Text by Blake Davis. Photos by Claire Buffie.
Alan Parker’s 1980 film Fame was about a group of motley inner-city kids attending New York’s prestigious High School for the Performing Arts, located only blocks away from the city’s most glitzy and seedy area of town – Times Square. Talented and underprivileged kids fought for a spot in the school, as hopeful singers, dancers, actors, and musicians. The film was a hit, and was nominated for six Academy Awards, and to this day maintains its popularity.
Fame is a gritty, R-rated piece of work that portrayed kids as they really were. It’s also a musical that had the sloppiness and joy of dancers and singers who looked real, moved in ways that were not pretty or in unison, and had music that was belted with a heart not seen in modern movies (that rely so heavily on studio-produced voices). But beyond that, what made the film so poignant was how it portrayed the characters’ struggles to follow their dreams, find their place, and express themselves as they came of age.
Over the years, Fame became a popular ‘80s TV series starring Debbie Allen (from the original cast), a short-lived Off-Broadway musical, and, it should come as no surprise, a reality competition show also produced by Allen. Now Fame is getting yet another reboot – this time as a movie. This version has all new characters and is set in the present, taking none of the plot lines from the earlier film. The only connective tissue to its previous versions is Allen as the school’s Principal. The rest of the faculty is filled out by a group of solid character actors like Megan Mullally, Bebe Neuwirth, Kelsey Grammer, and Charles S. Dutton – all familiar faces that blend easily into an ensemble of no-name up-andcoming actors and actresses all hoping to break out in the same ways their characters do. Leading the pack is 21-yearold Asher Book, a young singer and actor who attended the real Fame high school in New York City, where he found himself again, shooting scenes for the movie. In the film, he plays Marco, a kid from Brooklyn who has always worked and sung in his family’s Italian restaurant, who hopes to get into New York’s Performing Arts High School as a way of escaping the family business and following his dreams of becoming a singer and musician. “He’s this all-American kind of guy who goes to an audition at the Fame school and who over the course of the film realizes there’s really a lot of hard work behind these dreams,” says Book. “It’s the kind of struggle that any artist goes through to chase their passion, whether [they] are a singer, actor, or dancer.”
“Fame has always been a story about characters,” he adds. “That’s why it has stayed so popular. It’s not High School Musical where everyone is walking down the halls singing and dancing. It’s just about young people.”
And that’s something that differentiates Fame from other dance movies and musicals that have been popular since. Movies like Flashdance, Footloose, and Dirty Dancing all achieved similar financial success, but looking back at them, they couldn’t be sillier. (Did anyone buy Jennifer Beals as a welder?!) None of these movies hit the dramatic or pure filmmaking highs of Fame, but they capitalized on the ideas of young people yearning for a voice and a place in their worlds. And they remain popular because of that, while better dance and performance films like Bob Fosse’s Cabaret and All That Jazz, Blake Edwards’s Victor Victoria, and Herbert Ross’s Pennies From Heaven don’t have the same rabid fan base. Those movies existed in a world of adults trying to hold onto their dreams through backstage dramas and affairs, while Fame was about the beginnings of those dreams - and that’s why it still connects.
The recent onslaught of dance movies like Save the Last Dance, Step Up, Stomp the Yard, or You Got Served are certainly popular, but have plots that are simply an excuse to showcase the dancing. “The characters and ideas are secondary, if not altogether irrelevant,” says Book. “You go see Step Up because you want to see cool dance moves.” These films are also commonly victims of over editing, with dance and musical performance sequences that are shot with ten or more cameras and then made sense of and reconstructed in the editing room. Movies like Moulin Rouge! and Chicago are amazing visual spectacles, but there is rarely a line in a song or a dance move that isn’t interrupted with a cut, and then another. The remake’s 24-year-old firsttime director, Kevin Tancharoen, a veteran of MTV’s Dance Life and TwentyFourSeven, as well as Britney Spears’s Onyx Hotel Tour, shot the new film in the style that Bob Fosse used to, with meticulous rehearsals and very few cameras. “We would do dance numbers and they would get them in one take. It was pretty amazing,” says Book. “It helps that [Kevin] is one of us. This is his first big thing, and it’s cool to be able to share it all together. It was a very collaborative experience, and we all have so much respect for him.” At age six, Book became fascinated with the idea of performing when he saw his older sister dance at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. The Virginia native was told about an open call there for the national tour of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, and, on a fluke, he went. “I showed up in jean shorts and with two missing teeth and I ended up getting the role of Chip, the little teacup. I guess I was meant to be a performer,” he says, laughing. “I spent three years doing it. To this day, I’m still the longest running Chip.” He spent most of his childhood on the road doing different tours, including The Sound of Music with Richard Chamberlain, Oliver!, and The Prince and the Pauper. His father’s business was based in Virginia, so his dad stayed at home, while his mother went on tour with Book. Both of his siblings were in college, further stretching the family to different corners of the country. When not on tour, he was based out of New York City. “My mom didn’t want me to go to a public school in New York City, and since I was already in theater I ended up going to the Fame high school my freshman year,” says Book. “It was an amazing experience, but at that point I was getting tired of it all. When you are on the road and around all of these adults at such a young age, you grow up faster. Things in your life get sort of reversed. I wanted to stop all of the traveling and just be a regular kid - I wanted to play football!”
The family finally reunited and relocated to California, where Book finished school and found himself gravitating more and more towards singing and music. Through his vocal coach, he was recommended to a producer at Warner Bros. Records to fill a spot in a newly created boy band called V Factory. With close connections to High School Musical’s Ashley Tisdale, the band’s first single “Love Struck” was picked up by Radio Disney, a coveted place to be in the music world since the launch of artists like Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers. A little weary of being labeled an upand-coming ‘tween act, he says the group has a lot more edge to their work and songwriting, since each member comes from very diverse backgrounds. He’s as much of a fan of Stevie Wonder as he is of Justin Timberlake.
It was probably that same edge (and maybe a little help from his famous Alma Mater) that caused him to stick out from the crowd when he got the call from his agent to do Fame. Now he has come full circle since high school, returning to those same hallways, but he’s not all that different, he says. “This movie is not about stars, it’s about people who could be you or me, who are making choices about what they want to do with their lives. They are still trying to figure it out, and I’m still trying to figure it out on most days, too.”
After wrapping Fame, Book was back in L.A. promoting the release of V Factory’s first record and music video. Whether he will break out and become another Zac Efron remains to be seen. Right now he seems optimistic and wants to keep his feet planted firmly in the moment. “Fame doesn’t always work out the way people expect it to. There’s so much work that goes into making a dream come true,” says Book. “It really helps if you love what you are doing, and you just have to enjoy it for what it is.”
