1983 [all the right moves]

juliezhou · Guru

1983 [all the right moves]

juliezhou · Guru

Tom Cruise insisted on doing all his own stunts. During shooting he was sent to hospital with concussion!

Tom was drawn to the project because of director Mike Chapman, who was cinematographer on Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull", a film he'd seen at least 10 times. Mike didn't enjoy directing and the actors, particularly Lea Thompson, grumbled at his lack of direction sometimes. After this he went back to being a cinematographer.

Tom's fee was reportedly already topping $1 million even at this time! This was his first picture after "Risky Business".

Scorsese, after seeing All The Right Moves, directed by his friend and "Raging Bull" Cinematographer Mike Chapman, wanted Tom Cruise for "Color Of Money".

juliezhou · Guru

Westmont will re-enact game from 'All the Right Moves'

Mike Mastovich

mmastovich@tribdem.com Sep 12, 2012

One of the region’s most storied football rivalries will be renewed Friday night at Trojan Stadium.

Ampipe vs. Walnut Heights.

It’s been nearly 30 years since 20th Century Fox filmed the Tom Cruise motion picture “All the Right Moves” in Johnstown. To commemorate the milestone, Johnstown High and Westmont Hilltop will take on the roles of Ampipe and Walnut Heights during a Laurel Highlands Athletic Conference game at 7 p.m. Friday. This contest won’t appear in theaters, but the players, coaches and fans will resemble actors and extras who filled Point Stadium during filming in 1983.

“We’re so excited about it. It’s such a great story,” said Johnstown High coach Tony Penna Jr., who also is the school’s athletic director.“It’s hard to imagine a little town like Johnstown having two movies filmed here.”

Leading roles

The Paul Newman sports classic “Slap Shot” was filmed in the city in 1976 and based on the Johnstown Jets hockey team.

Seven years later, Cruise and Lea Thompson were relatively unknown actors in leading roles C Cruise as Stefan Djordjevic, the tough cornerback trying to earn a football scholarship and escape a dying steel mill town, and Thompson as his girlfriend, Lisa Lietzke, who had her own dreams of going to college to study music. Craig T. Nelson, whose credits at the time included a role in “Poltergeist,” played coach Vern Nickerson, who revived the blue-collar Ampipe program, but couldn’t find a way to defeat the affluent Walnut Heights team.

“A lot of the story lines have stayed the same 30 years later,”Penna said.

“A lot of these kids are trying to not necessarily find a way out of Johnstown, but they’re trying to find a way into college through football.”

The Trojans (1-1) will wear Ampipe black and gold uniforms while Westmont (0-2) will don the red and white Walnut Heights attire. Penna credited Sportsman’s, an athletic equipment distributor on Horner Street, for producing replica uniforms for the game.

“What a great way to celebrate the movie than to play a game to honor those two teams,” said Westmont Athletic Director Tom Callihan, who appeared in the “All the Right Moves” as an Ampipe player and had his share of close-ups and even a scene in which he showed off some dance moves.

“The teams will wear the respective uniforms,”he said. “Local sponsorship has been huge. AmeriServ is our corporate sponsor. We’ve reached out to the people who have been in the movie. The players who appeared in the movie are going to show up.”

A Facebook page C “All the Right Moves” Reunion C has spread the word across the country and caught the attention of Johnstown High graduate Ray Jones, the Class of 1983 vice president.

“Our principal, Mr. Irwin, knew our class officers’ schedules, and if there was something he needed to pull us together for, he’d schedule it around lunch or when it was convenient,” said Jones, 47, an emergency room nursing director in Ann Arbor, Mich. “I was actually sitting in a sociology class. I knew when I got called out I hadn’t done anything bad. I knew something was up.”

Jones said he joined class president Roxanne Brazill, treasurer Kelly Kanuch and secretary Christine Stahl in the principal’s office.

“Mr. Irwin said that Gary Morton wanted to talk to us about an opportunity for our class to be a part of a movie,”Jones said. “We were like, ‘Mr. Irwin, this is a nice joke.’ We didn’t believe him.”

