked almost spontaneous. "Many of the kids hadn't been on television before," says Michael A Hoey, who wrote, directed and produced much of the series. There was, he says, a deliberate lack of polish – they weren't stage-school brats or graduates of Disney. "The original concept of kids fighting to make a go of it" was mirrored in the actors' lives. "That's what went wrong with it in later seasons – it got sentimental and hokey in some respects."

Even some of the adults weren't seasoned performers. Shorofsky was played by Albert Hague, not a professional actor but a composer, who when the casting director rang and asked him to audition, thought it was a joke. "I was less than cordial," he said afterwards, and, showing how closely he played the character to himself added drily, "and with a German accent you can really be less than cordial."

So, too, his protege Bruno, who in real life was a musician campaigning to get proper credit in the show. Bruno's father was the cab driver who facilitated the iconic dancing-on-the-hood scene in the film. The absence of Bruno's mother wasn't explained. Almost no one in Fame had a full set of parents, and Leroy didn't have any. The similarity of Gene Anthony Ray's life to the character he played was, says Michael Hoey, "the great tragedy" of the series.
At this point in world history it is possible there is nothing more to be said about leg-warmers. Certainly, their influence has been emphasised at the expense of, say, belted leotards. At the beginning, fashions in the show were rooted in the 70s, with Bruno's brown cords and Gola trainers and Doris's layered scarves. The arrival of the 80s was signalled by Coco's denim waistcoat covered in badges that I have a dim, repressed memory we were shown how to make on Blue Peter.
The first season in the US was a critical success – it was nominated for 12 Emmys – second only that year to Hill Street Blues, but it took a while to build commercially. The real turning point was the cast tour of the UK, in 1983. "It was like the Beatles" recalls Hoey.

It's not surprising it took off in England, where yoghurts had barely been invented and you couldn't say words like "calisthenics" or "synthesiser" without causing a riot. None of the pygmies on Grange Hill made jokes about Rubinstein or said such things as, "You don't get applause unless you grow, and you don't grow unless you're courageous enough to be bad." From the corner of her dance studio Lydia told pupils, "You can't take it and you can't fake it. Until you can do one or the other or both, you're going to be a day late and a dime short." It didn't mean anything, but it still sounded amazing.

The actor who played Lydia, Debbie Allen, choreographed the live show and it struck British audiences like a banana thrown into a crowd during rationing. Fame's success caused many of the young actors totally and irretrievably to lose their heads. Valerie Landsburg, who played Doris, said she was either stoned or drunk for most of the latter years of production. Ray, whose mother was imprisoned for heroin and cocaine dealing, became a drug addict and died at the age of 41, in 2003, of a stroke. "He was that character, he was Leroy," says Hoey and part of the poignancy of the show, looking back, is that it falls at the end of a period that will always be seen as one of relative youth and innocence. In the years that followed, says Hoey, "we lost a lot of the dancers to Aids."

None of the actors went on to have anything like the careers the show seemed to promise them and many aren't even acting these days. The new film, meanwhile, is likely to remind us how good the original was. Trailers show pupils at the academy slamming their hands into things and giving each other encouraging hugs in the street. In the middle of one sequence, a girl shouts apropos of nothing, "He found me on YouTube!", like a distress flair to those born after 1985. Perhaps it will be brilliant and it's only nostalgia for the old days that makes it look like one of those authorised graffiti walls that entirely miss the point – and there are, as ever, things to be grateful for, like the fact Miley Cyrus isn't involved.
Still, it's hard to imagine it will be as sophisticated as the original, in which Mr Crandall, the drama teacher, summed up what in the latter part of the 20th century would become the runaway celebrity culture. For the most part, he told students, they presented on stage and in life hackneyed versions of themselves, endlessly repeated "shtick" that if they weren't careful, would be their downfall.
The real school is on Amsterdam Avenue, a few blocks west of Central Park and behind the Metropolitan Opera. The autumn term hasn't started yet and the only people around are security guards, one smoking outside a regular high school across the street, in prime position to witness impromptu outbursts from the Fame pupils. Has she ever seen them dancing on the steps or stopping traffic? She finds this so funny she bends double and is able, eventually, to say, no; the most she's heard is the sound of a piano wafting out.

Inside, at reception, a woman with the blasted look of someone who has had her face sung into at close range too many times. Do the students do anything unusual in the corridors? "Like what?" she says, suspiciously. "Anything showbizzy?"
To my surprise, she hoists herself up on tiptoes and holding her arms at shoulder height, flaps her hands like a fledgling bird. "Like this?" she says.
"Yes!" I say. "No," she says, and dropping her arms, looks at me as if I am mad!

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