Fred Astaire Quotes

After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.

Laughter is the sound of the soul dancing. My soul probably looks like Fred Astaire.

I was asked to act when I couldn't act. I was asked to sing 'Funny Face' when I couldn't sing, and dance with Fred Astaire when I couldn't dance - and do all kinds of things I wasn't prepared for. Then I tried like mad to cope with it.

Sure he was great, but don't forget that Ginger Rogers did everything [Fred Astaire] did, .. backwards and in high heels." From: Frank and Ernest by Bob Thaves, art by Bob Thaves.

Do it big, do it right and do it with style.

Because we are human, because we are bound by gravity and the limitations of our bodies, because we live in a world where the news is often bad and the prospects disturbing, there is a need for another world somewhere, a world where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers live.

The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.

...simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.... A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an "exhibitionist." How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, "Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!

Why didn't you tell me i was in love with you?

As a dancer, I out-Fred the nimblest Astaire.

The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it's considered to be your style.

Sure he (Fred Astaire) was great, but don't forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did,..backwards and in high heels.

And that love that wrinkles your nose touches my foolish heart.

She had died peacefully, in her sleep, after an evening of listening to all of her favorite Fred Astaire songs, one crackling record after another. Once the last chord of the last piece had died out, she had stood up and opened the French doors to the garden outside, perhaps waiting to breathe in the honeysuckle one more time.

Don't just walk through the flames. Get your Fred Astaire on and DANCE through them. Joy is around everywhere, even when the night falls hard.

I was obviously born to draw better than most people, just as the widow Berman and Paul Slazinger were obviously born to tell stories better than most people can. Other people are obviously born to sing and dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great leaders or athletes, and so on. I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives -- maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn't afraid of anything and so on. That's what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn't make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions. The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tapdances on the coffee table like Fred Astair or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an 'exhibitionist.' How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, 'Wow! Were you ever _drunk_ last night!

When a clumsy cloud from here, meets a fluffy little cloud from there, he billows towards her. She scurries away, and he scuds right up to her. She cries a little, and there you have your showers. He comforts her, they spark! That's the lightning. They kiss........Thunder.

When you have a Dancing partner, there's always gonna be a moment where the girl's gonna cry, Ginger didn't do that. But, most every other girl I've worked with have cried because they said "aah, I can't do it" and I have to go "Yes, you can, Shut up!" and they do do it.

Fred Astaire. Not a handsome man. He said himself he couldn’t sing. He was balding his whole life. He danced like a cheetah runs, with the grace of the first creation. I mean, that first week. On one of those days God created Fred Astaire. Saturday maybe, since that was the day for the pictures. When you saw Fred you felt better about everything. He was a cure. He was bottled in the films and all around the earth, from Castlebar to Cairo, he healed the halt and the blind. That’s the gospel truth. St Fred. Fred the Redeemer.

(reporter interviewing Broadway dancer Tommy Tune:) 'Do you think that greats like Fred Astaire possessed some kind of magic?' (pause) 'No. Magic possesses them'.

Sure, [Fred Astaire] was great, but don't forget that Ginger Rogers did everything that he did… backwards and in high heels.

...When the bespangled Miss Charisse wraps her phenomenal legs around [Fred] Astaire, she can be forgiven everything—even the fact that she reads her lines as if she learned them phonetically.

…Sam [Raimi] wanted the climactic sword fight to play out as elegantly as a Fred Astaire movie and he wanted it all in one crane shot. I must have rehearsed the routine for three weeks, but when it came time to shoot, the rigors of running up and down steps, fighting with both hands, and flipping skeletons over my head was too much to pull off without cuts. After ten takes, I knew Sam was pissed off, because he yanked the bullhorn from John Cameron. ‘Okay, obviously, this is NOT WORKING, and it’s NOT GOING TO WORK, so we’re going to break it up into A THOUSAND LITTLE PIECES.’ When Sam gets upset, he lets you know it, and he’ll torture you for days afterward because he’s one of those guys who never forgets. The first ‘little piece’ of the sequence was a shot of me ducking as a sword glances off the stone wall behind me. ‘So, you think you can do this, Bruce?’ he’d say, loud enough for the entire crew to hear. ‘Or should I break this ONE shot into THREE MORE SHOTS?’ Sam also threatened to put Ash in a chorus line with skeletons.