Morton was the executive producer of “All the Right Moves.” Morton’s wife was actress Lucille Ball of “ILove Lucy” fame.

Once the Johnstown seniors realized their principal wasn’t kidding, they quickly agreed to do whatever was necessary for their class to be a part of the movie.

Extra work

At that time, Johnstown High School was located in the old Cochran school, which also is the site of the current building constructed about a decade ago. The original Johnstown High School building located across the Stonycreek River from the Cambria County War Memorial Arena was vacant in 1983, but soon was brought back to life with the help of local construction workers and electricians. The old Johnstown High was used in most of the school scenes

“I was an extra,”Jones said. “We did the classroom scenes, the pep rallies. We were at the Point Stadium for the football game. The long nights. It was incredible.

“At that time (of the filming) the teachers were on strike, so we weren’t attending school at that point. It really gave us a unique opportunity to do something, keep focused and keep our relationships going. I have so many fond memories of hanging out with friends in the band and choir. Some of those relationships I still have today.”

Jones reflected on his vocal performance alongside future movie stars such as Thompson, whose biggest roles prior to “All the Right Moves” were in Burger King commercials. She later starred in hits such as “Back to the Future,” “Red Dawn,” and “Some Kind of Wonderful” before playing the lead role in her own TV series “Caroline in the City,” from 1995 to 2000.

“The choir scene, being a part of that was special,”Jones said. “We knew we were singing with these people who were stars or were on their way to being stars. We just spent hours on the stage shooting and reshooting.”

Economic impact

The movie did more than bring future stars to a city struggling as the demise of the big steel and coal industries set in.

Reports stated that about half of the “All the Right Moves” $5 million budget was spent in Johnstown. The movie provided a combined 2,800 days of work for local people in jobs ranging from on-screen extras to set construction workers and painters.

Johnstown faced a 23 percent unemployment rate in 1983, the highest in the country. Ironically, special effects were used to produce artificial smoke for the tall smokestacks located in the mills in Franklin Borough and near Old Conemaugh Borough because some of Bethlehem Steel’s plants already had shut down and others were running below capacity.

Interest in the movie and the chance to earn some money C or even hot dogs and a Coke C became evident on an April 1983 night at Point Stadium. After an advertisement that extras would receive a free hot dog, a Coke and perhaps a spot in the movie, 14,300 people turned out for the first day of filming the big game at Point Stadium. Another 10,210 fans showed for the second day of the scene that concluded in an artificially produced downpour courtesy of local fire departments’ hoses.

“I’ve been saying it all along,”executive producer Morton said in a 1983 Tribune-Democrat article about the large crowds at the Point. “The people here are beautiful.”

Some of the locker room scenes for the Walnut Heights game were filmed at the former Johnstown Vo-Tech, from which Theresa Subich graduated in 1983. Subich, wife of current Johnstown assistant coach Brian Subich and mother of Trojans standout senior lineman Nick Subich, had the idea of an “All the Right Moves” reunion.

“About a year ago, we were watching TV and flipping the channels and ‘All the Right Moves’ was playing,” Theresa Subich said. “I joked with Brian that I was actually in this movie. They used the seniors of Vo-Tech, Johnstown, Conemaugh Valley and Ferndale for scenes with the extras. I said, ‘Next year is the 30th anniversary of the movie, wouldn’t it be cool to have a rematch of that game?’ Brian approached Tony Penna and he thought it was a great idea. Tony went to Tom Callihan at Westmont, and he thought it was a great idea. I didn’t know my little idea would turn into a big event.”

Nick Subich and Penna were scheduled to film a TV commercial on Market Street in which the player and coach re-enact the scene in which Cruise’s Djordjevic questions Nelson’s Nickerson about the coach’s control over his players’ futures through his influence with college recruiters.

In the movie, Cruise runs up the street near the former Act III Restaurant (now Blaine Boring’s Chocolates) shouting, “You’re not God,Nickerson. You’re just a typing teacher.”

