Manufacturing a Multimedia Hit

By RICHARD CORLISS

FLASHDANCE Directed by Adrian Lyne

Screenplay by Tom Hedley and Joe Eszterhas

Big Brother has arrived a year early, in the form of a lithe young dancer from Pittsburgh. From every electronic orifice in the U.S. just now--from radio and stereo speakers, from the projectors in 1,140 movie theaters and out of the 24-hour mouth of MTV--comes one unavoidable, irresistible message: Flashdance!

In the first two weeks of its release, the movie Flashdance, an airheaded $8.5 million romance about a pretty Pittsburgh welder, earned $11.3 million and, more remarkably, for Paramount Pictures, improved its business the second week. The Flashdance LP, with ten songs from the film's nonstop pop-rock score, has sold 700,000 copies in two weeks, and is now moving off the shelves at the rate of 50,000 to 100,000 a day--welcome news to a music business that has been in a four-year slump. Says Jack Kiernan, executive vice president of lucky PolyGram records: "A dealer in Chicago just told me, 'It feels like 1978 all over again.'" That was the year of Paramount's Saturday Night Fever, another movie about a working-class dancer, which grossed $258 million worldwide and sold more than 30 million double albums. "It's too early to call Flashdance another Saturday Night Fever," says Paramount's Gordon Weaver, "but it looks as if it might become that kind of phenomenon."

Like Fever and, for that matter, the Rocky films, Flashdance has made it big by taking experiences of black youths and playing them in whiteface. The Flashdancers' moves can be seen any week on Soul Train, or on any inner-city street corner. But unlike its grittily romantic predecessors, Flashdance is pure glitz. This "Pittsburgh" has steel mills that shimmer in telephoto twilight. The sidewalks are clean as the Lido beach--must be where all the ironworkers got those golden tans. In a neighborhood bar, Alex (Jennifer Beals) and her chums put on a sexy, high-tech floor show that could exist only in Wayne Newton's dreams. One after another, lithe stunners display terrific muscle tone in discreet rock-'n'-roll stripteases. Alex lives in a loft about the size of SoHo, where she rehearses her dream: to win a job with the local ballet company. She gets it, helped by some slow-motion and quick-cut camera effects--and by an unbilled French dancer who played stunt double for some of Beals' jetes.

If Flashdance looks like a 95-minute "video" for MTV, the cable music channel, it should be no surprise. For one thing, Director Adrian Lyne is another in the long list of British mannerists (Alan Parker, Ridley Scott, Hugh Hudson) to have graduated from TV commercials, and to bring their techniques and attention span with them. For another, the film's "production numbers" were designed, or at least marketed, with MTV in mind. Paramount began running two-minute commercials on MTV a full three weeks before the movie opened. "The MTV audience likes music, movement, dancing," notes Weaver. "We hoped the movie and MTV would make a happy marriage. And it happened."

This week MTV will begin airing two Flashdance videos featuring Beals, the 19-year-old Yale freshman who was chosen over 4,000 other applicants. Beals has a sweet-sad face, a lean, expressive body and enough sultry energy to bring heat and humidity to her role; but in fact she is just one more erotic element in Lyne's fantasy of smoke, strobe lights and soft focus. Given the exposure, Beals may not mind. Neither do her Big Brothers on Hollywood Boulevard, who could be laughing all the way to 1984.

--By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.