The Song
This song, one of the last things we shot, hadn’t even been written when we began production.
When Olivia signed on to do the movie, her contract stated that she would have a solo song as well as approval over it. We watched for it in preproduction, but nothing arrived. This made everyone nervous. We started shooting and still no song. There wasn’t even a place for it on the production schedule. Then, halfway through the shoot, John Farrar, who had written “Have You Never Been Mellow” for Olivia, came up with “Hopelessly Devoted to You.”
John told me recently that he had wanted to write something like one of his favorite songs, “The End of the World,” an early sixties country hit sung by Skeeter Davis. The word “devoted” was used a lot in songs from the fifties and sixties, so he started composing with that in mind. The melody followed pretty quickly over a couple of days, and then he spent three weeks refining the rhyme scheme to make it work. He recorded the demo tape and sent it over to us.
Being unfamiliar with listening to demos, I couldn’t imagine what it would sound like when it was fully produced. On the demo tape, John was singing in a falsetto voice with a simple piano accompaniment. I ventured an opinion based on what I was hearing: “I’m not sure about this. Doesn’t it sound like a country-western song?” Olivia gave me a withering look. She was quite familiar with listening to demos. “Well, I like it!” she said. She was absolutely right. It went on to get an Oscar nomination for Best Song.
Sandy’s solo, on the backyard set at Paramount Studios
The Scene
For six weeks, just the words “Olivia’s Song” were a placeholder in the shooting script. Only after “Hopelessly Devoted to You” was selected could we really explore what the scene would involve. But even with the set constructed at the last minute, and the choreography and camerawork worked out the day of the shoot, what came out is a nice character moment in an otherwise frenetic movie.
Because we had a promotional deal with Pepsi, I had been assigned to undo the set decorator’s boo-boo of putting Coke signs all over the Frosty Palace set (see here). I carefully placed a wooden Pepsi carton right behind Sandy when she sits down on the porch and sings. It’s subtle, but it calmed Allan Carr down, who’d been having a rough time smoothing things over with the Pepsi reps.
The Location
When we listened to the demo of “Hopelessly Devoted to You” in the middle of our shooting schedule, we first had to figure out where to place it in the story. Pat Birch pointed out that the young audience we wanted would probably not like to sit and watch a slow ballad, no matter how great the song was. Poring over the screenplay, we landed on the idea that after the slumber party, Sandy goes outside to Frenchy’s backyard and pines for Danny. Pat thought the scene would work well after the “raunchy stuff” (as she called it) between Rizzo and Kenickie. And I also discovered one of the advantages of shooting a feature at a major studio. From the porch to the lawn and bushes and fireflies, the entire backyard set of Frenchy’s house was built overnight.
Olivia sang “Hopelessly Devoted to You” in one continuous take
RANDAL: When I first heard “Hopelessly Devoted to You,” I had never heard a demo before, so I thought, “I don’t know what this is. It sounds like a country-western song.”
OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN: You didn’t love it in the beginning, I recall.
RANDAL: But you said, “Well, I like it.” I thought, “I guess she knows better than I do,” and you certainly did. It got an Academy nomination and you sang it on the Oscar broadcast.
The Shot
Our crew showed up in the morning with a newly constructed set, the song, and Olivia. It was the hardest number for Pat to choreograph, because there was no action or dancing. What could Sandy do? Climb the fence? We decided to film the scene in one continuous shot. The kiddie pool gave Pat a prop to motivate Olivia’s character to move there to connect again with Danny, shown as an imagined reflection. For Olivia, this approach felt very natural, because she got to perform the way she does in concert, without stopping for additional angles. Electric fireflies were added to the set to give it a romantic mood. Bill Butler kept the camera moving all the way to the crane shot at the end.
Lovers’ Lane
Stockard and Jeff clicked right away, and their improvisations during a take were sometimes better than the screenplay’s lines. “Eat your heart out” was all Stockard. And “Your chariot awaits” was pure Jeff. Sometimes the lines were taken out for other reasons. Rizzo was supposed to say, “Keep a cool tool, fool. I’m wise to the rise in your Levis.” That was considered too much even for our movie.
With his longtime experience in the Broadway production (playing Danny Zuko for two years), Jeff wanted to keep the grittiness of the original Grease. “Can’t be bubblegum,” he’d say. “If you don’t believe that these guys would get into a fight, then you won’t believe Grease.” He’d tell stories on the set about being a “mascot” for his sister’s tough friends when he was a little kid, following them around. They’d stick him under a car when they fought with other gangs. He picked up how to be a tough greaser and used this to convey fifties bravado and cockiness.
The Shot
Grease was always meant to be a wide-screen color musical with its Southern California setting, colorful costumes, and fun music. The interactions between tough-girl Rizzo and the T-Birds definitely had an edge though, and the relationship of Kenickie and Rizzo gave us the opportunity to provide drama and vulnerability, something both Jeff and Stockard could convey.
The shoot for Lovers’ Lane took all night. Jeff could have done a few takes more on the make-out scene, but his respect for Stockard (combined with her husband visiting the set while we were shooting the scene) kept things professional. As a joke, Jeff taped porno pictures to the inside of the car before Stockard got in for the shoot. Stockard was a good sport about it, but we made him take them down. Jeff and Stockard were close friends. Long after the movie, they’d still greet each other at parties, shouting from across the room, “Hey, Rizz!” and “Kenicks!”
The Lovers’ Lane sequence was shot on Mulholland Drive at the top of the 405 Freeway—the area is now the Skirball Cultural Center. Dennis Stewart, who played the Scorpions’ leader, Leo, and Annette Charles, who played his girlfriend, Cha Cha, were the perfect biker types to contrast with Jeff Conaway and Stockard Channing. Jeff came up with the nickname “Craterface” based on Dennis’s pockmarked complexion. I was worried Dennis might object, but he thought it was cool.
“It broke”: one of the many “adult” moments that went over most children’s heads
