TCM is partnering this month with Fathom Events to present exclusive theatrical screenings of the Grease Sing-A-Long in select theaters August 16 and 19 only (buy tickets by clicking this link). For those of you who like me grew up in the 1970s and early 1980s this will be a fun walk down memory lane and a chance in indulge in some groovy nostalgia. For younger readers, this can be a chance at some cinematic archeology—an opportunity to explore a baffling oddity, a fragment of pop culture from some alternate universe that broke off from its parallel dimension and jabbed through a rift in time and space into our own unsuspecting world. Put simply, Grease is v. weird.
Some facts to establish the impact of this pop culture juggernaut:
The 1978 movie version of the musical Grease was a massive hit—posting the 2nd best opening weekend (behind Jaws no less); it became the top grossing movie musical ever; the soundtrack album was the 2nd highest selling album of the year (behind Saturday Night Fever); it became the top-selling movie soundtrack album ever.
But those are just numbers. Here’s what I remember: this thing was everywhere in the late 1970s. Its songs played through every speaker at all times. I was taken to see it a good half dozen times in both hard-top theaters and drive-ins before I turned 10. They showed it at my elementary school when I was in 3rd grade. I was at a gymnastics class where little kids flipped into the air on trampolines to the tune of “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee” and “Greased Lightning” (Go ahead, look up the lyrics online. I’ll wait).
If, somehow, you’ve never seen the movie before, or like apparently all the parents in 1978 and 1979 you simply never paid attention to the content of the film, it’s pretty raunchy. It’s basically about the liberating power of teenage sexuality.
That was the outwardly stated intention of the creators of Grease back when it was mounted as an off-Broadway musical in 1971. Warren Casey and Jim Jacobs had been inspired by the success of Hair to try something similar, but focused on a different time period—specifically the end of the 1950s, the leading edge of the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
Casey and Jacobs rankled at the dishonesty of the pop culture from the 1950s. Producers had discovered the buying power of teenagers and desperately created movies, TV shows, music, and other media to market to them—but these creations willfully misunderstood true teen culture and insisted on a sanitized distortion. Slap Elvis’ face on everything in sight to bring in the kids, but keep his gyrating hips cropped discreetly out of sight to keep him from corrupting those kids.
In response, the 1971 Grease soundtrack consciously copied the musical style of 1950s rock-n-roll but mapped that onto lusty, swaggering songs whose lyrics would never have been sung back then (like the it-doesn’t-count-as-thinly-veiled-innuendo-if-there’s-no-veil-it’s-just-innuendo “Born to Hand Jive”).
The plot is your basic boy-meets-girl romantic comedy staple, but twisted so that the point is that the virginal girl is ultimately convinced to put out. Along the way, the adult perspective is consistently mocked or ignored in favor of rebellion and abandon.
The original 1971 staging of Grease was a deliberately rough-hewn thing: “sets” that were just painted onto paper walls, a conscious decision to under-rehearse so no one would seem too slickly prepared. But it struck a nerve, and lasted… migrating to Broadway, and eventually to the screen.
The stage version had been written to look back roughly a decade, with equal measures nostalgic fondness for the 1950s and sharply critical snark. In other words, in 1971, Grease functioned a lot like those I Love the 80s shows in the early 2000s. But by 1978, that frame of reference had necessarily shifted, thanks to the simple passage of time. 1978 was a very different time from 1971—in terms of sexual freedom, women’s rights, politics, economics, and music.
Inevitably, the movie version of Grease became a weird hybrid of conflicting references. At root, the understructure of the stage musical remained, with the faux-50s soundtrack (performed for the film by the 50’s-era-thrownback band The Sha-Na-Nas). But those songs had never been entirely unambiguously retro in the first place—they were also songs from a musical, which is a whole genre unto itself. Musicals’ songs have a narrative quality and an earnestly emotional intensity that doesn’t normally surface in pop music.
Then, for the film, two new songs were added, both of which became the iconic signposts for the movie while wrenching the aesthetic direction decidedly away from the original spirit: the title song “Grease” by Barry Gibb and sung by Frankie Valli, and “You’re the One That I Want” by John Farrar and sung by the film’s stars Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta. Both are clearly disco songs, propulsive dance hits for an era of flared pants and mirror balls. Both were also massive selling hits that set the audience expectations for the film. “You’re the One That I Want” exploded to become one of the hottest selling singles of all time despite being released before the film opened, such that audiences flocked to the film specifically to see that song in situ. For those few ticket buyers who ended up at the theater without “You’re the One That I Want” buffeting around their noggins ahead of time, the opening titles’ “Grease” promises a disco-fueled time that seems strangely incongruous for a film about 1950s high schoolers.
And while we’re on that subject: high schoolers? Even when I was a kid I could tell these people were not high schoolers. Olivia Newton-John may have been every teenage boys’ crush at the time, but she was 30 years old when she played Sandy. John Travolta was 24, but looked substantially older than his co-star. Stockard Channing, who mocks Sandy for being “lousy with virginity” in the song that my gymnastics buddies flipped to, was 33.
This was part of the weird warping of time and space that was going on with this film. It started as an effort to retroactively reinvent 50s pop music to be honest about 50s teenage culture, and ended up with adults singing disco songs. It started as an off-Broadway screed about teenage sexuality and ended up as a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster that every parent took their kids to.
So, I’ll see you at a Fathom Events-participating theater for the Sing-A-Long, and I expect the audience will be full of folks my age, revisiting an old fave they likely first saw when they were a pre-adolescent child. That, and families, bringing their own little kids to groove to the funky sounds of “Hand Jive.” Does it make a lick of sense? No, but it’s so much more fun this way.