The CultureMap Interview

Karaoke cinema: Grease becomes an interactive experience at WorldFest

Randal Kleiser with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John on the set of "Grease."
"Grease" is iconic — and ready for a karaoke-style sing along.

Thirty-three years after it first splashed onto screens everywhere, Grease still is the word. The big difference now is, the people on screen aren’t the only ones who are hitting all the right notes.

A special Sing-A-Long version of the enduringly popular 1978 movie musical — prepared with the active involvement of Randal Kleiser, the film’s director — has been playing to packed houses in several United States cities throughout the past year. Lyrics to all the songs in the familiar soundtrack are flashed as subtitles on screen, allowing long-time fans and the newly initiated to, well, sing along with John Travolta, Oivia Newton-John and other members of the cast.

Call it le cinema du karaoke, and you won’t be far off the mark.

Kleiser himself will be on hand to see and hear how H-Town movie fans fare as song stylists when Grease Sing-A-Long screens Saturday afternoon at the AMC Studio 30 as part of the 2011 WorldFest/Houston International Film Festival.

Earlier in the day, Kleiser — whose other directorial credits include The Blue Lagoon (1980), Summer Lovers (1982), Flight of the Navigator (1986), and Getting It Right (1989) — will conduct a WorldFest-sponsored master class for directors and actors at the Houston Marriott Westchase. It’s partly his way of repaying an old debt: Back in 1972, when WorldFest was located in Atlanta, Kleiser — then fresh out of UCLA film school — received a festival prize for Peege, a short he had directed as his master’s thesis project.

But wait, there’s more: During the festival, Kleiser landed a distributor for Peege. (The film, a sensitive drama about a young man’s last visit to his aunt in a nursing home, went on to gross more than $1 million in various nontheatrical venues, and was selected in 2008 for inclusion in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.) Within two years, Kleiser was directing episodes of TV dramas and made-for-television movies. And in 1978, he was ready to make his first theatrical feature: Grease

Kleiser tells CultureMap more in an exclusive interview.

CultureMap: How unnerving is it to see that a movie you made 33 years ago isn’t only still popular — it actually has become an audience-participation event?

Randall Kleiser: I’ll tell you — one of the most exciting moments of my life was last summer at the Hollywood Bowl when we had 17,000 people show up in costume the first time they showed the Sing-A-Long version. And let me tell you — they all knew the lyrics. They didn’t need the subtitles. They were so into it. And there were costumes contests, and some members of the original movie cast appeared. It was just amazing. A phenomenon. And I’m just very happy to be part of it.

CM: But has Grease ever been a double-edged sword for you? I can remember Arthur Penn telling me years ago that, while he would always be proud of directing Bonnie and Clyde — well, he wanted to tell people, “Hey, look, you know I have directed other movies, too.”

RK: Yeah, I know what he meant. And, look, I know that Grease will probably be on my tombstone. But you know what? A lot of people don’t have anything to put on their tombstone. The fact that the movie is such a joyous celebration, and everybody likes it because of that — I don’t mind that at all. It does bring attention to me. And when it does, I can tell people that I’ve directed other movies.

CM: After all this time — and after seeing Grease so many times — are there things in it that maybe you weren’t so happy about back in 1978, but you’ve come to better appreciate now?

RK: Well, actually, I’m glad that I wasn’t an auteur at the time. Because there were things about it that I would have changed that would have made it worse. One of those things was the opening title song. I had gotten a guy to write a very ‘50s-sounding title song that was also called “Grease” — but was very much a rock ’n’ roll song. And we animated the title sequence to that song. The cuts hit on the beats and everything.

And when I finished the whole song and animated title sequence, [producer] Robert Stigwood came to me and said, “Hey, I want to have Barry Gibb [of The Bee Gees] write a song for the title sequence.” And I said, “Hey, it’s already done. Look at it. It works great.” But they brought me the Barry Gibb song anyway, for Fankie Valli to sing. And I said, “This is a disco song. Why are we putting this in here? It doesn’t even hit the beats.”

CM: Well, after all, Stigwood had just come off making Saturday Night Fever with a Bee Gees soundtrack. So maybe he thought a Barry Gibb title song might help make lightning strike twice?

