![]() ![]() “That first time when he turns around at the school, with that cigarette hanging out of his mouth? Every little girl in the whole world and some little boys, too, went”-she gasps. Travolta, 23 in the movie, was already major crush material thanks to the TV series “Welcome Back, Kotter,” the movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble and of course Saturday Night Fever, which opened the previous December. “I honestly think it was John and the dancing, because it is still so staggering to watch,” says Dinah Manoff, who played Marty Maraschino. The public ate it up in large part due to the stunner in the center of it all. The quad where the T-Birds gathered and Sandy walked with classmate Frenchy. ![]() The highest-grossing film of 1978, it topped Superman and National Lampoon’s Animal House, despite middling to scathing reviews-a “klutzburger,” the critic Pauline Kael said. In the canon of high-school musical movies- West Side Story, Bye Bye Birdie, Fame, Hairspray-the cheese that is Grease stands alone. “In another year nothing’s going to be left of the film’s locations.” “It’s a good thing you’re here now,” says Assistant Principal Frank Nunez. Construction trucks fill the area, along with the sound of hammers and drills sending dust into the air. The whole seating area will soon be a casualty of a modernization project. Newton-John sang her part of “Summer Nights” with the Pink Ladies amid a cluster of lunch tables, which were replaced shortly after filming. “So many kids get in that place and have their picture taken like that. The pink-bowed cheerleaders carry blue tinsel pompoms, their miniskirts far shorter than the “cheer squad” uniform Newton-John’s Sandy wore at the Rydell pep rally.įrancis leads the way between the breezeway columns Channing circled as she sang Rizzo’s ballad “There Are Worse Things I Could Do.” On the other side is the track and football field where Travolta and the T-Birds sang and strutted the bleachers for the film’s big duet, “Summer Nights.” “Travolta ends the song at the top in a pose like this,” Francis says, cocking his hip and pointing his arm in the air. Doors fly open and chattering students fill the expanse of the front lawn, carrying skateboards, backpacks, band instruments-all with smartphones in their free hands. “It sold for a lot,” says Francis, now a youthful 76 with a shaved head, a white goatee and smiley blue eyes. It hung in his classroom until he retired in 2001, when he auctioned it off to start a scholarship program. In fact, he and his students installed the Rydell High School sign that covered up the Venice High School sign above the front doors. “That was a tradition.”įrancis taught wood shop and technical theater at the high school at the time of the filming. “We planted these rose bushes around her to keep rival kids from coming over and painting her their school colors,” says Grant Francis, president of the alumni association, as he shows me the lithe figure, now cast in bronze. They pass a white plaster statue-the actress Myrna Loy, who, when she modeled for her art teacher in 1921, was 16-year-old Myrna Williams. The first shot of the school captures the anxious excitement of kids on the first day, pouring out of their cars and crossing the lawn. The movie began shooting on the Venice campus in the summer of ’77. © Paramount Pictures / Everett Collection A Nightmare on Elm Street and American History X, among others, were both filmed here, as was Britney Spears’ “.Baby One More Time.” But Grease was the word that made the school famous.Īustralian good girl Sandy Olsson and bad boy Danny Zuko on the Venice High track field. Palm-fringed Venice High’s circa-1935 Art Deco facade is familiar to decades of moviegoers. More than 12 million viewers caught Fox’s Grease: Live in 2016, and a ticket to the annual Hollywood Bowl Grease Sing-A-Long can cost the hopelessly devoted $600.Īt 17 I saw the film five times the week it opened, so as I pull up to west Los Angeles’ Venice High School it’s hard not to get goose-bumpy. One generation’s joy can be another generation’s torment, but the kitschy musical about a 1950s high school featuring Travolta as lovable greaser Danny opposite Olivia Newton-John as good girl Sandy and Stockard Channing as racy Rizzo, remains infectiously popular 40 years after its debut. “It’s amazing the joy level that it gives new kids, old kids, for generations, you know?” “I’m going for the one that would give the most therapeutic value to the future, and that would be Grease,” Travolta said. He would have good cause to choose any of those. It was 1996, and I was writing about the star of Saturday Night Fever, Urban Cowboy, Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty. “You’re going to be really surprised by the one I pick,” John Travolta said when I asked him which of his films he’d store in a time capsule.
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