fame

Give it a reset

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Take a look at this, please.

Fame script excerptI’m trying to see from your face whether you recognise any of that, but all I can see is that you’re looking a lot younger than me. I will try to still like you.

Anyway, if you do recognise it, I guarantee that you only recognise the first 17 words of the speech, not a single syllable after them. And you’re not really reading those 17, you’re hearing Debbie Allen saying them.

It’s the Fame speech. I think Allen delivers those lines in the opening title sequence of every one of that show’s 136 episodes. Certainly it’s in most of them, and I’ve just recently learned that she does different versions of it for some of the different seasons of the series.

Debbie Allen is this remarkable talent, a true and admirable star in so many fields, but curiously I don’t think her delivery of that speech works in any version other than the first one. The one where it wasn’t this famous line being delivered practically like a quotation, instead where it was just a single line of dialogue in an hour script.

Specifically in Fame, season 1, episode 1, “Metamorphosis” by Christopher Gore.

Imagine writing a line that an unfathomably enormous number of people remember vividly, decades later.

Gore wrote the 1980 film, which is frankly better: it’s less about fame, more about failure, and it stands up very well. He also wrote the pilot episode for the series and I understand it went through a lot of changes before it even got to the draft script I’ve just read. The changes were all to help make a series out of a movie, and I don’t know how many other hands were involved.

Nonetheless, “Metamorphosis” is different to both the film and the rest of the series. I’d say there are three Fames – the film, this pilot script and then the rest of the series – but don’t get me started on how many versions there are. There’s also been a TV reboot, a film remake, and countless stage productions.

If nothing else, they surely milked that idea dry.

Only, as fond as I was of the show’s early years when I saw them in the 1980s and how I’ve mostly enjoyed reading – so far – 21 of the scripts – I think it’s an idea that ran out of milk really soon.

I wrote about Fame for the Birmingham Hippodrome a few months ago, just a couple of pieces for the programme for their production of the stage version. In one of them, though, I offered that the reason the series is remembered as being brighter and lighter than the film is that it had whole seasons to tell its stories, not just two hours.

That could have been true and certainly I convinced myself, writing that while deep in COVID. But now reading the scripts, seeing some episodes, Fame seems to be an archetype of a certain 1970s/80s US TV format that I don’t like. It’s the type usually described as having a reset switch. Huge emotional upheaval happens in an episode, but it’s all fine at the end. That kind of thing.

Not that Fame has really huge emotional upheaval in the series, but does land some very good moments and they are then forgotten.

Today we might still know a guest star is never going to be heard of again, but what happens in one episode of a series has an impact that lasts. I’ve always thought that was better than the reset switch, and I’ve always thought it for a dozen reasons, but this week I’ve got a new one.

The reset switch is meant to mean that everything goes back to normal at the end of each episode. But in effect, what that inevitably means is that every episode is starting from scratch next time. There’s no follow through, so there’s no momentum, so each time it’s right, let’s do it again.

I think that’s why Fame seems, to me, to struggle for stories very early on its run. Some episodes seem more forced than others, more “this’ll do” than anything else. Apparently there is one right toward the end of the run where the studio asked whether the producers really wanted to do this story and the producers said it’s this or it’s a two-week production shut down while we try to think of something good.

Still, even with a reset-switch Fame, you get episodes like “A Tough Act to Follow” by Virginia Aldridge where I haven’t got the script, I haven’t seen it recently, but I still remember its punch from 40 years ago.

So I’m not saying that a reset-switch series can’t be any good, I’m just now thinking that it is bloody murder to keep coming up with entirely standalone stories where you’ve got to take us from everything-is-peachy and on to everything-is-peachy-again. I don’t think you can raise the stakes as high when you’re being pulled down at the start and the end.

Curiously, there was one key series that famously and very noticeably ignored the reset switch. I’m sure there were others in the transition phrase between the 1980s and our present golden age of television drama, but one was noticeable because of its background and where its writers came from.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. If you’re thinking I couldn’t go further away from Fame if I tried, I see your point, but Deep Space Nine was the fourth Star Trek series and the preceding three were all primarily reset-switch ones. Very famously against the demands of the studio making it, Deep Space Nine kept on having good people do bad things and living with the consequences. There were consequences. They lasted throughout the run of the series, they weren’t tied off in a neat bow at the end of the hour.

