Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the film studio recently acquired by Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, used to be the greatest among the major studios of Classic Hollywood, with a reputation built around legendary musicals. The New Hollywood era, however, wasn’t kind to that studio, forcing it to downsize its production and enter a series of mergers and acquisitions that would almost obliterate its identity. The very last musical made by MGM under its original brand was Fame, a 1980 film directed by Alan Parker.
Fame was the only film script in the career of Christopher Gore, a successful Broadway playwright. The plot is set in the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan, an institution famous for having some of the greatest Broadway and Hollywood stars as its alumni, and it covers four years in the lives of seven of its students. These teenagers are of different races, social backgrounds, and sexual orientations, and they study in different departments (Drama, Music, and Dance), but they all share the same dream of achieving fame as musicians, dancers, or actors. Along the way, there are various impediments to that goal – private insecurities, identity issues, troubled family histories, lack of proper education, bad habits, and unfortunate choices in their private lives.
Some of the best-known and most successful films in Alan Parker’s career were musicals, and Fame is no exception. Despite a troubled production, during which he wasn’t on the best of terms with his young cast (whom he later described as a “Hollywood clique in the making”), he managed to squeeze very good performances out of them. The most important element of the film is its realism. Parker rewrote Gore’s original script, which was supposed to be a celebration of show business as the embodiment of the American Dream, and added much darker overtones. Aspiring stars are living in a metropolis still going through one of the roughest patches in its history, embodied in ever-present graffiti on the walls, and their push towards fame and fortune has a clear economic incentive. Not everyone will reach that goal – some will be rejected at the very beginning when they fail auditions, some will fail their classes, some will realise that graduation is only the start of a much bigger struggle, and some will find that, once they reach fame, they won’t be able to handle it.
Yet, despite the darkness, Fame is a very pleasant experience for viewers, mostly thanks to the Oscar-winning soundtrack by Michael Gore, which included two songs that were also nominated for Oscars, with the title song, performed by Irene Cara, winning and becoming a great hit. Parker uses the songs in a way different from classic musicals – in the film, they provide a realistic background for music and dance numbers, and one example is “Fame” being played on the radio, leading the practising students to improvise what would turn into a spectacular street dance scene. Parker also directed those scenes in a modern style, often criticised by contemporary critics as “too influenced by television commercials” and later embraced by generations of directors influenced by MTV. Fame was embraced by the audience and became a solid hit, spawning a 1980s television show and a 2009 remake. MGM musicals, in the end, had a very good swan song.
RATING: 7/10 (++)
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