After the Fame movie was released in 1980 Gerald Isenberg (Executive Producer), Stan Rogow (Producer) and Christopher Gore (writer & Creator) produced a pilot episode for television. Filming took place on location in New York in December 1980.  Debbie Allen, Lee Curreri, Albert Hague and Gene Anthony Ray reprised their roles from the movie.

Fred Silverman, then head of NBC liked the pilot enough to commission a series if the right Executive Producer could be found and William Blinn was one of people he had in mind. When Blinn accepted the role and brought Mel Swope in as producer the network requested that the Pilot be re-edited to be more accessible by an audience. New footage was filmed and about 75% of the original was kept.

Art Director Ira Diamond created the main set of the lobby, office, teacher’s lounge, dance room, cafeteria and classrooms and the 16 episode first series went into production in the Autumn of 1981. Although NBC would not commit to that number of episodes straight away, they would ask for a couple and then a couple more.  The first episode aired on American TV on 7^th January 1982 and on 17^th June 1982 in the U.K.

The character of Garcy was dropped and Danny Amatullo created instead some of the early scripts had already been written and I have a copy of the script for “Alone In The Crowd” which features Garcy instead of Danny.

The series faired okay in America but was up against “Magnum PI” so never won it’s time slot however, did enough to secure a second season. In the U.K. the show became and instant hit, attracting up to 11 million viewers per episode.

The U.K and European success of the show led to an album “The Kids From Fame” being released which was hugely successful and spent a total of  46 weeks on the U.K. charts with 12 of those weeks at number 1. “Hi Fidelity” and “Starmaker” were released as singles and reached number 5 and 3 on the U.K. singles chart.

Fame Mania had hit and the cast were brought over to the U.K. during their Christmas break from filming season 2 to perform a number of U.K. sell out concerts.