Grease

The Scene

I went to Radnor High School in Radnor, Pennsylvania, and every year we had the big Lower Merion game. Each time, the entire student body showed up with lots of school spirit. The band played our school song at the bonfire and the coach riled up the crowd. This sequence is based on those experiences.

Rydell High’s pep rally opens with one of Pat’s dancers, Dennis Daniels as Bart, twirling fire batons. Dennis was an actual 1974–75 United States World Baton champion. Once Pat heard about this, we had to include him in the pep rally.

Sid Caesar in his role as Coach Calhoun needed no direction. He was what I call an aim-and-shoot actor: as soon as I aimed the camera at him, he started doing his thing, in this case firing up the student body. Meanwhile, working with Dody Goodman as Blanche and Eve Arden as Principal McGee was a blast. They came up with great comedy bits whenever they improvised together; one that ended up in this sequence was when Blanche was getting into Coach Calhoun’s bloodthirsty speech while Principal McGee watched her, a bit appalled. All we had to do was just pick the best take.

When we see the T-Birds—Putzie, Sonny, and Doody—they’re doing a riff on the Three Stooges. During rehearsals, I found out that these guys were all fans of the Stooges and had imitated them before. I arranged for Columbia to send over some Stooges shorts and screened them with the guys. They worked out this routine, which shows their friendship better than any line.

Kenickie drives up in a 1948 Ford Deluxe junker. With a cracked windshield, missing headlight, and in need of a good paint job, it’s all he can afford after a summer job lugging boxes. His jalopy is just one of the many period-specific cars in the movie, from the Pink Ladies’ 1948 Studebaker Commander Regal and Danny’s 1949 Dodge Wayfarer at the drive-in to the mid-fifties Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles, and Chevrolets crowding the parking lot of the pep rally.

Because we wanted to have a climactic race sequence at the end of the movie, we needed to set up the opposing gang early in the movie. We named them the Scorpions and had them drive by in this sequence with their hot rod, Hell’s Chariot, a custom-built, flame-spewing 1949 Mercury Series 9CM. When they see the rival gang, the actors provided some great improvisation that made it into the movie: Jeff Conaway pulls out a switchblade and Barry Pearl pulls out a squirt gun.

The Shot

One of the key moments in the movie is when Sandy and Danny meet again. I storyboarded this sequence with Sandy in the foreground and the Pink Ladies behind her, and a matching shot of Danny with the T-Birds behind him. In this reunion with Sandy, Danny’s delighted to see her again, but then he notices the looks from his gang. With a flip of his collar, Danny reverts to his trademark “That’s cool, baby, cool . . . I mean you know how it is . . .” Sandy calls him for what he is, “a fake and a phony.” Danny is upset as she storms off, and he catches Rizzo smiling at his discomfort. You see a glimpse of John’s more vulnerable side. Having worked with John before, I knew he would nail this moment, and I had him walk into a big close-up, with the others in soft focus behind him. He almost, but not quite, goes after Sandy. Then he turns his back on her and saunters to his gang. That sequence was all John. Not only can he hit the comedy beats but his innate vulnerability comes through no matter what kind of tough guy he plays. It helped that John and Olivia had on-screen chemistry. Their close working relationship turned into a lasting friendship.

When Frenchy tries to comfort the sobbing Sandy, she launches into a tirade against men: “Men are rats . . . They’re fleas on rats.” At a Grease sing-along I heard the audience recite Frenchy’s lines word for word. They’d memorized her speech! The movie’s become like The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The Costumes

“All you need is the spirit,” Albert Wolsky told me. “You’ve got bobby socks and you’re halfway there.” Albert designed the look of the teachers and staff and the students using a combination of custom-made costumes in period fabric, repurposed costumes from earlier productions, and street clothes. Great costumes need a vision, but a smart costume designer knows what absolutely must be made for the production and what can be found and put together more inexpensively and quickly.

A costume like Coach Calhoun’s baseball cap and Rydell High jacket looks simple, but every detail is considered and matched with the other athletes to create a cohesive look.

The T-Birds’ jackets were made for the movie, but their black shirts and jeans could be bought pretty cheaply. One thing Albert did not skimp on was the period fabric for the principal actors’ costumes—he knew that fabric from the fifties hangs and moves in a certain way that is unmistakable.

At the time, Paramount didn’t have a large workroom but they had a fabric room left from the days of the great Edith Head. There were bolts of fabric there from the fifties that Albert used for key costumes, like Sandy’s and Rizzo’s outfits, while other costumes he pulled from the wardrobe room and repurposed. That was a common practice, and one of the reasons why there are so few costumes left from Grease. At the Paramount costume archives I saw Marty’s Pink Ladies jacket and a Rydell High cheerleader outfit restored and on display, but little else seems to remain. I’ve kept a Rydell letter jacket, for special occasions. Olivia kept her skintight “Bad Sandy” pants (and auctioned them off to raise funds for charity). Barry Pearl has his authentic T-Bird jacket. I’m not sure who else kept what, but any items would probably do well on eBay.

Costume designer Albert Wolsky’s original sketches for Rydell High students