The Scene
Peer pressure is a big part of teenage life. In this scene, Sandy is trying to fit in and become a Pink Lady. This is her hazing moment, when she is offered cigarettes, alcohol, and the ritual of having her ears pierced. Rizzo, being the tough chick who runs the group, makes fun of Sandy behind her back when Sandy disappears into the bathroom, feeling ill after drinking and smoking and getting her earlobe jabbed by Frenchy. Sandy finally emerges from the bathroom and discovers Rizzo’s taunt, and her scripted line was, “Who do you think you are, making fun of me?” Olivia changed it to, “You’re making fun of me, Riz?” which made her seem more sympathetic. Stockard came up with the retort, “Some people are so touchy,” while sinking down in embarrassment at being caught.
JAMIE: Being the only girl of the Pink Ladies who had done the show before, I didn’t have to learn the material except for the new songs. Pat would say to me, “Jamie, figure out what the girls are going to do back there.” I was like, well, we could do the things that we’ve always done.
RANDAL: Have people recognized you over the years from Grease?
JAMIE: A lot of people say, “I think we went to high school together.” I know right where it’s coming from. And a lot of people tell me that I’m the way their child learned to brush their teeth.
The Script
While rehearsing the scene, we noticed a few lines slowed down the pace, so we cut or changed them. For example, in the shooting script, the character Jan looks at the TV and exclaims, “Jeez, look what Loretta Young is wearing,” but Jamie thought that Jan probably wouldn’t care about the Oscar-winning actress. She proposed replacing it with a line from the play that had always gotten a good laugh: “No shit, Bucky Beaver.” She pointed out to me that she has large front teeth, and I instantly flashed on a commercial from my childhood: Ipana toothpaste. It had a cartoon character named Bucky Beaver as its spokesman. We had the research department at Paramount track the commercial down and ran it on the vintage TV for the scene. With her “brusha brusha, brusha” along with the TV commercial, Jamie got her laugh again.
The Shot
From the shooting script’s simple phrase “a typical girl’s room of the period,” our art department created the ultimate bedroom of every fifties girl, including a paint-by-number painting of a horse and photos of teen idols pinned to the walls. Created on a soundstage, the set gave the feeling of an intimate bedroom, even though there was a crew of forty right outside the open fourth wall.
The scene was the Pink Ladies’ last day together on our shoot, and the mood was infectious—Olivia, Stockard, Jamie, Didi, and Dinah had become real-life friends and got into the slumber-party vibe. In fact, they were having so much fun that it was hard to get them to concentrate on the scene. Didi even said that she spontaneously closed the bedroom door when Stockard pulled out the bottle of wine as Rizzo, so her “parents” wouldn’t hear them. But Pat Birch was a taskmaster during the music number and got them to focus and perform the loose and playful choreography. When I announced, “That’s a wrap!” everyone cheered and celebrated. We had the feeling that we might not see each other together again. And we were so wrong, as our friendships have lasted for decades.
Last day of production; I stepped in to slate the shot.
The Song
One of the original songs from the play, “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee” compares Sandy to the real-life Sandra Dee, an actress who played popular Goody Two-shoes roles in fifties teen romances like Gidget, A Summer Place, and Tammy Tell Me True. Bad girls like Rizzo would have loathed Sandra Dee.
From the moment Stockard as Rizzo swivels to face her friends with a sharp gleam in her eye, she lets the audience know they’ll be in for a bumpy ride. Rizzo skewers Sandy with “Look at me, I’m Sandra Dee, lousy with virginity” and ends with the Americanized Italian expletive “Fangool!” before proclaiming one last time, “I’m Sandra Dee!”
The original stage lyrics included “No, no, no, Sal Mineo, I would never stoop so low,” which you can still see in the shooting script. Tragically, the actor Sal Mineo had been murdered a little more than a year before we began Grease, so we changed the lyrics to “Elvis, Elvis, let me be, keep that pelvis far from me.” But in an eerie twist of fate, Stockard sang these lyrics to the picture of Elvis on August 16, 1977, the day he died.
