The Real Elmore City Footloose
A real town with a real ban
Elmore City is a small town in Garvin County, south-central Oklahoma. Until 1980, public dancing was illegal there — a town ordinance from 1898, two years before Oklahoma was even a state, that had been kept on the books through fifteen presidencies.
"Public dancing was forbidden in Elmore City due to a ban enacted pre-statehood, and dancing had been forbidden for 82 years, through 15 presidencies." — 405 Magazine, 405 Magazine (2024)
The ordinance had been written when local Methodist and Baptist congregations dominated the county's civic life, and the religious objection that put dancing on the proscribed list — that public dancing led to drinking, drinking led to lust, lust led to ruin — had been kept alive by every successive generation of pastors.
The senior class of 1980 won the prom
In the 1979–80 school year, the senior class at Elmore City High School lobbied the school board for permission to hold the town's first sanctioned prom. The petition was led by Rex Kennedy and Leonard Coffee — junior class officers — and it passed.
"The curious name of Ren — portrayed by Kevin Bacon in the movie — is an amalgam of the first names of prom organizers and junior class officers Rex Kennedy and Leonard Coffee." — OKG, Oklahoma Gazette
The vote at the school board was contentious. Local clergy testified against. Parents testified on both sides. The students' winning argument turned out to be similar to Ren's at the Bomont council in the film — that dance had biblical sanction, that the New Testament references to celebration didn't condemn what the kids were proposing. The prom went forward in May 1980.
Pitchford read about it in the news
The story moved across the wires. Dean Pitchford (in Footloose) — by then an Oscar-winning lyricist for Fame (1980) and looking for his next project — saw the headline and recognized the shape of a movie. He flew to Oklahoma City, rented a car, and drove south. He stayed in Ardmore, which is a real town twenty miles from Elmore City and is referenced indirectly in the film, and spent a week interviewing students and parents.
"Pitchford drafted a script and lyrics built around a big-city teen reluctantly transplanted to a small town that had banned music and dancing. To infuse the project with realism, he flew to Oklahoma City, rented a car, and drove to Ardmore and Elmore City, staying for a week and talking to Oklahomans about their lives." — 405 Magazine, 405 Magazine (2024)
What the film changed
Pitchford fictionalized aggressively:
- He compressed multiple Oklahoma towns into a generic Midwestern Bomont. The film locations are in Utah; the dialect is generic American.
- He invented the car-wreck origin — four kids killed driving home from a dance, including the reverend's son — to give the ban an emotional logic in present tense. The real Elmore City ordinance was older than living memory.
- He created Reverend Shaw Moore as a single antagonist with personal grief. The actual opposition in Elmore City was diffuse — a coalition of clergy and elders, no one of them tragic.
- He made the protagonist an outsider from Chicago. The real Rex Kennedy and Leonard Coffee were local kids.
Elmore City still hosts the prom
The town still holds an annual prom. In the years after the film, Elmore City became a small tourist destination of sorts — Footloose pilgrims, occasional anniversary write-ups in the regional press. The 40th anniversary in 2024 brought another round of features in Oklahoma media.
"The events in Elmore City sparked an iconic 1984 movie, multi-platinum soundtrack that displaced Michael Jackson's Thriller from the top of the charts, successful 1998 Broadway musical and 2011 movie remake, building a multi-million entertainment franchise known by a single word: Footloose." — 405 Magazine, 405 Magazine (2024)