Kevin Bacon readily admits he didn’t know what he was getting into.
“The script didn’t really indicate anything,” Bacon tells The Post. “It just said, ‘and then they dance,’ and again, ‘and then they dance,’ I thought it was like when you’re in a bar, and you start moving around. I said, ‘I don’t know if you really need a choreographer, because I just like to dance. Why don’t you just let me dance, and turn the camera on?’ ”
“Footloose,” of course, was far more than just snapping fingers and shuffling feet. Released 30 years ago this week, the movie featured a prom scene of backflips, synchronized kicks and such then-underground moves as popping-and-locking.
More than anything, that triumphant climax — made possible by Bacon’s character opening the minds of the small town’s citizens — plays as pure exuberance. Offscreen, though, things weren’t always fun.
Bacon and others in the cast (including Chris Penn) were given dance lessons, a process he describes as “tough” and “frustrating.”
“I was doing things I wasn’t used to doing, at a super-accelerated rate,” he says. “Ultimately, there were things I just couldn’t do, like the gymnastics, flying around on high bars and stuff, and some dance moves that were too complicated.”
Despite his lesser skills, though, Bacon was hardly a lost cause.
“You can see when somebody loves music and has rhythm, because it comes out in their bodies,” says one of the film’s dancers, Christopher Harrison. “[Bacon] was definitely into it. He wanted to show he liked to move, and sweated through a number of different outfits.”
While Bacon did much of his own dancing, he was doubled for more challenging moves by pros, including Harrison and gymnast Chuck Gaylord, brother of Olympic gymnast Mitch Gaylord.
“I hated being doubled,” says Bacon. “At one point, I remember having such an identity crisis, because I looked over and there were two different guys [to do my] gymnastics moves. ”
“He’s a consummate pro, and he wanted to be that character in every frame,” says Lynne Taylor-Corbett, the film’s choreographer, who notes that Ren had been a runner in the original script. She had him changed to a gymnast to give more options for the character’s range of movement.
“Ultimately [director] Herbert [Ross] did an amazing job of that doubling,” she says, “and now people look at it and think it’s [Bacon].”
Resented or not, the doubles were clearly needed. Even the professionals found the prom scene challenging, especially with glitter pouring down on them.
“They would dump big chunks of it on top of us, then sweep it back up [and dump it] again,” says Harrison. “You’re trying to nail your choreography, and they’re saying, ‘Don’t look up,’ because you didn’t want a piece of chunky glitter to land in your eye.”
Soon after filming wrapped, Ross decided the prom scene had to be reshot. He had originally planned the scene to play out in slow motion, hoping the glitter falling would create a magical mood. But when the film was screened for the public, it made the finale drag.
The other major change in the reshoots involved the addition of several new dance styles that were just then catching on, including popping-and-locking.
One of the film’s surprisingly good dancers was the late Chris Penn, who played Ren’s buddy Willard. Penn had no dance skills, but Taylor-Corbett found a way to bring out his inner boogie.
“He didn’t move at all [at first] and almost refused to,” she says. “He told me he had wrestled . . . clicking into his love of wrestling was my way in.”
For all the fun dancing in the film, Bacon believes that it’s the movie’s heart — as epitomized by Penn — that really accounts for “Footloose” becoming so beloved.
“From a dance standpoint, the best scene in the movie is me teaching Chris Penn to dance,” says Bacon.
“There’s an innocence that’s captured there, of just this guy trying to teach this other guy a couple of moves, and I think that’s why the movie was popular — more so than any kind of stand-alone dance or gymnastic moves.”