Forty-five years ago, audiences first glimpsed the sun-kissed, palm-lined campus of Rydell High, the school setting for the movie musical Grease. Featuring star-making performances from John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, Grease immersed viewers in the camp melodrama of 1950s adolescence, replete with preening boys, blushing girls and explosive dance numbers.
Based on the 1971 stage musical by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, which had starred actors including Richard Gere and Barry Bostwick, Grease the film swapped the original’s grittier Chicago setting for the steamy heat of the west coast. Centring on the story of the car-obsessed T-Birds and their romances with the chain-smoking Pink Ladies, Grease was met with a mixed reception upon its release in 1978. “I’ve never seen an uglier large-scale musical,” wrote one critic for the Washington Post. In the decades since, though, it has amassed a committed following. Countless spin-offs and revivals have been produced, including Grease 2 in 1982 and a forthcoming prequel series, Grease: The Rise of the Pink Ladies.
We look back at the original film through the eyes of the film’s cast and crew, remembering the summer-long production, their relationships on and off screen, and the musical’s enduring legacy.
Several cast members first appeared in the national touring productions of Grease before they auditioned for film roles.
Jamie Donnelly (Jan): Grease started in a basement in Chicago and these characters are based on real people, which is why they feel so relatable. I auditioned for the first company to take the show from Chicago to off-Broadway. I became the replacement for Jan, and at that point the original cast was a very tight-knit group. It was a little bit like being the new kid in school.
Michael Tucci (Sonny LaTierri): Everybody wanted to be in Grease. Those early auditions for the tour were full of hundreds of guys. Quite a few of the other male cast members made it on to the film, like John Travolta, who was playing Doody. The minute the curtain went up on my first performance, the audience just popped. You could identify with these people, you wanted to be part of their group.
Barry Pearl (Doody): I was an understudy, which meant I got to know a lot of the different parts and, along with the other guys who had performed the show on national tour, we all built a real language together.
Donnelly: Not only were the guys doing the show together all the time, they lived together on the road. These relationships that you see in the movie are real. I was in the show for six months and I did it eight times a week, so I knew it backwards, forwards and upside down.
In 1976, John Travolta’s star was rising and he signed a three-film deal with Paramount. Producer Allan Carr and screenwriter Bronte Woodard’s adaptation of Grease was one of the projects he wanted to lead.
Joel Thurm (casting director): I had known John since he was 17 and, from the moment he walked into my office, I knew he would do well. He was an incredibly good-looking boy with wonderful eyes and had such poise at such a young age.
Tucci: I saw John’s career skyrocket when he went from his Grease stage run to another play across the street. He got unbelievable reviews and was nominated for a Tony. He couldn’t get out of the door to the theatre; he was already getting mobbed by fans.
Thurm: Two years before Grease, I produced the TV film Boy in the Plastic Bubble with John and the Grease director, Randal Kleiser. John had great faith in us and so he signed on to Grease, which wouldn’t have gotten made without a star name like his.
Kelly Ward (Putzie): I met John for the first time shooting The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. I knew then that he was a star. Certain people, when you’re with them, you can see the magnetism that the camera loves. He has that magic.
Casting began in LA in 1977 over a three-week period of dance tryouts and callbacks.
Thurm: It was John who wanted Olivia Newton-John for the role of Sandy. Unusually for a star like Olivia, she asked for a screen test because she was a singer, not an actor, and she was unsure about being quite a bit older than John. We set up a full film test of the drive-in scene and she was perfect. She was so good that I didn’t have a back-up Sandy – if Olivia had said no, you’d see me in the film in a skirt and a blond wig!
Tucci: By the time the film came around, I was in my early 30s and too old for the role. One night, though, Allan Carr and Joel Thurm happened to be sitting behind my mother and father at the opening night for another play of mine and my mother heard them mention Grease. She turned around and told them how I’d been in the stage version and that they had to see me. Allan said he’d bring me in the next day, so I went to audition and got the part of Sonny.
Dinah Manoff (Marty Maraschino): I saw the original version on Broadway and fell in love with it. I was only 20 when my agent put me up for an audition and Grease ended up being my first film. I originally read for Frenchy but the casting director had me come back for Marty. They did a dance audition and I’m not a dancer, so I just kind of wriggled my way through it with my shoulders and my hips as best I could. I think they thought that was pretty funny, which is probably how it all came together.