What counts more than luck is determination and perseverance. If the talent is there, it will come through. Don't be too impatient. Stick at it. That's my advice. You have to plug away, keep thinking up new ideas. If one doesn't work, try another.

They clapped palms and John dragged the other male off the snow with his good arm. Then they walked off into the night, side by side. It was almost, John reflected, as if they’d done this before— Murhder started to whistle a cheery little tune, and John had to do a double take. After a silent laugh, John joined in, finding a perfect harmony: “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” When Murhder started doing a hop’ita-skip’ita every third step, John Fred Astaire’d, too. Just two vampires, looking for the undead, ready to enjoy some good old-fashioned bloodshed. Besties.

If we followed our own advice, we'd be successful.

I guess the only jewels of my life were the pictures I made with Fred Astaire.

What was it they said about Ginger Rogers . . . ? She did everything Fred Astaire did only backward and in heels?

And remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. Only she did it backwards and in heels.

She'd always imagined an autumn wedding: russet leaves and black velvets and dancing to Fred Astaire.

My first picture was Kitty Foyle. It was my mother who made all those films with Fred Astaire.

Sometimes I take her food from the Iranian restaurant she and Ollie liked—the Sunny Acres kitchen staff is happy to warm it up—and sometimes I bring her a DVD or two. She likes the oldies, like with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. I always bring her something, and she’s always happy to see me. On her good days she does see me. On her bad ones, she’s apt to call me Olivia. Or Charlotte. That’s my aunt. I also have an uncle.

[on Fred Astaire] Astaire is the motherless man-about-town, all sophistication quite debonair, yet with a lope in his walk rather than a swagger, for -- despite his receding hair -- he is essentially boyish, youthful, innocent.

The surviving human beings there could do nothing but wait for the end to come. They chose different ways to live out their final days. That was the plot.** It was a dark movie offering no hope of salvation. (Though, watching it, Aomame reconfirmed her belief that everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.) ** On the Beach, the 1959 movie, director: Stanley Kramer, writer: John Paxton, starring: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire & Anthony Perkins. On the Beach, the 1957 novel, writer: Nevil Shute.

Peabody wandered off, scanning the entertainment units lining the wall, wondering what it would be like to be able to afford any amusement available: music, art, video, holograms, VR, meditation chambers, games. Play a set of tennis with the latest Wimbeldon champ, dance with a hologram of Fred Astaire,

It's Never Too Late for Rock'N'Roll It may be too late to learn ancient Greek Under a canopy of gnats It may be too late to sail to Mozambique With a psychotic cat It may be too late to find a cure Too late to save your soul It may be too late to lose the heat It may be too late to find your feet It may be too late to draw a map To the high desert of your heart It may be too late to lose the poor It’s never too late for rock’n’roll It may be too late to dance like Fred Astaire Or Michael Jackson come to that It may be too late to climb the stair And find the key under your mat It may be too late to think that you’re Never too late for rock’n’roll We have to believe a couple of good thieves can still seize the day We have to believe we can still clear the way We have to believe we’ve found some common ground We have to believe we have to believe We can lose those last twenty pounds

I haven’t said it yet, but it seemed implied, that cinema for me was the American one, current Hollywood productions. “My” period goes roughly from The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (Henry Hathaway, 1935) with Gary Cooper and Mutiny on the Bounty (Frank Lloyd, 1935) with Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, to the death of Jean Harlow (which I relived many years later like the death of Marilyn Monroe, in an era more aware of the neurotic power of every symbol), with lots of comedies in between, the mystery-romances with Myrna Loy and William Powell and the dog Asta, the musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the crime pictures of Chinese detective Charlie Chan and the horror films of Boris Karloff. I didn’t remember the names of the directors as well as the names of the actors, except for a few like Frank Capra, Gregory La Cava, and Frank Borzage, who represented the poor rather than the millionaires, usually with Spencer Tracy: they were the good-natured directors from the Roosevelt era; I learned this later; back then I consumed everything without distinguishing between them too much. American cinema in that moment consisted of a collection of actors’ faces without equal before or after (at least it seemed that way to me) and the adventures were simple mechanisms to get these faces together (sweethearts, character actors, extras) in different combinations.

