In the run up to the Fame Reunion Concert in L.A. Lee Curreri tells Playbill his Favourite Fame Memory:
"I had the pleasure of writing one of the storylines for the Fame series. It was called ‘Blood, Sweat, and Circuits.’ My idea was for Bruno to come up with a computer program to express the dance movements of Leroy (Gene Anthony Ray) in colors and shapes on a computer monitor. This may sound completely commonplace now, but, remember, this was 1983. I naively thought that this was going to be easy, but I found out later that there was only one person who had ever done it, and his name was Ed Tannenbaum. Ed lived in Silicon Valley and he had an exhibit of this very thing at the San Francisco Exploratorium.
The next thing I knew, I was on a flight with the story editor up to San Jose to find this man they called E.T. His fee was a little steep for our show, but the producers ended up going along with it. My favorite part was actually seeing the technology work—watching Gene Anthony's dancing re-interpreted in a collection of different colored shapes on a screen!”
Buy Tickets
I'm loving all these little insights into Fame and what it meant for the cast. This one was funny! Not one of my favourite episodes by any means, but at least it was groundbreaking, and Lee had some space. If the production had gone on giving it to him, maybe he'd have stayed longer *sighs*.
ReplyDelete