Rock Is Money to Hollywood Ears
As the summer ended, the two current movies with Top Ten, platinum-selling soundtracks, Flashdance and Staying Alive, continued to draw at the box office. Flashdance, the movie, had grossed $87.5 million, while the soundtrack had sold a staggering 4 million copies and produced two Number One singles. Staying Alive had earned $58.3 million and finally had a hit in Frank Stallone’s “Far From Over,” after an initial single by the Bee Gees had bombed. What the industry has learned from the success of these films is not just that rock & roll draws its huge following into theaters, but that MTV and video clips are a strong new force in movie advertising.
They call it “cross-plugging”: the film gets a boost from the airing of video clips that are made to promote the music. Michael Sembello’s “Maniac” rose to the top of the charts with strong promotion from a video that’s a montage of Flashdance‘s sexy dance sequences; Stallone’s “Far From Over” got heavy play by MTV for a video that features John Travolta. MTV’s airing of these videos, which use actual footage from the films, amounts to promotion for the movies as well as the music. “You’re going to see that synergism all over now,” says movie-marketing consultant Charlie Powell. “You’re going to see the cross-plugging back and forth — the movie selling the MTV selling the album selling a book selling even a fashion. What’s going on here is a terrific marketing event that transcends a movie or an album.”
“If you have a really hot soundtrack and you can get MTV playing it all day long, you’re in business,” says Leonard Goldberg, executive producer of WarGames, another youth-oriented movie that was a big hit this summer, grossing $68.2 million.
Unfortunately, as a result, we may see a host of imitators of Flashdance and Staying Alive, which were weak on dialogue and plot, but strong on rock music and dancing to propel the action along.
“I hope we don’t get a plethora of movies like that, although it has clearly affected the thinking of the studios this year,” says Bill Oakes, the head of RSO Films, which produced not just Staying Alive but such other films with big-selling soundtracks as Saturday Night Fever, Grease and Xanadu. “If you continue to go further in the direction of Flashdance, you end up with a film with no characters and hardly any dialogue.
“Flashdance was shooting on the same lot as us at Paramount,” Oakes remembers. “And frankly, there were gloomy faces all over the lot for quite a while, because it was a film that, without the music in it, didn’t add up to much. A lot of people call it an extended MTV clip.”
“I think you’re going to see the visual sensual-effect picture — which is how I describe MTV — you’re going to see that a lot in movies today,” says Charlie Powell.
Powell thinks Flashdance helped Staying Alive by attracting an older audience. “The young kids were going to go see both of them, but Flashdance started to develop crossover business. I’m a 49-year-old man, and I wanted to see Flashdance, and 38-year-olds had to see it, and twenty-sevens and fifty-twos all had to see it. Normally, that audience doesn’t come out for a youth-oriented picture. We didn’t come out for Porky’s II. We did come out for Flashdance, and that crossover business then was waiting for Staying Alive.”
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What Flashdance has going for it, primarily, is composer Giorgio Moroder. It is Moroder’s song “Flashdance … What a Feeling,” sung by Irene Cara, that went to Number One on the charts and created tremendous early interest in the picture.
Moroder wasn’t brought in until late in the project, so he shares production credit for the music with Phil Ramone. That point confused many. The two didn’t, in fact, collaborate; Ramone, whose contribution included the hit “Maniac,” was involved at the beginning of production but had other commitments, which necessitated the film company’s calling in another producer. “At the last moment — something like six weeks before the final mixing — they still needed somebody to write the score,” says Moroder, “and that’s when I came in.”
It was no shot in the dark. The Italian-born Moroder had won an Academy Award for his 1978 soundtrack to Midnight Express, had scored Cat People in 1982 for director Paul Schrader (“He certainly wouldn’t have allowed me to do anything too commercial”) and had written the music for American Gigolo in 1980, which included Blondie’s huge hit “Call Me.” He’d also written the hit “On the Radio,” which was used in the film Foxes, for Donna Summer, whose first success in America had come with Moroder’s European-disco sound.
Because of the enormous success of Flashdance, Moroder now has more offers for film work than he can accept. Lately, most of his time is taken up with Scarface, a new film by Brian De Palma, starring Al Pacino. He is also writing a disco number to be sung by Irene Cara in D.C. Cab, a movie that stars Gary Busey and Mr. T, and he’s preparing to do another film with De Palma, tentatively titled Fire, starring John Travolta in a role fashioned after the life of Jim Morrison of the Doors. “In the case of fire,” says Moroder, “they need the songs before because they have to shoot concerts.”
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