The action of God’s grace precedes our consciousness of sin, so that we perceive the depth of our own participation in sin’s bondage simultaneously with the recognition of the unconditional love of Christ, which is perfect freedom. We recognize that love, moreover, not from the depths of the hell we were bent on creating for ourselves, but from the perspective of the heaven that God is preparing for us. In the victorious presence of the crucified and risen One, the whole company of the redeemed will throw off every bond and join in a celebration of mutual love and joy where no one will be a wallflower and everyone will be able to dance like Fred Astaire and Michael Jackson combined. Thus “Lord of the Dance” is truly an apt title for the risen Christ and for the kingdom of God: “The Great Dance . . . has begun from before always. . . . The dance which we dance is at the center and for the dance all things were made. Blessed be He!”10

Via Negativa Sometimes it's too hard with words or dark or silence. Tonight I want a prayer of high-rouged cheekbones and light: a litany of back-lit figures, lithe and slim, draped in fabrics soft and wrinkleless and pale as onion slivers. Figures that won't stumble or cough: sleek kid-gloved Astaires who'll lift ladies with glamorous sweeps in their hair— They'll bubble and glitter like champagne. They'll whisper and lean and waltz and wink effortlessly as figurines twirling in music boxes, as skaters in their dreams. And the prayer will not be crowded. You'll hear each click of staccato heel echo through the glassy ballrooms—too few shimmering skirts; the prayer will seem to ache for more. But the prayer will not ache. When we enter, its chandeliers and skies will blush with pleasure. Inside we will be weightless, and our goodness will not matter in a prayer so light, so empty it will float.

The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an exhibitionist.             How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!

You didn’t waltz into my life like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing on air. Quite the contrary, you made a crash landing in the center of my heart, blazing guns and glory.

But she never distanced herself from others, and she was enormously friendly to everyone—no stuffy attitude, no star complex. As for her talents, Grace acted the way Johnny Weissmuller swam or Fred Astaire danced—she made it look easy. And she probably went through life being completely misunderstood, since she usually said exactly what she meant.

It was no accident that Mickey arrived with sound and music because music became the metaphor for his inner muse and the sine qua non of his existence. In his early cartoons, some of which are musical revues, he is wholly a musical creature—as much Fred Astaire as Charlie Chaplin. Hearing notes, Mickey cannot help but dance, sing, and make music himself, turning everything he spots into an instrument and converting reality into happiness. Even his relationship with Minnie Mouse is musically inspired; they literally make beautiful music together and bring joy and harmony, even fluidity, out of what is often threat and chaos. And this is also why the cartoons typically end with Mickey beaming or laughing, a chipper spirit, no matter what has befallen him. For all the subliminal attractions of his shape or his size or his sexuality, Mickey’s secret, the appeal of which is obvious and not limited to Depression America, is that he can always make things right in his head—just as Walt Disney, the escape artist, could. In the end Mickey Mouse was the eternal promise of cheerful solipsism.

