Gene Kelly Fan vs. Scholar (Dancing in the Rain)

You set Gene Kelly Fans. What has the response to the site been?
Overall, pretty good. Some days the site receives 100 hits, other days 500, and the day when one of our contributors’ essays comparing Astaire and Kelly made it on IMDB’s hit list, over 4,000 people visited. The Gene Kelly Fans Twitter account, which I began first, grows weekly as well. To date, there are almost 1,000 fans following and interacting with us. All in all, it’s nice to know so many people out there still appreciate Kelly’s films and talents. [More on the reason I created the site in "On Academics and Fansites (or, My Justification for Creating Gene Kelly Fans)."]

You’ve put an immense amount of work into Gene Kelly Fans and met many people connected to Kelly in the course of your research. Any favourite stories you care to share?
First, thanks, but I don’t feel I’ve put “an immense amount of work into the site.” It always, always takes second-chair to my class preparation, teaching, and researching, so it doesn’t consistently get updated. Favorite stories? Hmm, here are three:

• On Twitter I met a former delivery guy who brought a basket of fruit to Gene Kelly while he was filming That’s Entertainment II (1976).
• Another woman contacted me via email to say she was on a TV special with Gene in the 1960s called Children’s Letters to God (1969); we’re hoping she writes a post for the site.
• But perhaps the most memorable contact is a guy from Los Angeles who wrote to me because he purchased one of Gene Kelly’s vests from an MGM wardrobe sale in the early ‘70s. Sewn into the back of the vest was an MGM tag with Kelly’s name and a six-digit number. None of us could figure out what film it was from, but it was almost definitely a vest that was paired with a tux. Ultimately, the owner contacted someone at Profiles in History, a Hollywood memorabilia dealer, who matched the production number to Singin’ in the Rain (1952). It was the vest Kelly wore under a black tux in the scene in which Jean Hagen’s character gets hit in the face with a pie (below).

When talking to people connected with Gene Kelly, did you discover anything surprising? Anything that changed your view or cemented your opinion of him?
Not really anything surprising. I have learned that even at age 80, Kelly still maintained his star persona of that all-American, proletariat performer: he wore a hat, khakis, and loafters; he disliked wearing tuxes and attending large events; he would rather be dining on hot dogs and beer than lobster and wine (he hated vegetables, particularly asparagus); and had a keen understanding of and love for children. These are all things we would’ve seen in his films, interviews, and in fan magazines.

Can you separate your enjoyment as a fan from your academic perception of his films?
I can, but sometimes it’s difficult. Separating the two was especially hard for me earlier this year as I was constructing an essay on two Volkswagen commercials that feature Gene Kelly. In one ad (found here), Kelly and Donald O’Connor dance in the backseat of a Volkswagen Jetta (right); in the other (found here), Kelly’s face is digitally “pasted” onto the bodies of three different break-dancers so that he’s “performing” steps and gestures that he did not while he was alive. In short, I do care for the ads. I think they’re unethical and poorly done. And as a fan, they make me unhappy with those who own the rights to his image. But I had to put aside these visceral reactions and explain, as an academic, why the commercials are problematic and why they didn’t work for many viewers out there (I was definitely not the only one who disliked them). Ultimately, I realized that while the two spots might succeed within the world of advertising awards and in the eyes of some viewers, they disappoint as homages to Gene Kelly and the classical film musical because they draw attention to their own artifice, something neither Kelly nor the genre would presume to do.

These are the final interview questions that didn’t make it into the BBC Radio 2 documentary on Gene Kelly. All of the previous questions/posts may be found here.

Related posts: