On Location with: FAME

In the 1970s and 1980s companies stopped making just short trailers for movies. To bring in irregular film goers and to puff up the importance of likely blockbusters, they made one-reel pictures about the pictures, basically "Making of" features. For MGM the umbrella title was 'On Location with' and this one is about FAME, the Alan Parker musical drama that, along with Saturday NIGHT FEVER, briefly redefined and revived the movie musical.

It didn't take, of course and the whole thing collapsed with Steven Bochco's disastrous TV series COP ROCK. Today in 2012 the corpse occasionally twitches and we get a film version of a Broadway stage musical, usually with the stage choreography annoyingly unchanged for the movie screen. That's the subtext of this short subject: it's not about the aspiration of making a musical about kids who desire to be performers. It's about giving them and the audience musicals. One should applaud the effort if not the result.