In Singin’ in the Rain, Lina Lamont provides both an effective “beard” for Don and Cosmo and a foil, representing both the reason for Don’s “unattached” state and the basis for their mutual contempt for women. Yet the signs are all there to be read for those interested in reading them: Cosmo and Don performing as a burlesque team, in which they sit on each other’s laps and play each other’s violins; Cosmo’s comment to Lina after the premiere of The Royal Rascal, “Yeah, Lina, you looked pretty good for a girl”;30 and their bullying, in “Moses Supposes,” of the fogyish diction coach, figuratively drawn out of his closet only to be ridiculed as an asexual “pansy” who can’t sing and dance (thus both confirming and denying homosexuality at the same time).31 On a broader scale, Kelly’s career as a dancer, offering a more masculinized style of athletic dance (in opposition especially to the stylized grace of Fred Astaire), represented a similar balancing act between, in this case, the feminized occupation of balletic dance and a strong claim of heterosexual masculinity. Significantly, the process of exclusion they use with the diction coach is precisely what Cosmo proposes they apply to Lina in converting The Dueling Cavalier into a musical: “It’s easy to work the numbers. All you have to do is dance around Lina and teach her how to take a bow.” But they also apply the strategy to Kathy, who is only just learning to “dance” in this sense (conveniently so, since Debbie Reynolds had had but little dance training, as noted).32 Early on, we see her dance competently in “All I Do Is Dream of You,” but she then seems extremely tentative in “You Were Meant for Me,” immobile for much of the number, not joining in the singing, and dancing only as Don draws her in (which is, of course, consistent with her character’s development at this point). With “Good Mornin’,” though, she seems to “arrive” as part of the Don-Cosmo team, even though for part of the number she serves as a kind of mannequin—much like the voice teacher in “Moses Supposes,” except that she sings the song proper while Don and Cosmo “improvise” tongue-twisting elaborations between the lines. As the number evolves, their emerging positions within the group become clear. Thus, during their solo clownish dance bits, using their raincoats as props, Kathy and Don present themselves as fetishized love objects, Kathy as an “Island girl” and Don as a matador, while Cosmo dances with a “dummy,” recalling his earlier solo turn in “Make ’em Laugh.

In unusual fashion, Astaire and Rogers are watched by an active (standing, dancing) rather than passive (seated, watching) audience. In the context of the Big Apple, an energetic group dance at its height in 1938, Astaire and Rogers’s combinations can be understood as examples of shining, when one couple steps forward to do a fancy step or combination while others watch, ready to join in at any time.

Seen in context by audiences familiar with the couple’s earlier films, “The Yam” would have been altogether surprising, and either thrilling or disappointing. In their prior dances in any public context, Astaire and Rogers had normally cleared the floor. By contrast, early on in “The Yam” they invite everyone, good and bad dancers alike, to join them. The action of “The Yam” travels from room to room and even outside, with the crowd of dancers following enthusiastically.

The theme of music making the dancer dance turns up everywhere in Astaire’s work. It is his most fundamental creative impulse. Following this theme also helps connect Astaire to trends in popular music and jazz, highlighting his desire to meet the changing tastes of his audience. His comic partner dance with Marjorie Reynolds to the Irving Berlin song “I Can’t Tell a Lie” in Holiday Inn (1942) provides a revealing example. Performed in eighteenth-century costumes and wigs for a Washington’s birthday–themed floor show, the dance is built around abrupt musical shifts between the light classical sound of flute, strings, and harpsichord and four contrasting popular music styles played on the soundtrack by Bob Crosby and His Orchestra, a popular dance band. Moderate swing, a bluesy trumpet shuffle, hot flag-waving swing, and the Conga take turns interrupting what would have been a graceful, if effete, gavotte. The script supervisor heard these contrasts on the set during filming to playback. In her notes, she used commonplace musical terms to describe the action: “going through routine to La Conga music, then music changing back and forth from minuet to jazz—cutting as he holds her hand and she whirls doing minuet.”13 Astaire and Reynolds play professional dancers who are expected to respond correctly and instantaneously to the musical cues being given by the band. In an era when variety was a hallmark of popular music, different dance rhythms and tempos cued different dances. Competency on the dance floor meant a working knowledge of different dance styles and the ability to match these moves to the shifting musical program of the bands that played in ballrooms large and small. The constant stylistic shifts in “I Can’t Tell a Lie” are all to the popular music point. The joke isn’t only that the classical-sounding music that matches the couple’s costumes keeps being interrupted by pop sounds; it’s that the interruptions reference real varieties of popular music heard everywhere outside the movie theaters where Holiday Inn first played to capacity audiences. The routine runs through a veritable catalog of popular dance music circa 1942. The brief bit of Conga was a particularly poignant joke at the time. A huge hit in the late 1930s, the Conga during the war became an invitation to controlled mayhem, a crazy release of energy in a time of crisis when the dance floor was an important place of escape. A regular feature at servicemen’s canteens, the Conga was an old novelty dance everybody knew, so its intrusion into “I Can’t Tell a Lie” can perhaps be imagined as something like hearing the mid-1990s hit “Macarena” after the 2001 terrorist attacks—old party music echoing from a less complicated time.14 If today we miss these finer points, in 1942 audiences—who flocked to this movie—certainly got them all. “I Can’t Tell a Lie” was funnier then, and for specifically musical reasons that had everything to do with the larger world of popular music and dance. As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, many such musical jokes or references can be recovered by listening to Astaire’s films in the context of the popular music marketplace.