Turning back the clock

A Cruise representative said the actor is working and was unavailable for comment for this story. Brian Subich reached out to Cruise’s and Nelson’s agents in hopes of having some type of presence from the now big-name actors. Nelson is working on the TV series “Parenthood.”

“All the Right Moves” premiered with a charity event at the Duke Theater in the Richland Mall on Sept. 29, 1983.

In a Tribune-Democrat interview on the eve of the premiere, Cruise recalled filming in Johnstown.

Back then, Cruise said he embraced the role of Stef Djordjevic because it contrasted his character in “Risky Business.” In that movie, Joel Goodsen was a kid raised in an upper-middle-class family in suburban Chicago. “Risky Business” hadn’t been released when “All the Right Moves” was being filmed but became a hit that summer.

“Joel Goodsen in ‘Risky Business’ comes from a very secure environment, which gives him room to question things such as education and money,” Cruise said in the 1983 interview. “Stef Djordjevic in ‘All the Right Moves’ comes from a very unstable environment. ... The mill’s closed, and he feels that education is his only way for opportunity.”

Cruise commented on the Flood City, saying, “The way Johnstown looks, the whole look of the film, is beautiful.”

Prior to filming, Cruise spent a brief time at Johnstown High trying to learn about life as a student. His identity was revealed when some of his “classmates” recognized him from his role in the movie “Taps.”

Thompson didn’t have such a problem at nearby Ferndale High, where she fit in for most of a week until then-Principal Richard Rigby told the students a future star was in their classroom.

Back in 1983, Thompson was impressed by the tight-knit group of students at Ferndale.

“Most of these people have gone to school together since kindergarten,”she said in a 1983 Tribune-Democrat interview. She noted the students were “very innocent, very nice.”

When asked to contrast “All the Right Moves” with another movie she starred in that year, “Jaws 3-D,” Thompson said, “(‘All the Right Moves’) is real life. No sharks, no nothin’. This is a movie about this town C real people and real problems.”

https://www.tribdem.com/news/local_news/video-jhs-westmont-will-re-enact-game-from-all-the-right-moves/article_19e5d8be-407e-5f70-b43e-de03b19b1df4.html

juliezhou · Guru

RE: [all the right moves]

juliezhou · Guru

1983 [all the right moves]

juliezhou · Guru

RE: [all the right moves]

juliezhou · Guru

1983 [all the right moves]

juliezhou · Guru

All the Right Moves: When Tom Cruise graduated from Brat Pack to star turn

The storyline is straight from Springsteen’s The River, but this is an underrated gem

Keith Duggan

Fri Mar 26 2021 - 06:00

There's a scene in All the Right Moves in which Tom Cruise and the late Christopher Penn share the screen for about 50 wistful seconds. It's a film in which they play fast friends in a Pennsylvania steel town who share aspirations of college football scholarships. But a teenage pregnancy sees Brian Riley, played by Penn, pass on a full ticket to California and decide to get married and take a job, a decision which demands C and duly receives C the Cruiser's patented gaze of baffled, toothy wonderment.

If it sounds to you as though the storyline might have been lifted straight from the lyric book of Bruce Springsteen's The River, then you're on the right track. All the Right Moves was actually filmed in the fabled Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and the sullen townscapes, smoke stacks and sunless afternoons are captured in despairing glory. There's a documentarian's authenticity to some of the scenes. And it's a fascinating film to revisit in the light of everything that has happened in American politics in the past decade because it mainlines straight to the land of lost content which Donald Trump would exploit so cleverly on his way to outwitting the system: the Rust Belt and the dream of local jobs and self-sufficient communities.

All the Right Moves catches the souring last roar of all that and, plus, we are watching the generation who have begun to see beyond the limitations of a prescribed way of life. “Getting out” is all they talk about. “Djordjevics have been humping steel in this town forever. It’s about time one of us had something to say about the stuff afterwards,” Cruise’s Stef Djordjevic says passionately of his desire to break the mould and go to college.

