#YOUTUBE ONE MAN BAND MOVIE#
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I was the person who’d say “I feel so bad for you” or “Is there any more pizza?” A lot of guys my age who knew they were gay but felt they could not tell anybody identified with Doris because she did not have a boyfriend. Photograph: Beverly Goodway/Shutterstockĭoris was essentially the girl who did the exhibition.

We even shared an apartment and drove to work together. I was 23 and had been in movies, and I was the oldest in the show. I ended up getting the role of Doris Schwartz.

#YOUTUBE ONE MAN BAND TV#

I remember seeing Lee on screen and thinking: “I’m gonna be friends with that guy some day.” Two years later I get a call – they’re doing the TV series.

#YOUTUBE ONE MAN BAND MOVIE#

I was understudying on Broadway when the movie came out in 1980 and I went to a midnight screening. That was the start and I really took off from there – working in music for TV shows and films just like I wanted to do. I got a gig writing music for a TV movie with Mickey Rooney. At the time, the network decided not to syndicate it any more in the US, but it was doing so well in the UK and Italy, they continued making it for export. I sent them a demo, and who should show up to orchestrate it but Peter Matz? He took my crummy little demo and orchestrated it for a live orchestra at the NBC studios. As well as writing songs for Fame, I was asked to write music for NBC’s Saturday morning cartoon shows. Around that time, drum machines, sampling and synths were really taking off so I had this idea of learning as much as I could about all that, and I became a one-man band, writing drums, bass, timpani, brass, the whole orchestra. I was writing songs at 2am in the morning. A lot of it was waiting for shots to be set up. We’d start each day at 7am and finish at 7pm. I remember one scene in an abandoned old high school in New York, late-afternoon sun streaming through the windows, and the ballerina Hilary, who was played by the ballerina Antonia Franceschi, dancing with Leroy. I loved going on set when I wasn’t filming.

I was playing tarantellas for Italian vacationers in the Catskills when I found out I’d got the part of Bruno. I wanted a shy but sensitive real-life keyboard prodigy. When Alan Parker was casting the movies Fame, he was looking for real people rather than actors for most of the roles. When I watched the Carol Burnett Show on TV, for example, I was watching because I loved the way the bandleader Peter Matt orchestrated the music. I was this misfit little Italian kid who went to a Catholic school in the Bronx and had peculiar interests. I wanted to be Lalo Schifrin, who wrote the Mission: Impossible theme. It was never about the ego for me, just the music.

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