Ginger Rogers said regarding her dancing partnership with Fred Astaire, “Just remember that everything Fred did, I did backwards, and in high heels.

Anyway, I wanted to tell you this story, since it just rolled into my gourd while I was into that 1950 Lighthouse shot. I never told you about the Legend of the Gigantic Fart, did I?” “Put the beer in a paper bag. Let’s get it on the road.” “No, man, this story became a legend and is still told in the high schools around the county. You see, it was at the junior prom, a very big deal with hoop dresses and everybody drinking sloe gin and R.C. Cola outside in the cars. Now, this is strictly a class occasion if you live in a shitkicker town. Anyway, we’d been slopping down the beer all afternoon and eating pinto-bean salad and these greasy fried fish before we got to the dance. So it was the third number, and I took Betty Hoggenback out on the floor and was doing wonderful, tilting her back like Fred Astaire doing Ginger Rogers. Then I felt this wet fart start to grow inside me. It was like a brown rat trying to get outside. I tried to leak it off one shot at a time and keep dancing away from it, but I must have left a cloud behind that would take the varnish off the gym floor. Then one guy says, ‘Man, I don’t believe it!’ People were walking off the floor, holding their noses and saying, ‘Pew, who cut it?’ Then the saxophone player on the bandstand threw up into the piano. Later, guys were shaking my hand and buying me drinks, and a guy on the varsity came up and said that was the greatest fart he’d ever seen. It destroyed the whole prom. The saxophone player had urp all over his summer tux, and they must have had to burn the smell out of that piano with a blowtorch.” Buddy was laughing so hard at his own story that tears ran down his cheeks. He caught his breath, drank out of the beer glass, then started laughing again. The woman behind the bar was looking at him as though a lunatic had just walked into the normalcy of her life.

I was asked to act when I couldn't act. I was asked to sing 'Funny Face' when I couldn't sing, and dance with Fred Astaire when I couldn't dance - and do all sorts of things I wasn't prepared for. Then I tried like mad to cope with it." - Audrey Hepburn

There is a book to be written, for instance, on small errors in subtitles. In the Fred Astaire musical Royal Wedding, for instance, the English girl he falls for, played by Sarah Churchill (daughter of Sir Winston), is engaged to an American, whom we never see but who’s called Hal—like Falstaff’s prince, like a good high Englishman. That English H, though, was completely inaudible to the French translator who did the subtitles, and so throughout the film the absent lover is referred to in the subtitles as Al—Al like a stagehand, Al like my grandfather. If you have the habit of print addiction, so that you are listening and reading at the same time, this guy Al keeps forcing his way into the movie. “But what shall I say to Hal—that I have never loved him?” Patricia says to Fred. Down below it says, “Et Al—qu’est-ce que je vais lui dire?

The band changed its name for every show—at various times they were called: Ashtray Babyheads, Nine Inch Worm Makes Own Food, Vodka Family Winstons, and the Inalienable Right to Eat Fred Astaire’s Asshole—until one fateful night. “We had a song called ‘Butthole Surfers,’ ” says Leary, “and the guy who was introducing us that night forgot what we were called and so he just called us the Butthole Surfers.” Since that was their first paying show, they decided to let the name stick. At the time—and for years afterward—one could barely utter the band’s name in public, and their name was often abbreviated in advertisements as “B.H. Surfers.

