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New 'Fame' isn't the same

Directed by a 25-year-old, it focuses more on performing, less on melodrama

By Melena Ryzik New York Times News Service

NEW YORK — Fame, the remake, bears 10 story lines, five complicated musical numbers and the mantle of trying to recharge a franchise that spawned a TV series, a musical and countless copycat renditions of its Oscar-winning theme song ("Fame! I'm gonna live forever! I'm going to learn how to fly!").

By turns dark, melodramatic and hopeful, the original movie, released in 1980, achieved cult status among a generation of performers for whom it offered a first glimpse of artistic life.

The remake, which opens Friday, rests on the shoulders of a director who's younger than his source material: Kevin Tancharoen, 25. It is his first feature film. On the set in his parka, jeans and sneakers, he looked barely older than his cast. In fact, he was younger than some of them.

But Tancharoen didn't come from the same background as his young actors, most of them largely unknown, or their film counterparts. Instead of training at an arts preparatory school, he spent his teenage years on the road, as a backup dancer on tour with Britney Spears.

He was home-schooled and eventually earned a high school diploma; in his off time, he taught himself to shoot video and use just-released home editing software.

Before he was 20, he was creating multimedia shows for Spears and other artists. If the institutional rigor of a Fame-like school is one path to artistic discovery, Tancharoen's is pure high-tech do-it-yourself.

After meeting with many directors, Gary Lucchesi, a producer at Lakeshore Entertainment, which developed and released Fame along with MGM, hired Tancharoen on the strength of just two meetings. "I asked him to retrace his history for me, and what I recognized very quickly was that, although this was a guy who was young, he had undertaken big responsibilities throughout his life," he said.

Entrusting him with a high-stakes, high-profile project like Fame — the budget is upward of $25 million, and the cast includes Bebe Neuwirth, Kelsey Grammer, Charles S. Dutton and Megan Mullally as the teachers — was a leap, but Lucchesi and his partners felt that, given his youth and performance background, Tancharoen was uniquely suited for it.

In an interview this summer in Los Angeles, where he still lives and where most of the indoor scenes of Fame were shot, Tancharoen described his unusual career path. He began dancing, mostly hip-hop, on a lark, after tagging along to classes with his sister, now Maurissa Whedon, a screenwriter. At 12, he joined a company started by the choreographer Wade Robson, then still a teenager.

While the first movie focused on social issues — illiteracy, poverty, abortion, sexuality — and had a streetwise savvy, the remake is mainly concerned with the strains of juggling professional aspirations and artistic intent. Lucchesi said that change was a function of the times.

"An arts career is something that's taken seriously now from 12 or 13 years old," he said, "and there's tremendous competitiveness to get into these public high schools, so the focus is on the challenge and on achievement."

That was evident among the cast members, most of whom had been performing nearly all their lives; on the set, several young actors, none of whom were born when the original Fame came out, were already talking about Broadway or dancing being their "first love." The filmmakers paid attention.

"The second we cast these kids, the script changed," Tancharoen said. "They're stepping into the movie version of their own shoes."

But managing those stories, and the hallmarks of the original movie — the stage fright and puppy love, parental disapproval and casting couch — proved difficult: The director's cut was 31/2 hours long. "I had overshot the texture," Tancharoen said.

The shorter version still has a slick look: To signify the students' growth, Tancharoen started with a handheld shooting style and moved to smoother dolly shots as they matured.

Even before he began work on Fame, Tancharoen already had an idea for another film, "a unique kind of dance movie," he said, "that I wanted to go pitch, which was essentially movies like You Got Served and Stomp the Yard, but would cruise like The Warriors, set in the backdrop of Sin City or 300, but using the visual effects of Kung Fu Hustle. Crazy, right? Totally nuts."

It's called Arcana, and Brett Ratner is attached to produce.