Thurm: Quite a few people auditioned for Rizzo, but something unusual happened when Stockard Channing came into the room. Stockard could not have been more wrong as a person for Rizzo – she was well-born and wealthy and her manner of speech was totally different – but she mesmerised us in the audition and we knew it had to be her.
Didi Conn (Frenchy): My agents called and said the director and producers wanted me for the part of Frenchy. They had never sent me a script, so all I knew was that she was a beauty-school dropout and that they wanted me to come to the audition looking like the character. I ended up coming across a Frenchy’s beauty parlour in LA. I asked the lady to give me big hair like hers, since mine doesn’t do much. I don’t know how many cans of hairspray she used but she made it happen. Then I got tight pants and a little scarf. I walked into the audition room and everyone was just laughing and laughing at me!
Pearl: The part of auditions I remember best is how they lined up the guys and girls on each side of the room and our task was to try to woo a girl off the stage. I decided to play it drunk, so I came out with a Styrofoam cup and started to hug a girl, I put my arms around her and slipped my hand down to her bum but then she pushed it away, so I started caressing my bum as though it were hers. Everybody laughed and I’m pretty sure that’s what got me the part.
Thurm: People might say the cast is too old, but Grease is not a documentary; it’s a fantasy. It is a non-PC fairytale that is better for the cast not being teens. The only thing that was important was that the cast all looked about the same age as each other, which they did.
Tucci: When I got the movie, Allan walked me out of the audition room, gave me $100 and said: “Take your mother and father to Chase’s for dinner.” That was a very high-end restaurant back then. We went, sat down in the booth, and my mother looked across the room to see Dean Martin and Don Rickles having dinner together. She almost had a heart attack – she was very proud of where we had gotten to.
Filming began on the Paramount lot over 15 weeks in the summer of 1977.
Ward: It was like a summer-long party. They also cast 10 male performers and 10 female performers to be the foundation of the big musical sequences and they brought us all in for three weeks in advance of the start of principal photography to rehearse. That process made us all fast friends.
Pearl: There really wasn’t a rotten apple in the bunch. A lot of us knew each other from the stage shows and I was very close to Jeff Conaway [who played Kenickie], since we grew up together in New York. He was kind of a bad boy, he was my Zuko. We were like a big happy family.
Tucci: They were making five movies on the lot that summer. Henry Winkler was there and he had actually turned down a role in Grease for fear of being typecast after Happy Days. Next door they were doing The Exorcist II, Jack Nicholson was doing a movie, and Goldie Hawn. But everybody was sneaking on to our set to see what was going on in Grease. The big stars wanted to be here and to see Olivia especially.
Conn: I was a little starstruck by the whole thing, since Olivia had all these No 1 songs and specials on TV already. She was so humble though and we all really respected and loved each other. She was nervous just like the rest of us on the first day of shooting and she even said to tell her if there were any ways she could improve her acting. There were some other things going on too, I mean the Winnebagos that were our dressing rooms were rocking and rolling all night. But John and Olivia loved each other in a professional way.
Thurm: Allan got sick for quite a while with a stomach infection when we began filming, so he wasn’t on set. It fell to me to answer a lot of the producer questions that started to come up. He had wanted to shoot the carnival scene at Magic Mountain, for instance, which is this huge theme park outside LA, but we didn’t have the budget, so I made it a tacky little fair instead. That ended up working much better for the feel of the film. For the Sandra Dee reprise after the drag race, we didn’t have time to shoot her singing, so we just did it in voiceover. It was a vacuum that I had to fill.
Manoff: There are two ways of remembering it. The objective version is that it was a joyous, busy, uplifted set. John was sizzling hot at the time. They had guards keeping the fans away at the gates since he was like a rock star. The other way of remembering it is my experience as an actress doing her first film, and I was terrified. I was nervous, I was self-conscious and I thought I didn’t know what I was doing. I just kept putting one foot in front of the other and shaking my hips. It was pretty overwhelming.
Conn: Once we got our makeup on, I was Frenchy and we all called each other by our characters’ names. That really helped because I was 27 at the time, and there were a few others there who were older than that, so this gave us a licence to be goofy and crazy and horny. It was all the things that teenagers in the 50s would be.
Some of the actors who had been in the original stage productions were concerned about the new scripts that Carr and Woodard had produced. They decided to make changes.
Donnelly: The script was very different from the stage play, which was raunchier and a little more rough. Those of us who had been in the play were figuring out how we could put things back in again that had worked in the play, so it had the best of both worlds.