We have heard the stories: Duke Ellington would say, “I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.” 5 Tennessee Williams felt that “apparent failure” motivated him. He said it “sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.” Many have heard that Thomas Edison told his assistant, incredulous at the inventor’s perseverance through jillions of aborted attempts to create an incandescent light bulb, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” 6 “Only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one. Many thanks . . .” read part of the rejection letter that Gertrude Stein received from a publisher in 1912.7 Sorting through dross, artists, entrepreneurs, and innovators have learned to transform askew strivings. The telegraph, the device that underlies the communications revolution, was invented by a painter, Samuel F. B. Morse, who turned the stretcher bars from what he felt was a failed picture into the first telegraph device. The 1930s RKO screen-test response “Can’t sing. Can’t act. Balding. Can dance a little” was in reference to Fred Astaire. We hear more stories from commencement speakers—from J. K. Rowling to Steve Jobs to Oprah Winfrey—who move past bromides to tell the audience of the uncommon means through which they came to live to the heights of their capacity. Yet the anecdotes of advantages gleaned from moments of potential failure are often considered cliché or insights applicable to some, not lived out by all.

Like Ginger Rogers dancing with Fred Astaire: he got all the credit, but Ms. Rogers was dancing the same steps backward and in high heels.

Be like Fred Astaire.” “Romance Ginger Rogers?” I holler, confused. Jackie pokes her head back into the dining room and raps her knuckles gently on the doorway. “Don’t let the hard work show.

Still, Frederic Allen and his partners recognized that the markets were changing. Given its Boston roots, Lee Higginson lacked the national networks of Morgan or National City, a leading commercial bank. The firm needed someone to establish stronger connections, first with new companies whose securities would appeal to investors, and then throughout the United States with the investors themselves. Every American already knew Jack Morgan. They were getting to know National City’s chairman, Charles Mitchell, a former electrical goods salesman, who had been encouraging his brokers with sales contests, high commissions, and motivational speeches. Lee Higginson needed someone to join this fray, and to introduce the firm’s name and the companies it discovered to the public. It wouldn’t hurt if this man resembled Fred Astaire

Peter, leaving the library with a light step, and skipping down the stairs like an elderly Fred Astaire.

Warren Buffett didn’t take his rejection by Harvard Business School to heart because, as he says, ‘I always knew I was going to be rich. I don’t think I ever doubted it for a minute.’ Don’t assume that other people are right about you and you are wrong; only you know what you’re truly capable of. Luckily Fred Astaire had already learned to think positively and ignore the negative when he received this famously unfavourable review of a screen test, ‘Can’t sing. Can’t act. Balding. Can dance a little.

Astaire had been told by the studio brass that he could have all the time he needed, so he planned for six weeks of rehearsal on the more difficult numbers (“Night and Day” and “The Table Dance”) that he imported from the stage production. Even though Astaire had played the role of Guy Holden, the man mistaken for Mimi’s (Ginger Rogers) divorce correspondent, on Broadway and in London, he was too much of a perfectionist to assume that he could reprise the dances on film without sufficient rehearsal. In addition, the Cole Porter score that he had sung in the theatre was, with the exception of “Night and Day,” completely scrapped and replaced with songs by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel, and Con Conrad and Herb Magidson (after Porter refused producer Pandro Berman’s request to write new ones). Astaire wanted, and was given, the time to master the new material.

In fact, there were no movie stars in view, though Finian himself was a talent star, one of the last of the Golden Age, Fred Astaire. He hadn’t filmed a musical since Silk Stockings, in 1957, but it was a frustrating return, for Astaire felt Coppola had no feeling for the form. And Coppola didn’t—not the form of musical Astaire was used to making. For instance, some of the show’s many dance sequences became choreography by other means—a festive picnic with a tug-of-war and other contests for “If This Isn’t Love.” Then, too, Astaire was working with his old RKO assistant, Hermes Pan, who was suddenly fired from the picture, offending Astaire’s deep-rooted sense of loyalty—to his profession, to the great songwriters who had made songs on him, and to his colleagues. Still, the movie flows along nicely with a likable confidence, not easy to bring off when the plot takes in a pot of gold that grants wishes.

He’s about as interested in your intellect as I am.

The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an “exhibitionist.” How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, “Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!” •

To go from Obama to the crudest kind of parvenu, bragging about his wealth and IQ, with gold-plated everything, was too much. It would be like having Fred Astaire as your president and then getting Rodney Dangerfield.

