FLASHDANCE - The Musical Screen to Stage

And so here we are in the spring of 2010 marking the twenty-seventh anniversary of Flashdance with our West End premiere. Twenty-seven years - it all seems both long ago and only yesterday. Allow me to tell you how I came to write the movie in the first place.

In 1981 my friend Robert Markle (a painter who understood the power of the female figure) had become disenchanted with the static nature of nude-figure studies. He wanted figures that moved. His father, a Mohawk Indian, was a legendary high-steel worker and like his father, Markle had an unshakable, romantic attachment to blue-collar life.

Back then, Markle found his “moving figures” on the runways of a working-man’s bar in Toronto and another, in nearby Buffalo, New York. He had happened upon a fleeting but vibrant sub-culture of fresh young amateur dancers who put together their own shows. These fantastic girls had no small amount of sexual glamour.

The dance-acts were produced by the girls themselves. They were their own choreographer, music director, stylist, make-up artist...whatever it took. One latin chiquita had designed a pair of pumps with see-through high heels that contained live goldfish swimming in aquamarine water. They had some truly great ideas... And could they dance! Markle would sketch quietly behind a pitcher of beer as they moved electrically, sometimes outrageously, on the runway across from him. Once in awhile he’d glance my way and say, “This is my Sistine Chapel, pal.”

A painter’s parade of gorgeous flesh-tones in various hues, this was Markle’s found art. He saw the dancers as local heroines and I could see why. They were true originals, wildly alive, and they danced for each other, not the men in the room.

They couldn’t tolerate real strippers and would tell you so, though they had no problems taking their clothes off if “it made sense for the act.” The girls seemed completely natural, projecting not one ounce of prurience. They were supremely confident under the skin. In the dressing room, with no clothes on, their bodies were so perfect they looked dressed.

Markle’s muses liked to parody themselves with out-size burlesque names such as Gina-Gina The Sex Machina, Tina Tech or Muscles Marinara. Behind the bravado they were mostly nice Catholic girls from a working-class neighborhood. They were desperate to be outlaws for a moment in time -- to make something dramatic out of themselves before life’s realities closed in and they would end up marrying the pipe-fitter down the street.

Even back then there was an underlying dread of an unstable future. It was understood that the outsourcing trend of the so-called New Economy would threaten job security, even close the mill-towns and ultimately destroy the blue-collar dream. Life was a ticking-clock. Reaganomics built the coffin in the early eighties and George W. Bush hammered in the final nail a few decades later.

As I look back I now realize these dancers didn’t exist in a vacuum. They were part of an emerging zeitgeist. In a sense they were the first MTV girls -- even though MTV was very much in its infancy back then. They had their own fashion sense; part dancer-drag, part industrial-drag. There was something very sexy about blue-collar girls who were competent in men’s jobs. Eventually the flashdancers were instinctively making their own living videos, whether they realized it or not. The performances in the corner bars were narrative in nature, little stories that created a complete style by merging, sensationally, all at once, in a flash, music, dance and fashion. I called the style “flashdance.” And here it is with us once again, but this time live on stage where it started in the first place.

Flashdance the movie was made in 1983, against all odds, at a time when Hollywood had decided the musical genre was dead. It was precisely because of this studio prejudice that I conceived Flashdance as a movie musical where no one sang to the camera. Though the screenplay was musically structured and driven by dance production numbers, I was careful to play scenes “real” and never have a character sing out loud. There was plenty of resistance to this concept and at first we found directors weren’t interested. Fifteen in a row said, no thanks. After passing at least once, Adrian Lyne agreed to take the job. And he directed it beautifully-without Adrian the movie probably wouldn’t have worked.

The first director to turn down my script was the master himself, Bob Fosse. I met with Fosse in his sparse, gloomy apartment across from the Plaza Hotel in New York. The maestro had a cold but nonetheless was chain-smoking. He sat in a worn leather chair under a torn Sweet Charity poster. He’d cough from time to time in the growing darkness and, as if choreographed, I would hear a female cough in a distant bedroom.

Fosse was tough-minded but generous both with his time and surprisingly detailed notes. He had obviously spent a lot of time studying the script. He loved the Flashdance girl but thought the script had a central flaw. He didn’t believe a movie could be built simply on single choreography to camera. As far as he was concerned, without ensemble choreography a musical just couldn’t work. I argued that my girls were pure rock ‘n roll. They had to be seen as if they were performing to a mirror. Fosse didn’t buy that. He was an old jazz guy who had little patience for rock ‘n roll, in any case. “Look. It’s not a movie,” Fosse said at his apartment door while shaking my hand. “If it’s anything, it’s a musical for the stage...”

“Trouble is I’m making a movie,” I replied sheepishly.

“If you change your mind,” the maestro said looking bone-weary, “you have my number... with work your Flashdance might make a hell of a Broadway show.”

From your lips to God’s ears, Mr. Fosse. Let’s hope you’re right. If you’re still up there, maybe you could put in a good word for me.

By author Tom Hedley