Production History (Footloose) Footloose

Pitchford built the project around a real news story

In 1980, Yale-educated songwriter Dean Pitchford — fresh off an Academy Award for the title song to Fame (1980) — read a newspaper account of Elmore City, Oklahoma, where the high-school senior class had just persuaded the town to allow its first prom in 82 years. He flew to Oklahoma City, rented a car, and spent a week in Elmore City and nearby Ardmore interviewing the students and their parents. (405magazine, deanpitchford)

"Headlines about the town's ban on dancing inspired a Yale-educated writer to create the screenplay and lyrics for what would become an American cultural juggernaut." — Joy Hofmeister, 405 Magazine (2024)

Pitchford built two parallel projects from the same research: the screenplay and a soundtrack of nine songs whose lyrics he would write himself. See The 1984 Soundtrack.

Casting the lead took multiple frontrunners and one breakthrough

Tom Cruise was an early frontrunner for Ren — he had to pass because he was already committed to All the Right Moves (1983). Rob Lowe auditioned and reportedly injured himself during the dance test. Christopher Atkins, of The Blue Lagoon (1980), was also in the running. The role went to Kevin Bacon, a 25-year-old New York stage actor whose feature work to date had been an ensemble part in Diner (1982) and a brief appearance in Animal House (1978). (foxnews, remindmagazine)

The other principals fell into place around Bacon:

• Lori Singer as Ariel — fresh off NBC's Fame (1982–83), where she had played a teenage cellist named Julie Miller, a part written for her actual Juilliard background.
• John Lithgow as Reverend Shaw Moore — coming off two consecutive Oscar nominations for The World According to Garp (1982) and Terms of Endearment (1983).
• Dianne Wiest as Vi — primarily a stage actor at the time, with a handful of screen credits.
• Chris Penn as Willard — younger brother of Sean Penn, with a small role in All the Right Moves the same year.
• Sarah Jessica Parker as Rusty — eighteen years old, coming off CBS's Square Pegs (1982–83). She nearly turned the part down because the producers wanted her to dye her hair red.

Herbert Ross had been a choreographer before he was a director

Producer Daniel Melnick hired Herbert Ross to direct. Ross had begun his career as a Broadway choreographer (working with Streisand, Sondheim, and Rodgers) before moving to film with Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969). His most acclaimed pictures — The Turning Point (1977) and The Goodbye Girl (1977) — were both built around performers, and his dance background made him a natural fit for a film whose climax is a warehouse full of teenagers cutting loose. See Herbert Ross.

Lynne Taylor-Corbett built the dances around a non-dancer

The film's choreographer was Lynne Taylor-Corbett, a New York–based modern dance choreographer who would go on to a Tony nomination for the 1998 Broadway adaptation. Taylor-Corbett's job was structurally complicated: her star, Bacon, was not a trained dancer, while several of the supporting parts (Lori Singer, the bridge dancers) needed to handle real movement. The solution was a four-part rotation of doubles for the warehouse sequence — Bacon plus a dance double (Peter Tramm), a stunt double, and two gymnastics doubles, blended through editing. (hollywoodreporter, cnn)

Bacon was unhappy about it for years afterward.

"I had a stunt double, a dance double and two gymnastics doubles." — Kevin Bacon, CNN (2011)

The warehouse scene is the most edited dance sequence in the film for exactly that reason. See The Choreography.

Lithgow built the reverend by interviewing a real one

Lithgow, not a religious person himself, looked up an Assembly of God minister in the Yellow Pages and asked for a meeting:

"I told him I'd been raised in the church and was thinking about becoming a minister. I just wanted to know what was involved. The truth was, I just wanted to know how a minister talks." — John Lithgow, HuffPost (2014)

The hook for Lithgow's performance was Shaw's lost son: "That was the hook for me," he said — a man who had buried a child and then legislated his grief. (cheatsheet)

The Utah locations doubled for the Midwest

The fictional Bomont was filmed almost entirely in Utah Valley — Provo, Lehi, Payson, American Fork, Lindon, and Springville. Specific locations include:

• Bomont High — Payson High School, Payson
• The First Christian Church — Community Presbyterian Church, American Fork
• The steel mill / warehouse dance — Geneva Steel Plant, Lindon
• The flour mill (final prom location) — Lehi Roller Mills, Lehi
• The tractor chicken field — Allred Orchards, near Payson
• The book-burning courtyard — Springville Senior High School, Springville

The snow-capped Wasatch Range is visible in many of the long shots, marking the film unmistakably for any Western viewer as not actually the Midwest. (movie-locations)

The soundtrack was finished before the film was

Pitchford had Loggins, Deniece Williams, Bonnie Tyler, Mike Reno, Ann Wilson, Sammy Hagar, Eric Carmen, John Cougar Mellencamp, and Karla Bonoff lined up to record songs whose lyrics he had written, often in advance of the picture. The soundtrack album would hit number one on Billboard on April 21, 1984, displacing Michael Jackson's Thriller. The title song, co-written with Kenny Loggins in a Lake Tahoe hotel room while Loggins was on painkillers for broken ribs, would be number one for three weeks. (americansongwriter, songfacts)

See The 1984 Soundtrack.

The budget was $8 million; the gross was over $80 million

Paramount Pictures financed the film on roughly $8 million. It opened February 17, 1984, and grossed over $80 million domestically — ten times its budget — placing seventh among the year's highest-grossing films. (wikipedia)