The next week, Finian’s Rainbow began a twelve-week filming schedule. Jerry Jackson recalled that when Coppola was unhappy with Pan’s choreography he would ask him (Jackson) to change it rather than approach Pan directly—so poor was the working relationship between director and choreographer. Michael Goodwin and Naomi Wise suggest that the tension between them may have had less to do with Pan’s work and more to do with the challenge he presented to Coppola’s authority: “Coppola described Pan as ‘a disaster.’ That probably means that Pan disagreed with him or insisted that the camera serve the choreography, not vice versa, or asked for more rehearsal time for the numbers” (Goodwin 1989, 79). After the filming of “That Great Come-and-Get-It Day” in which Pan makes his final on-screen appearance shining shoes in a barbershop vignette, his twenty-week guarantee was up and he was released from the film. Since Jackson refused to stay on after Pan left, a young choreographer named Claude Thompson was hired to stage the remaining numbers. Even before Pan had been released, his work was subverted by Coppola who continually interrupted the choreography with cutaway shots of vignettes that were neither entertaining nor dramatically effective. The director had no choreographic training or experience and staged musical numbers based on concepts that often had no relationship to the sound of the music or the sense of the lyrics. For example, he filmed “Something Sort of Grandish” on a hill with Petula Clark hanging white bed sheets on a clothesline and conceptualized “If This Isn’t

The next week, Finian’s Rainbow began a twelve-week filming schedule. Jerry Jackson recalled that when Coppola was unhappy with Pan’s choreography he would ask him (Jackson) to change it rather than approach Pan directly—so poor was the working relationship between director and choreographer. Michael Goodwin and Naomi Wise suggest that the tension between them may have had less to do with Pan’s work and more to do with the challenge he presented to Coppola’s authority: “Coppola described Pan as ‘a disaster.’ That probably means that Pan disagreed with him or insisted that the camera serve the choreography, not vice versa, or asked for more rehearsal time for the numbers” (Goodwin 1989, 79). After the filming of “That Great Come-and-Get-It Day” in which Pan makes his final on-screen appearance shining shoes in a barbershop vignette, his twenty-week guarantee was up and he was released from the film. Since Jackson refused to stay on after Pan left, a young choreographer named Claude Thompson was hired to stage the remaining numbers. Even before Pan had been released, his work was subverted by Coppola who continually interrupted the choreography with cutaway shots of vignettes that were neither entertaining nor dramatically effective. The director had no choreographic training or experience and staged musical numbers based on concepts that often had no relationship to the sound of the music or the sense of the lyrics. For example, he filmed “Something Sort of Grandish” on a hill with Petula Clark hanging white bed sheets on a clothesline and conceptualized “If This Isn’t Love” as a series of children’s games. The director’s method of staging was little more than playing the music for a dance routine and telling the actors to “move with

Sidney provides the commentary on the DVD, and he tells us that he wanted “a train song.” Warren and Mercer gave him much more than that, for “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” is really an “entire town song.” It starts in the saloon—an important location, as it will be at war with the restaurant the Harvey girls wait table in—then moves to the train’s passengers, engineers, and conductor as it pulls in and the locals look everyone over, especially the newly mustered Harveys themselves. Warren’s music has imitated the train’s chugging locomotion, but now comes a trio section not by Warren and Mercer (at “Hey there, did you ever see such pearly femininity … ”), and the girls give us some individual backstories—one claims to have been the Lillian Russell of a small town in Kansas, and principals Ray Bolger and Virginia O’Brien each get a solo, too. The number is not only thus detailed as a composition but gets the ultimate MGM treatment on a gigantic set with intricate interaction among the many soloists, choristers, and extras. But now it’s Garland’s turn to enter the number, disembark, and mix in with the crowd. According to Sidney, Garland executed everything perfectly on the first try—and it was all done in virtually a single shot. Fred Astaire would have insisted on rehearsing it for a week, but Garland was a natural. Once she understood the spirit of a number, the physics of it simply fell into place for her. In any other film of the era, the saloon would be the place where the music was made. And Angela Lansbury, queen of the plot’s rowdy element, does have a floor number, dressed in malevolent black and shocking pink topped by a matching Hippodrome hat. But every other number is a story number—“The Train Must Be Fed” (as the Harveys learn the art of waitressing); “It’s a Great Big World” for anxious Harveys Garland, O’Brien, and a dubbed Cyd Charisse; O’Brien’s comic lament, “The Wild, Wild West,” a forging song at Ray Bolger’s blacksmith shop; “Swing Your Partner Round and Round” at a social. Marjorie Main cues it up, telling one and all that this new dance is “all the rage way