RK: Sure. But like I told them: “Even the lyrics don’t match the movie.” So they told me: “Well, go talk to Barry Gibb.” So I went to the set of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which he was shooting with his brothers at the time. We walked behind one of the sets — and he was dressed like one of the Beatles in a Sgt. Pepper outfit — and I told him, “Gee, Barry, these lyrics don’t match our movie. You have a line in there: 'Life is a time of illusion, wrapped up in trouble and laced in confusion. What are we doing here?' Now, those lyrics are very serious. And they have nothing to do to with our bright, sunny musical. We don’t have any serious scenes in the movie. It’s all happy. Can you change the lyric?”

And he said to me, totally seriously, “Why don’t you shoot a serious scene?”

CM: And so…?

RK: He didn’t change the lyric, I was outvoted, and that was the song that was slapped on the movie. And it turned out that it was a big hit, and no one noticed that the lyrics were completely wrong for the tone of the movie.

So if I would have been an auteur, and I could have had my way – it probably would’ve not been as good a movie.

"Grease Sing-A-Long" will be shown at 3 pm Saturday at the AMC Studio 30. Randal Kleiser and WorldFest director J. Hunter Todd cordially invite fans to dress up as their favorite "Grease" characters for the occasion.

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Movie Review

Avatar: Fire and Ash returns to Pandora with big action and bold visuals

Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios

Oona Chaplin in Avatar: Fire and Ash.

For a series whose first two films made over $5 billion combined worldwide, Avatar has a curious lack of widespread cultural impact. The films seem to exist in a sort of vacuum, popping up for their run in theaters and then almost as quickly disappearing from the larger movie landscape. The third of five planned movies, Avatar: Fire and Ash, is finally being released three years after its predecessor, Avatar: The Way of Water.

The new film finds the main duo, human-turned-Na’vi Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his native Na’vi wife, Neytiri (Zoë Saldaña), still living with the water-loving Metkayina clan led by Ronal (Kate Winslet) and Tonowari (Cliff Curtis). While Jake and Neytiri still play a big part, the focus shifts significantly to their two surviving children, Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) and Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), as well as two they’ve essentially adopted, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) and Spider (Jack Champion).

Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who lives on in a fabricated Na’vi body, is still looking for revenge on Jake, and he finds help in the form of the Mangkwan Clan (aka the Ash People), led by Varang (Oona Chaplin). Quaritch’s access to human weapons and the Mangkwan’s desire for more power on the moon known as Pandora make them a nice match, and they team up to try to dominate the other tribes.

Aside from the story, the main point of making the films for writer/director James Cameron is showing off his considerable technical filmmaking prowess, and that is on full display right from the start. The characters zoom around both the air and sea on various creatures with which they’ve bonded, providing Cameron and his team with plenty of opportunities to put the audience right there with them. Cameron’s preferred viewing method of 3D makes the experience even more immersive, even if the high frame rate he uses makes some scenes look too realistic for their own good.

The story, as it has been in the first two films, is a mixed bag. Cameron and co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver start off well, having Jake, Neytiri, and their kids continue mourning the death of Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) in the previous film. The struggle for power provides an interesting setup, but Cameron and his team seem to drag out the conflict for much too long. This is the longest Avatar film yet, and you really start to feel it in the back half as the filmmakers add on a bunch of unnecessary elements.

Worse than the elongated story, though, is the hackneyed dialogue that Cameron, Jaffa, and Silver have come up with. Almost every main character is forced to spout lines that diminish the importance of the events around them. The writers seemingly couldn’t resist trying to throw in jokes despite them clashing with the tone of the scenes in which they’re said. Combined with the somewhat goofy nature of the Na’vi themselves (not to mention talking whales), the eye-rolling words detract from any excitement or emotion the story builds up.

A pre-movie behind-the-scenes short film shows how the actors act out every scene in performance capture suits, lending an authenticity to their performances. Still, some performers are better than others, with Saldaña, Worthington, and Lang standing out. It’s more than a little weird having Weaver play a 14-year-old girl, but it works relatively well. Those who actually get to show their real faces are collectively fine, but none of them elevate the film overall.

There are undoubtedly some Avatar superfans for which Fire and Ash will move the larger story forward in significant ways. For anyone else, though, the film is a demonstration of both the good and bad sides of Cameron. As he’s proven for 40 years, his visuals are (almost) beyond reproach, but the lack of a story that sticks with you long after you’ve left the theater keeps the film from being truly memorable.

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Avatar: Fire and Ash opens in theaters on December 19.

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