BARRY: At one point before “Summer Nights,” Michael was looking for a word to call Tom Chisum and used the word gavone.
RANDAL: What does it mean?
MICHAEL: Gavone. Say your father had a garbage truck. All of a sudden, his brother becomes governor of the state of New York, and now he’s head of garbage. But he’s still a gavone.
BARRY: A lowlife. So then Tom Chisum stepped in and I ad-libbed. I started to say “A gavone” too but, I’m like, “Michael’s already said gavone.” It became “Gumdrops, man.” It means nothing. It means absolutely nothing!
MICHAEL: It’s like that water pistol you pulled out in this scene too.
RANDAL: You were just being crazy.
BARRY: Gumdrops, man.
The Song
During the sing-alongs, all it takes to get the crowd cheering is the line, “So what did you do this summer, Sandy?” That’s the kind of question a student would ask. Pat stuck close to this real-life honesty in her choreography—“kids don’t buy artifice,” she’d say.
This song sets up the two main characters’ personalities. Wanting to be respected by their peers, Danny portrays his summer affair as raunchy to the T-Birds and Sandy relates it as romantic to the Pink Ladies. Then Danny and Sandy move away from their peers and harmonize their true feelings in a split-screen moment.
We didn’t know it at the time, but “Summer Nights” would go on to be one of the top karaoke songs in the world.
My original split-screen concept, illustrating Danny’s and Sandy’s different perceptions of their summer
The Scene
When I saw the stage version, the boys were on the left side of the stage and the girls were on the right. In adapting this to film, it was clear that cutting back and forth between the two would be the way to go. This number has a natural build. We wanted to work with that and get the audience involved as soon as the guys start dancing on the bleachers and the girls step away from the cafeteria tables, so that by the climax of the song, they were hooked.
The cast gave it their all—the boys were sweating in their leather jackets under the summer SoCal sun. Their energy inspired the girls, who took breaks from their own rehearsals to watch them. The boys watched us shoot the girls too and cheered them on.
John described what everyone felt: “Imagine—you’re on the set, you have the choreography down, you have the music blasting. The director says action and you’re off! You take off like a balloon in this other dimension . . . you just feel alive.”
As both the girls and boys urge Sandy and Danny to reveal everything about their romance, Pat kept the storytelling going through movement, so by the song’s end, each character has been firmly established. Pat’s dancers appear in the background doing everyday activities, eating their lunches and other ordinary high school things. But then, on a certain musical phrase, everyone in the background simultaneously turns and goes into a choreographed routine.
There was a lot of improvisation during rehearsals that made it into this scene. When Rizzo pushes Patty Simcox (and Sandy) off the bench, Susan Buckner had wanted to dive headfirst into the garbage can. But that would have been too tricky to pull off and potentially dangerous for her. The “gag me” gesture by tough greaser girl Sauce may have been more from the seventies than the fifties but we used it because Mimi Lieber, one of Pat’s dancers, timed it perfectly. The guys had all sorts of comedy bits in there, such as Kelly, as Putzie, looking up girls’ skirts, which was something we came up with the day of the shoot. Kelly later said, “You could have picked a hotter chick.” He was staying in character.
Associate producer Neil Machlis (left) outside on the set at Huntington Park High School with Kelly Ward and Barry Pearl
The Shot
Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s original script had dialogue that eased effortlessly into the lyrics of the song; this was one of the numbers that was carefully storyboarded. Pat Birch, Bill Butler, and I developed a plan to intercut the two different sides of the story, finding visual ways to connect them. We were inspired by the number “Tonight” in West Side Story. We first decided which phrases of the song would be seen on each group. Pat choreographed movements that would continue across the cuts, such as when the boys jump up on “You know what I mean!” and we cut to the girls as they thump down in a group to sit on the cafeteria table. The result is probably our best example of how our choreography, camera, and editing came together.
Choreographer Pat Birch staging “Summer Nights” on the bleachers of Venice High School
Days of Pat’s choreography planning and rehearsal led to the sequence of John and Olivia singing together, John at the top of the bleachers and Olivia standing on a tabletop. I had storyboarded a split-screen moment at the end of the song, where both faces would be in close-up. When John sings, “Oh,” there was a magical moment during one of the takes: as the camera pulled back, the sun came out from behind a cloud and lit up his face as he smiled. It’s one of my favorite moments in the movie because it was a lucky accident.
We filmed a very wide shot for the end of this song, thinking that we might need a beat for the audience to react or applaud. The studio cut it, and they were right.
The Choreography
In rehearsals, Pat worked out the choreography of “Summer Nights” with the boys and the girls practicing side by side. By the time we shot the boys’ scene on the bleachers at Venice High School, everyone knew precisely what their action would be. Throughout “Summer Nights” we kept moving between single close-ups of actors singing and shots of groups dancing with the same movements. “The audience loves disparate bodies moving together,” Pat would say. Pat was used to performing to an audience seated beyond the proscenium. For the movie, she adapted to the eye of the camera.
The Cinematography
We wanted to showcase Olivia and John at key moments in “Summer Nights” but keep the storyline going as well, showing the actors and dancers head to toe. Bill Butler worked on syncing camera moves with the motion of the dancers. We used a dolly with the girls as they skipped through the outdoor cafeteria. We used a crane for the boys on the bleachers, following them up and down as they strutted. Somehow they never tripped. Riding high on the crane with the Panavision camera, two huge arc lights, and the cinematographer of Jaws, I thought to myself: I’m finally a Hollywood director.
Another important aspect of Grease’s cinematography was its crisp visual style, a throwback to the colorful Hollywood musicals I grew up watching, like An American in Paris and West Side Story. By the late seventies, Technicolor was out of style; movies like Easy Rider and Annie Hall had a soft and muted look. So the buoyant, colorful style might have been unpopular—Bill thought it was a “gamble to go sharp”—but we thought it was right for this picture.
Cinematographer Bill Butler and me on the crane for “Summer Nights”