In Funny Face, all it takes for the lovely Audrey Hepburn, a mousy intellectual in a Greenwich Village bookshop, to question her high-minded celibacy (“My philosophic search / Has left me in the lurch”) is a peck on the cheek from a character played by Fred Astaire. Not Cary Grant or Gary Cooper: Fred Astaire. Well, he has as much right to play a chick magnet as she has to play an existentialist, but when she falls for him she hasn’t even seen him dance; she’s only seen him trash her bookstore.

I have worked like a dog all my life, honey. Dancing, as Fred Astaire said, is next to ditch-digging. You sweat and you slave and the audience doesn’t think you have a brain in your head.

A person who refuses to give up will always succeed, eventually. Henry Ford failed and went broke five times before he succeeded. NBA superstar Michael Jordan was once cut from his high school basketball team. After his first audition, screen legend Fred Astaire received the following assessment from an MGM executive: “Can’t act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.

The first thing that impressed itself on me as I gave him the once-over was his air of respectability. I had always supposed that poachers were tough-looking eggs who wore whatever they could borrow from the nearest scarecrow and shaved only once a week. He, to the contrary, was neatly clad in formfitting tweeds and was shaven to the bone. His eyes were frank and blue, his hair a becoming grey. I have seen more raffish Cabinet ministers. He looked like someone who might have sung in the sainted Briscoe's church choir, as I was informed later he did, being the possessor of a musical tenor voice which came in handy for the anthem and when they were doing those 'miserable sinner' bits in the Litany. He was about the height and tonnage of Fred Astaire, and he had the lissomness which is such an asset in his chosen profession. One could readily imagine him flitting silently through the undergrowth with a couple of rabbits in his grasp, always two jumps ahead of the gamekeepers who were trying to locate him. The old ancestor had compared him to the Scarlet Pimpernel, and a glance was enough to tell me that the tribute was well deserved. I thought how wise Jeeves had been in suggesting that I entrust to him the delicate mission which I had in mind. When it comes to returning cats that have been snitched from their lawful homes, you need a specialist. Where Lloyd George or Winston Churchill would have failed, this Graham, I knew would succeed.

drives those songs. “My dad never had [a record player], but he used to play on the piano, so that’s how I heard them all,” Paul said of the pop songs of the 1920s through 1940s. “I was a big fan of Fred Astaire. Still am. I just like that style: the wit in the old black and white movies, the little underdog who’s really very sophisticated. The sophisticated underdog is a character I’ve always been very drawn to. I think in some ways it’s because I’ve grown up in a working-class environment where there were some very clever people, but you wouldn’t have known it to look at them. So this whole idea of the hidden talent in people I’ve always found very attractive.

With ‘You Gave Me the Answer,’ mixed on March 21, the challenge was to evoke the spirit of Funny Face, the Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn film that inspired the song, without surrendering the benefits of modern sound techniques. They started with the piano introduction, using the fact that the keyboard had been recorded using three microphones, spread across three tracks of the master (labeled ‘left piano,’ ‘right piano,’ and ‘middle piano’) to create an echo effect that suggested a pianist playing in a large, empty hall. The echo evaporated as Paul’s piano intro kicked into the faster tempo that leads into the song. From there, it was a matter of finding the right balance between the winds, strings, and basic track—plus making Paul’s voice sound like that of a vaudeville crooner, something O’Duffy accomplished using a Pultec equalizer that thinned out the high and low frequencies. “That was designed [to sound like it was] recorded through a vaudeville microphone,” O’Duffy explained. “You’re making a great singer’s voice sound thinner and squeakier—removing the warmth of the man’s humanity. You’re screwing it up, essentially. But it’s screwed up to give you an effect reminiscent of vaudeville.”28