Cut up your sweatshirts, because Paramount+ is dipping into its vault to reboot the iconic 1983 feature film Flashdance as a TV series, reports The Hollywood Reporter. The streaming service, known right now as CBS All Access, but scheduled for a reboot next year, is bringing to the small screen a modern take on the story that helped make Jennifer Beals a household name.
Tracy McMillan of Amazon’s Good Girls Revolt will write the script for the drama, currently in development, while Angela Robinson will executive produce and direct the pilot for the potential series. Original Flashdance associate producer Lynda Obst is also attached to the project as an executive producer as well. The original Flashdance film followed the story of Alex Owens, a steel mill worker and exotic dancer with dreams of becoming a professional ballerina. The film first opened to negative reviews, but soon became a hit, bringing in more than $200 million across the world to become the third highest-earner in the U.S. in 1983. The new show will have a similar plot, as a young Black woman who works in a strip club dreams of a career in ballet while navigating romance, money, art, friendship and self-love, as per THR.
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One of the most iconic moments in the original film, when Beals’ character pours water on herself during a dance on stage, almost didn’t happen, director Adrian Lyne said on the 2020 Paramount Presents Blu-ray of Flashdance, as per Showbiz Cheatsheet. Lyne explained that when he first pitched the “wet dance,” executives were “infinitely skeptical” of his idea.
“They were all sitting on bleachers looking at me,” he recalled. “I had a girl at the bottom and I had a hosepipe with water, no lighting. I was trying to explain that the water was going to fly everywhere and her body was going to look great because of the sheen on her body.” Even then, Lyne said a mistake in picking a light-colored background almost sunk the scene before it even got off the ground. “It’s such a fundamental obvious thing so the sparkling water would show up. I was trying to do it against a white background which is insane,” he continued. “Finally I realized my idiocy.”
Pushing to make the scene work, only to have it become one of the most iconic movie moments of all time, only proved the message of the movie. “So many things are luck really but I think you have to make the luck happen,” Lyne said. ‘When you’re deeply depressed because everybody is cynical about this wet dance and oh that won’t work and most of you thinks it’s not going to work either but that you persevere. It’s a little bit like the story of the movie really, about persevering and succeed.”