And a key writer in making that happen, in even taking on his studios in protracted fights, was Ira Steven Behr. Yes. He wrote for Fame and then he showran Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Mind you, this week I learned that Fame’s showrunner, William Blinn, went on to write Prince’s movie, “Purple Rain”, and that now seems a bigger jolt.

I think I’ll shut up here, before I admit to you that in the 1980s, I had the most enormous crush on one of the Fame dancers. Phew. Nearly admitted that.

There is nothing good but remembering makes it so

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I think about this a lot. Maybe there isn’t any art that is good or bad by itself, it is made one or the other by whether we remember it. So for instance, YouTube just chucked a “20 Famous TV Themes” video at me and every single one was shite altogether, except for the five I remembered, which were were all masterpieces of musical construction.

And then I went to see a reunion concert from a group that with infinite regret must now be called the Pensioners from Fame. They put on a good show, they put on a good night, but last weekend I watched the recording and now it felt like they were constrained by the past. Songs written very quickly on a 1980s TV show’s schedule felt thinner than the 2022 concert treated them. Putting it back on a screen should have worked, but they became tunes to remind you of what they used to sound like, or what you were like when you first listened to them. They weren’t songs that stirred much more than memory.

Though to be fair, there were songs I didn’t know and they weren’t bad.

I stopped watching Fame when it went into first-run syndication. You’re looking at me now. For its first two seasons, it was on NBC network TV and was shot on film. Then NBC dropped it, but everywhere outside the US loved this show so much that they paid for it to continue, they just didn’t pay enough. So the last four seasons were shot on video and even all that time ago, the drop in image quality was too much for me. So there were songs at the reunion concert that I’d not heard before, and the cast included actors I hadn’t seen before.

So with them, I was freed from the memory and the associations that are forever locked to the songs I did know. Yet it still felt as if what was being celebrated at the reunion was a memory seen from so very far away.

Still, by chance I also recently got to write about Fame for the Birmingham Hippodrome’s theatre programme as they put on the stage version. I got to say that bit about NBC cancelling it and the BBC putting up some cash. I also got to say, which I so strongly believe, that the original film by Christopher Gore was far more about failure than fame and, incidentally, I still rate the movie’s music highly.

What I didn’t get to say because there wasn’t room, it wasn’t relevant to the piece and because I’m not entirely sure anyone would have believed, is what a writer of the TV show went on to do next. Ira Steven Behr went from the bright and cheery Fame to the bleakest but also the best of the Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine.

I have no idea why that pleases me so much.

Finding Fame

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So there’s this thing about Thomas the Tank Engine. It doesn’t especially matter whether it’s a good or a poor TV show, what tends to happen regardless is that people love it when they’re very young. Then they go to school and wouldn’t be seen dead with a Thomas the Tank Engine lunchbox. Next, they get through the embarrassment and forget about the show but then many years later, they’re buying the DVDs in a nostalgia bin or joining the online Thomas forums.

Hopefully the quality of the show played in to one’s enjoying it when very young, but now that certainly has nothing to do with it: you’re watching that DVD and you aren’t seeing Thomas the Tank Engine, you are seeing yourself.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a complete episode.

But I appear to have gone through this cycle with Fame.

That’s Fame the TV show, not the film. It has always and forever been okay to like the film written by Christopher Gore and directed by Alan Parker. It seems to me that the film is much more about failure than it is about fame and that miserable bleakness plus some great music makes it pretty timeless.

Whereas my main memory of the TV series is that it was extremely bright and colourful and jazz-hands happy. These are all things that lend themselves to embarrassment so the show was always at risk of this but it did also come in 1982 when US television was mostly light, easy-watching fare. My beloved Lou Grant was cancelled the year before and while it was replaced on the schedule by Cagney and Lacey, while Family Ties started then too, while St Elsewhere began as well, most of the year was pretty bad. TJ Hooker started. The Happy Days spin-off Joanie Loves Chachi began its brief run. Bring ‘Em Back Alive. Remington Steele started in 1982 and much as I enjoy it, it was froth. And then there was Knight Rider.

But it’s funny how many of those titles you recognise. Three decades on and the only one you’re not sure of is Joanie Loves Chachi. Then, too, there is little question but that you know this line:

You want fame. Well, fame costs. And right here is where you start paying … in sweat.