In the play, there was a joke where my boyfriend called me Bucky Beaver because my teeth stuck out. I wanted to add that in during the slumber party scene, so Randal got clips from the 50s Bucky Beaver commercial and I improvised that “brush-a brush-a” routine while it was playing on the TV.
As well as Travolta’s star power on set, a number of other cast members and crew also brought a formidable presence to their scenes.
Manoff: Stockard Channing knocked me out. I idolised her and she was really working on another level to the rest of us. When she sang Worse Things, she was just so deep and soulful with Rizzo. I followed her around like a puppy dog to learn whatever I could.
Conn: Frankie Avalon was a bit before my time, but when he came down those stairs and sang Beauty School Dropout to me, he was incredible. I’m drooling just talking about it now. I could have sat there all day being serenaded.
Thurm: Albert Wolsky’s costume designs were so good, he should get royalties just for the way he dressed Sandy at the end, when she turns “bad” – it was such a perfect moment and it was Olivia’s favourite in the film too. Albert had found those pants from a thrift store but they didn’t have a zipper, so she had to be sewn in and out every time she wanted to go to the bathroom. For those few days of filming, she just drank less water!
Donnelly: You had to love Olivia. She was just such a good person. She was very modest about acting because it was new to her. She was pretty much the sweetheart that you saw on screen and anything but a diva. John was so sexy and charismatic, whereas your heart went out to Olivia and you cared about her.
During filming, Travolta invited the cast to a screening of a new film he had shot but that was yet to be released: Saturday Night Fever.
Conn: John said to us: “I did this little movie in Brooklyn and I really don’t know if it’s any good. Would you guys come and take a look?” We all went over to a screening room, thinking it was going to be nothing. As soon as it was over, we turned to him and said: “John, it’s amazing. You’re gonna be a big movie star.” But he had no idea.
Manoff: He was so incredible in it and then I realised that we’re all now on this big career ride with him. Still, when I watch Grease and he does that star turn in front of Rydell at the beginning of the film, he was giving off something that’s really rare. So much talent and sex. When those two combine, it’s electric.
Donnelly: Saturday Night Fever ended up coming out before Grease did, and that’s what really catapulted him into stardom.
When Paramount released Grease in June 1978, it was a box office success, but the cast and critics had mixed responses.
Conn: When the cast saw the first screening, we loved the animation at the beginning because we had no idea they were going to add that, but a lot was also cut. We thought they sacrificed the heart of the story because they cut some really dramatic scenes between Kenickie and Rizzo. We were not happy when we walked out.
Manoff: I remember that the reviews were very mixed. There was a huge ad campaign that Alan Carr had set up where we went city to city, but the movie itself was being called too camp and criticised for not being like the play.
Ward: After the film came out I would go to auditions, and when I said I was in Grease, it would often suck the air out of the room.
Tucci: The film hurt me because it stereotyped me. The critics never appreciated it, but now it’s become iconic. It’s just good entertainment and it’s a great babysitting film because the kids don’t really know what’s going on.
Forty-five years on, the film stands as one of the highest-grossing movie musicals of the 20th century.
Manoff: It’s strange because Grease is a big studio film that has also become a cult favourite. Every Halloween, I have Pink Ladies show up at my house singing Summer Nights. I tell my sons that when they’re trying to get a girl, they should tell them your mother was Marty – that’ll work! Each generation loves it.
Ward: Everybody experiences the awkwardness and the insecurity of teenage years, and Grease captures it beautifully. When all of us from the film get together, the years melt away and it’s just like we were back on set. We formed bonds for life.
Conn: It came out before music videos and I think it’s so successful because it’s like a long music video. I’m always surprised at how many people love Frenchy – she has been so relatable over the years.
Thurm: I knew it was going to be a hit – there wasn’t a question in my mind. The critics didn’t matter, since they forgot that audiences go to movies to have fun. The timing was right as we were having a 50s revival with Happy Days on TV and the music put the album on the charts for a decade. I love going on YouTube now and watching flashmobs still performing songs from the film around the globe.
Donnelly: I truly believe that having the stage show as the roots of the film made it something that no one has been able to replicate. It might be light entertainment, but there is a depth there that gets directly to people’s hearts and makes them happy. It’s like the high-school experience of everybody’s dreams, and that means it’s always time for Grease. It was a magical collaboration that I don’t think could ever happen again.
• Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies is on Paramount+ from Friday
