“Fame” won, beating out Dolly Parton’s “ 9 To 5.” (“Fame” peaked at #4. Cara played the role of Coco Hernandez, and she also sang the film’s title song and “Out Here On My Own,” another track from the soundtrack.
#Flashdance soundtrack lyrics movie#
That 1980 movie tells the story of a group of driven theater kids at a New York performing-arts high school, and it remains beloved among theater kids decades later. Four years later, Cara played one of the leads in Fame. In 1976, when Cara was still a teenager, she played the lead role in Sparkle, a cult-favorite movie about a Supremes-style group. At 12, she was part of the cast of The Electric Company on PBS. At 10, she sang at a Duke Ellington tribute at Madison Square Garden. (The #1 single in America when Cara was born: Frankie Avalon’s “ Venus.”) Cara started out acting and singing young, and she was on the Broadway stage by the age of eight. Irene Cara Escalera was born in the Bronx, the daughter of a Puerto Rican factory worker and a Cuban-American movie-theater usher. Cara was ideally suited to both tasks, since she was both an actor and a dancer. On “Flashdance… What A Feeling,” Cara, who didn’t act in Flashdance, takes on the perspective of the Jennifer Beals character, and she sings about the freedom of surrendering her body to dance. But the people who sang those songs didn’t launch huge careers. That soundtrack album sold six million copies in the US, and it briefly knocked Thriller out of the #1 spot on the album charts after its 17 weeks on top. Similarly, the Flashdance soundtrack was a titanic success that didn’t exactly launch any stars. Michael Nouri, Beals’ love interest, was one of the leads of The Hidden, a low-budget 1987 sci-fi flick that I absolutely fucking love, and he had a few years as a recurring character on NCIS, but he didn’t really set the world on fire, either. Jennifer Beals is still working, and she still looks almost exactly the same way she did in 1983, but she’s had very few big roles since Flashdance. Weirdly, though, Flashdance didn’t really make stars out of its actual stars. (Let’s all pause for a second and enjoy thinking about the version of Flashdance that Cronenberg would’ve made.) Flashdance also made Lyne a star, and he spent the next few years essentially defining the erotic thriller, when that was still a category of movie that Hollywood made. The English director Adrian Lyne had only made commercials before Flashdance, and Bruckheimer and Simpson only offered him the job after David Cronenberg and Brian De Palma turned it down. Producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, teaming up for the first time, immediately became one of the most powerful teams in Hollywood, and they continued to dominate at the box office even after Simpson’s cocaine habit caused his death 13 years later. Flashdance had a budget of about $7 million, and it made more than $200 million worldwide - enough to make it the #3 movie of 1983, behind only Return Of The Jedi and Terms Of Endearment. Critics hated the film, but it did monster box office. You can draw a direct line from the look of Flashdance to the neon sheen of the Brat Pack movies and to the oiled-up muscularity of the Stallone/Schwarzenegger school of action flicks.įlashdance was huge.
In cribbing its techniques from the music-video world, Flashdance more or less invented the ’80s movie, or at least the non-Spielbergian variety of ’80s movie. Something like half the movie is montage, and the whole thing takes place in a beautiful, ecstatic otherworld.
The cinematic style of Flashdance is pure cocaine-dust-cloud MTV decadence: Clouds of dry ice wafting everywhere, big haircuts shown in backlit silhouette, editing cut to the beat of the pop songs on the soundtrack. That’s probably the best way to explain what happened with Flashdance.įlashdance is a pretty ridiculous movie - a retelling of the Rocky fairytale that subs out Sylvester Stallone’s down-on-his-luck mob-enforcer boxer for Jennifer Beals’ nervously striving steelworker and aspiring dancer. A year after that, the MTV influence had spread to cinema. A year later, the channel had already started to make a huge impact on the pop charts. MTV first went on the air in August of 1981. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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