I should write a line that gets remembered and quoted in 32 years time.

You’re expecting me to re-evaluate Fame and say that at least that it doesn’t deserve its cheesy reputation or perhaps that it actually deserves to be a classic. I don’t know. I am Thomas the Tank Engine-style blinded to it. But I re-found it by an odd route and it’s proved to be a route that has made me re-evaluate the series as a production. Maybe it’s because I’ve been involved in shows now, maybe because I’ve had to produce the odd thing, but I have a new and very great respect for how this TV series was made. How they physically made 136 episodes.

Every US TV show, especially of that time, was making up to 24 episodes per year but this series was making 24 musicals. A new musical every week. The ones I’ve been watching this week tended to have three musical numbers each: typically a solo song over some montage or other, plus some kind of dance-room-related tune and then usually a big, full production number with the large cast of regular dancers. If you only count the professional routines and not all the pro/celebrity dances, that’s more than we see each week on Strictly Come Dancing or its US equivalent Dancing with the Stars.

Doing that on a drama budget, doing that on a drama schedule, it makes me go pale. The writer in me is also immediately conscious of the impact that makes on your script. You have to stand up three musical numbers, you have to find a story that allows for these to happen naturally during your episode. It’s bloody hard and not every writer, not every episode, succeeds: even in the first few of the series that I’ve just watched, there are one that feel contrived. Nice tunes, but fudged into the story.

Then equally, there’s a writing issue of how long those songs or dances take. Three minutes each? Two? Call it two minutes apiece on average and you are still handing over six minutes of your fifty-minute running time to a musical interlude. Your story has to fit fifty minutes, has to deliver a big moment ahead of each of three commercial breaks and then resolve itself. Oh, and let’s have another one next week. And the week after.

I don’t think I was aware of all this in 1982, though I was already seeing television as something that is crafted rather than just a thing you half-watch in the evening. But I am aware of it now and that made the route I came back to Fame all the more interesting. Because I found it again through the scripts.

I have no clue, not one single clue, what I was looking for online last weekend but in that rabbit-hole kind of way, I found myself coming across Fame and specifically across The Kids from Fame Media Blog. It looks like it was designed in the 1980s and it’s tricky to find your way around. So tricky that while that’s the site’s front door, it’s just taken me a time to find the scripts I first stumbled across. But they’re here: the complete shooting scripts for Fame, beginning with the first season.

I read a lot of scripts, I enjoy reading scripts, I’m particularly interested in this set for how they approach the musical numbers. Some just have scene headings and a few lines of description like

91. BRIDGET’S AUDITION – PRODUCTION NUMBER

starts simply and builds as the corps of dancers from Lydia’s class move onto stage to back and accentuate Bridget’s routine. Leroy is her male ‘support’ dancer, helping her in lifts and turns, etc. The moves are intricate, always keeping Bridget in the forefront of the audience’s focus, leading to a final portion in which all the dancers fall away, leaving the performing arena to Bridget, allowing her to carve graceful shapes from thin air, in concert with Bruno’s music…

Let us all take a moment to imagine being Debbie Allen, not only having to learn her lines from the script as she starred as dance teacher Lydia Grant but also having to go uh-uh, graceful lines, right honey, and choreograph that number.

One script included all the lyrics to the various songs. It was really confusing: the lyrics were written out in all capital letters, very hard to read, and the way they were positioned in the script meant they were followed by dialogue that was clearly meant to precede them. But they did also include very familiar – to me from my radio work – cues and timings for how long the music would take.

And then another script just gives up and says, in total:

MUSIC #1 – TO BE ANNOUNCED

It’s funny how clearly you can see a show finding its feet through its scripts and just how they are written, what they tell the production. I’ve read entire series of scripts before to see how a show develops from start to end and it’s terribly instructive as well as interesting.

So as a writer, I recommend taking a look at the scripts. If you tell anyone we talked about this, tell ’em that I was very serious about production issues and script writing and the history of television, okay? Maybe you can tell them I admitted I’ve enjoyed watching the episodes and that I like the music.

But if you ever tell anyone that I had a gigantic crush on one of the Fame dancers, you’re off my Christmas card list and no mistake.