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Fred Astaire Turns Hollywood Upside Down
From: Columbia University
| By:
Columbia University Oral History Research Office |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Dancing,  singing, acting--Fred Astaire (1899-1987) did it all and made it look easy. He is often credited with the creation of modern tap dance, and is best known for his performances in such films as Top Hat (1935) and Swing Time (1936). Astaire's career spanned more than 70 years, and included roles in 40 movies and 16 television shows.
In this excerpt from an interview conducted in 1971 by Charles Higham and donated to Columbia University's Oral History Research Office by Time Life Books, Astaire (above) tells the story behind the well-known scene in the film Royal Wedding (1951) in which he seemingly defies the laws of gravity to dance on the walls and ceiling. |
Fred Astaire remembers dancing on the ceiling.
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Fred Astaire: Well, there are so many complicated--I did a dance on the ceiling, which was very complicated in one picture. |
Charles Higham: Yes. How was that achieved? |
Astaire: Well, again, I couldn't describe it really adequately here. I can for you. But the whole room turned, this room. It was a room about this size. And the whole room turned like this, you see, and as it came down, I met it. The camera went with it, you see. The camera and everything went with it. So as I stayed at the bottom, doing whatever I did, and I met this wall as it came to me; when they finally set it on the lower line of the picture, it looked as if I was climbing the wall. And there I was, sticking out like this on the side of the wall, and then I got to the ceiling--I'm upside down. |
Complications of that were that things had to be lashed down, and as they tried it the first time, it was like a big iron lung that was built for this thing. It was very--took quite a while to do. And the turning of it worked by electricity. A fellow pushed buttons and he knew exactly when I'd be there, and he'd turn it when I wanted to go to the top and look as if I was getting to the top. |
Do you understand what I'm saying? It was all described in Life. It's in there. It was in that magazine. |
So it was one of the things I really liked best of all the solos that I did, and it worked out because I dreamt it up one night, thinking of how this could be. And then I tried to get it in a picture and it never fit into any picture for, oh, a number of years. A couple of years. And Arthur Freed, who's a producer--this was at Metro--liked the idea so much, finally we found a place for it, which was in Royal Wedding. Pan was not on that picture. Nick Castle, I think, worked on it. And Stanley Donen was the director. He was a big help getting that technical side worked out. He's very clever like that. |
Higham: I'm surprised it didn't bring on an attack of vertigo. |
Astaire: Well, it's a funny feeling to be--if this room was to turn around here now, and all of this is up there and that's down here, it's a very funny feeling, I can tell you that. And it took a knack to look as if--you see, you're fighting the laws of gravity all the time, and to look as if you're really going, there's a tendency for you to look a little unnatural. I had to work on that, to just look as if I was splitting up, you see. |
Higham: First time around it was hard, was it? |
Astaire: Oh, I worked on it till about three weeks before we shot it. Oh, yes. But it was worth it. |
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