This is not Fast Times at Ridgemont High or any of those glossy West Coast films, it's an inversion of that world. These youngsters are ordinary

To become an engineer C it’s a modest premise for a Hollywood film and it’s just one of those reasons why All the Right Moves stands out as an odd, indefinable curiosity, clunky and flawed for sure but, for all of that, still alive with a strange energy that most films do not have.

Why is that? It’s hardly the story, which is unapologetically slight. In the opening scenes, young Stef and his pals are high-fiving each other in the school hallways and being all self-congratulatory and ****y. But it’s clear to us that they are just playing at being cool; this is not Fast Times at Ridgemont High or any of those glossy West Coast films, it’s an inversion of that world. These youngsters are ordinary: dorkish, boastful, uncertain and trying to navigate unpromising futures.

Lea Thompson plays Lisa, Stef's girlfriend, and emerges as the strongest character in a claustrophobic, patriarchal society, and she shares with Cruise a scene which was surely one of Hollywood's first serious attempts to explore the issue of sexual consent. When the film opens, it's the last game of the season C and of their lives C for the Ampipe football team. Stef's team is playing against a flashy, rich school from elsewhere. The only sports scene in the film lasts about 10 minutes and is terrific, from the subdued bus trip across a barren landscape to the dressing-room huddle to the last-minute fumble, in driving, horrible rain, which leaves the team devastated.

Afterwards, Stef is a witness rather than participant when some locals trash the house of coach Nickerson, played by Craig T Nelson, who recognises his star player and actively sabotages all scholarship enquiries. Stef suddenly finds that all the colleges have gone cold on him. He hits the liquor store and realises that C like Brian C he won't be getting out.

Magnetism

Nineteen eighty-three was the year when Cruise’s peculiar energy and magnetism began to percolate into his unstoppable rise as the biggest star of the last 40 years. He made four big-screen appearances in quick succession that year. The Outsiders was released in March, Losin’ It in April and then, in August, Risky Business presented the burnished Cruise in a dark comedy that was a sly indictment of American capitalism masquerading as a celebration. It established Cruise as a star.

All the Right Moves was released in October to a puzzled reception. This was, after all, just five years after The Deer Hunter; it was too soon for moviegoers to return to those steel towns filled with gloomy Polish and Irish and Italian patriarchs, with all that Catholic guilt and Rolling Rock beer and plaid shirts.

So, for cinemagoers in 1983, All the Right Moves must have made a confusing companion piece to the Cruise in Risky Business, in which he plays Joel, a young American who also wants to get into college, but does so despite transforming his palatial lakeside home in Chicago into an escort service for the weekend.

Watching Cruise in All the Right Moves is like seeing Joel’s less-wealthy country cousin: there’s no need for the Ray-Bans where he’s from because the sun never shines. It’s Cruise before the industry applied the permanent gloss; he’s jittery and pale and rarely turns to the surface charm. You get to watch him simply as an actor rather than the star turn C a realm into which his peers have firmly and ungenerously placed him. Cruise has yet to win an Oscar in any category, which, a quick scan of the winners lists will confirm, is ridiculous. What you get, instead, is a hint of future performances C including the obligatory drunken scene and that moment where he takes off in a full sprint through the deserted nightscape of the town.

"There's a transmission of willpower and energy that the camera picks up with him," the screenwriter Nicholas Pizzolatto said last August in a podcast exploring the Cruise phenomenon. "It doesn't happen with everybody. If he is on the screen, everyone else sort of fades to grey."

It's a succinct explanation of the elusive quality which has enabled Cruise to remain a megastar for almost 40 years, long after most of his Brat Pack associates have given up the ghost. And it's what makes his scenes here with Chris Penn, who was just 18 in 1983, so unusual and revelatory. In the wedding morning scene, Cruise gives it socks in trying to pulse with frustration and empathy and to communicate to us that this, right now, is the moment when their lives are shooting in radically different directions. But it's Penn who effortlessly owns the moment, standing in his goofy ruffled wedding suit and somehow transmitting fear and pride and optimism and resignation over their brief exchange.

