- This was the theme from the movie of the same name starring Kevin Bacon in his breakout role; Rob Lowe and Tom Cruise also tried out for the part. He plays a teenager who moves to a small town where dancing is illegal. Dean Pitchford, who wrote the screenplay to the film and the lyrics to all the songs in the movie, got the idea from a 1979 newspaper article about the town of Elmore City, Oklahoma, where a law against dancing was on the books since the 1800s. The 14 high school seniors decided they wanted a prom, and got the town council to overturn the antiquated interdiction so they could dance. Pitchford visited Elmore City to research his screenplay, where he spent a week immersing himself in their culture.Pitchford was an actor, appearing in stage productions of Godspell and Pippin before getting a chance to write lyrics for songs in the 1980 movie Fame. He started working on Footloose when he was a staff songwriter for Warner Brothers Publishing. For a while it looked like 20th Century Fox was going to pick up the screenplay, but it ended up being produced by Paramount, who were rewarded with $80 million in ticket sales from the film, which cost about $8 million to make.
- Dean Pitchford called his screenplay “Cheek To Cheek” as a placeholder for a real title. Once it became clear that studios were interested, he had to come up with a real title. In a 2012 Songfacts interview, Pitchford explained: “I really had to come up with a better title. So I did what I do with lyric writing: I took a yellow legal tablet, and any ideas that I had, I did not edit. I just wrote down, line after line after line. I filled page after page after page with variations and ideas that I had for it.About Day 2, I wrote down ‘footloose and fancy free,’ and then I wrote down ‘footloose,’ and then separately ‘fancy free.’ When I went back over the list, I think I had four that I thought might be good ideas. But ‘Footloose’ was by far my favorite. I typed up hypothetical title pages, and I put, ‘this title by Dean Pitchford,’ as the title of the new screenplay. Then I put the four of them in a stack, and I put ‘Footloose’ on the bottom. I took them into a meeting with Craig (Melnick) and Dan (Zadan, producers at Fox), and I said, ‘Here are some ideas for the title.’ They looked at number one, they went, ‘Okay. All right.’ And they flipped it over, and number two, and they flipped it over, and number three, ‘Okay.’ And then they flipped over the last one, which was ‘Footloose by Dean Pitchford,’ and they lit up like a Christmas tree. I had deliberately done it that way, because it was my favorite and I was saving it for the end. And they felt what I felt, which was it was just such an interesting looking word and it didn’t mean anything, but it did. And all those ‘O’s’ gave it a visual kind of punch. We all just went for it. It sort of sold itself. I certainly didn’t have an idea for a song, because I hadn’t yet gotten together with Kenny Loggins. But it’s one of those interesting words that looks good on paper – you see it scrawled across a billboard, and it sells itself.”
