At School with Grease 2 and Michelle Pfeiffer
 This is a good chance to get back, for a couple of hours, to the times (happy for everyone, I suppose) of high school. Times of wild runs through corridors at 13:30, hungry, thirsty for freedom after five hours of unequivocal "seclusion". Wish to fool around, having fun to the sound of deafening, beloved and reassuring motorcycle's "roars".
That's what entered Paramount's cameras during four months, the time it took to shoot Grease 2. It happened in Norwalk, California in front of the old Excelsior building renamed Rydell High for the occasion. The film, set in 1961, takes place two years after the graduation of the famous Grease gang.
Precisely in a former school closed because there weren't enough students and money for maintenance. Paramount took care of setting the building up: fix the plumbing and wax the floors… for the entry of an exceptional crew. Producer Allan Carr took shelter into the office of principal's assistant. Eve Arden, as Mc Gee the principal, is in her office with her secretary Dody Goodman. Tab Hunter gives lessons in the biology lab, Connie Stevens teaches English in another classroom and Sid Caesar, as Calhoun the coach, is outside in the gymnasium. "Working with these old lions is fantastic – Adrian (Zmed as Johnny Nogerelli) says - we became a family, it's like we've always known each other." Everybody loves him, including Michelle Pfeiffer who plays the role of Stephanie, the "hottest" Pink lady, who has a flirtation with the T-Birds leader Johnny Nogerelli and a growing dissatisfaction which will bring her to impose her personality. Indeed she looks for a new love, "a devil in skin tight leather, a man growin' out of the seat"
Which is exactly what Maxwell Caulfield as Michael Carrington, the new guy from England, decides to become in order to seduce her.
All the four leading actors are at their first experience in a big movie like this. Michelle had acted in movies like "The Hollywood Knights", "Falling in love again" and "Charlie Chan and the curse of the Dragon Queen". She had been seen also in two TV series "Delta House" and "B.A.D. Cats" and in TV movies like "Callie and Son", "The Solitary man", "Splendor in the Grass" and "The Children nobody wanted". We will remember of Michelle's changing blue eyes, sometimes innocently angelical, sometimes full of a more mature seduction. And just think four years ago she was a box girl in a supermarket in the Orange county, just near to Los Angeles, "but miles away!". Namely in a very conservative environment.
So conservative that her father freaked out when she mentioned she would like to become an actress.
After High School, she decided to work for a year and then to go to a court-reporting school. She graduated from Fountain Valley High in three years instead of four. "I build my life like I had a chronometer in my hand and then one day, in a moment of break, I asked myself what I really wanted to do with my life. The answer was acting, but I had no idea where to go to do it. I looked up in the directory… then I went to model's agent Robert Powers, I borrowed a dress from a friend of mine who really knows how to dress and I explained to Powers' staff I didn't have the money neither for their courses nor for a photographic book, but I knew I needed photographs. What could I do?
A photographer called Nick Lombardi took some shots and with them I got my agent. Next year I worked at Von's and I attended acting classes at the same time."
Michelle started singing and then she got her first dancing audition, this time she panicked: there were 1500 people that day and most of them were professionals. There were also actors, all the aspiring Stephanies were dancing together, as well as the aspiring Paulettes. Michelle was about to drop everything when Pat Birch's assistant stopped her. " I'm really glad I didn't leave that day - she will say during the shooting - it's been the most exciting experience of my life!" Four days after the last audition for the film she marries Peter Horton. As soon as they're back from honeymoon the production starts… "With much fear…" Michelle will say after. |