All the Right Moves was made on roughly the same $6 million budget as Risky Business. But it took in just $17 million rather than the $60 million earned by Risky Business and, by the time Cruise returned with the double whammy of Top Gun and the Colour of Money three years later, the downbeat football movie began to look like nothing more than an odd footnote on a dazzling resume.

Embryonic

But it has stuck around like a piece of grit. As the years passed and Cruise went stratospheric, All the Right Moves represented one of the few films to capture him in embryonic form. Meanwhile, Chris Penn's career became a faltering, unsteady thing. While it was abundantly clear he had a rare gift for acting C as opposed to movie stardom C Hollywood didn't seem to know what to do with him, and he probably didn't share the singular, all-possessing want which defined both Cruise and his own brother, Sean. Chris Penn died suddenly aged just 40 in 2006, by which time he had built a dedicated cult following. Just two years before that, Salon. com ran a long and spiky tribute by Cintra Wilson under the headline The Mightier Penn, which argued that, in a more equitable world, it was Chris whom the world would recognise as the exceptional talent of the family.

"Sean Penn is phenomenal because he never does the most obvious, first-thought thing C he adds a considered layer of character spin on top of every reaction, such as: he smiles when he's being threatening because he's amused at the thought of kicking your ass," she writes.

Locals in Pittsburgh and Johnstown would vouch that it caught the atmosphere and accents and the look: the big, hulking cars, the foreboding and gloom

“ Okay, that’s great, very impressive... But Chris Penn does this other thing: he makes you seamlessly believe in characters so much you barely even notice them. It’s a more inverted, egoless choice C he always serves the role instead of serving his career. Sean is a showboat, a scenery-chewer. Chris is the opposite C a stealth bomb.”

Unfair, perhaps, on Penn senior, but it gets to the point of Chris Penn. No actor has flaunted ego on the screen as nakedly as Tom Cruise C everything is excess, all the time. In Penn, at that moment, he had a perfect counterpoint: a chunky, fatalistic, grinning ghost. And they are both just starting out.

Cliche-riddled

Films lauded on their release are often shown up as dated or just plain bad by the passage of time. All the Right Moves is the opposite. It was indicted for being cliche-riddled at the time, but mainly by critics too dim to recognise that the term itself is a cliché. It had its champions, too, with Roger Ebert the most notable of those.

It's undeniably filled with archetypes, from the stoical, careworn father to the visiting college recruiters to the local thug. But it was a considered attempt to depict teenage life in a typical American industrial town at a particular point in time. Locals in Pittsburgh and Johnstown would vouch that it caught the atmosphere and accents and the look: the big, hulking cars, the foreboding and gloom and the sense that the 20th-century industrial model was failing them. That's hardly an accident: the director, Michael Chapman, is better known as one of the great cinematographers, responsible for the camera work in Jaws and Raging Bull.

Even the soundtrack title song by Jennifer Warnes has more to it than immediately meets the ear C it's got that MTV Sunday afternoon synthesised familiarity but is also entirely its own thing. There's no question that it's Cruise and his one-man furnace of emotion who carries much of the tension of the film. He deceives us into thinking that his failure to get into that engineering course would be nothing less than a tragedy. Still, it's Penn who embodies the heart of the town and a moment in American life: 1983, the declining steelworks and the unwritten law that mister, when you're young, they bring you up to do like your daddy done. And it caught, for celluloid posterity, the memorable collaboration between Cruise, the actor who still blazes above Hollywood as the last true, old-style movie star, and the scarcely glimpsed brilliance of Chris Penn. Not many films can boast that.

Oh, and needless to say, young Stef gets his scholarship too, reconciling with coach Nickerson after a showdown on the street. It’s night time, just the two of them and Cruise’s voice breaks into that familiar high pitch as he shouts: “You’re not God! You’re just a typing teacher.” He stands for a moment, framed by a church at the end of the street, then turns on his heels and sprints toward his glittering future.

https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/all-the-right-moves-when-tom-cruise-graduated-from-brat-pack-to-star-turn-1.4520139