It's a little unnerving to be here in the LA River.

We're in the river.

We are actually riding in the river.

Whoa.

[music] Hooray for Hollywood.. Hi, it's Harry Medved, and welcome to Locationland, the show that puts movies in their places.

We're at the new Sixth Street Bridge, spanning the LA River and just east of downtown Los Angeles.

If you're getting a little bit of cinematic deja vu about this neighborhood it's because the old bridges and the LA River.. in hundreds of TV shows and movies.

Films like William Friedkin's To Live and Die in LA, the cult classic Repo Man, the giant monster ants movie, Them, the film noir directed by John Boorman starring Lee Marvin, Point Blank.

Today, Grease is the word because we're going to be joined by Randall Kleiser, the director of the greatest high school musical ever made.

He's going to be right down there in the river showing us where he shot the Thunder Road drag race.

He's going to talk about how he recreated the 1950s with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John throughout Southern California's most cinematic destinations.

You shot at lots of other locations for Grease.

Can you tell us a little bit about Leo Carrillo and why you picked that for the beginning of th.. Leo Carrillo is a beach that's been used in so many movies, including one where I was an extra.

Okay, Tony Curtis.

I just was a background surfer in Dont Make Waves It was so much fun.

I worked as an extra on I Love You, Alice B. Toklas.

I played a hippie.

I visited the set of Beach Blanket Bingo when I was a student.

I wanted to see how movies were made.

When I was out there, I actually saw Buster Keaton hanging out.

Nobody knew who he was, so I went over and talked to him because I'd been studying him at school.

It was great to be able to meet him.

I was very familiar with the beach, and when we needed an opening, a romantic opening for the movie, I just immediately thought of Leo Carrillo Beach.

[music] We're actually in the LA River with waves going all across the car.

We are.

Look at this.

It reminds me of in the very beginning of Grease with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, there's a big wave that looks like it caught them off guard.

Well, when we were shooting that scene, nobody had checked to see if the tide was in or out, and it was coming in.

Olivia was laughing, and John was a little upset because he thought it was not cool for Olivia to get hit like that.

He was irritated.

You can see it on his face, there's a photo of us where that happened.

It was fine, they just got wet.

There was no damage.

John was protective.

He was protective of her, yes.

I see.

He was protective of her through the whole shoot because he felt-- he acted like an older brother to her.

John was the one who recommended me to direct Grease because we had such a good rapport on The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.

Tell us about some of the other locations for Grease, like three different high schools.

Why did you have to shoot in three different high schools and not just one?

Well, we started shooting Grease at Venice High School.

The football coach didn't want us there.

Whenever we were shooting, he turned on all the sprinklers.

We packed up and left and went to another school.

Why did he not want you there?

It was interfering with his practice and he didn't want a Hollywood movie messing around with his practice.

That was more important to him than the fact that his school was going to be iconic forever.

[laughs] This is the First Street Bridge, so this is where-.

The turnaround.

Ah, yes.

the turnaround takes place.

All right, this is great.

How funny, totally nostalgic.

Here we are at the new bridge.

Wow, this is trippy.

Where are we going to stand?

[laughs] Well, we could stand like Olivia was on this side here.

I can show you exactly where she was sitting.

It was like, she was sitting a little further up.

Yes, how cool is that?

Because that's right behind her.

How about that?

She was watching the thing right there.

The other kids are up there.

She's a loner on her own-- A liner, yes.

coming down.

I was always trying to.. How did she get-- She came from here.

How does it feel being back here, where all the action took place Oh, this is great.

It's amazing to come back and sit exactly where Olivia Newton John was when she saw the ending of the race right down there.

It was about 100 degrees.

The crew had their shirts off.

I had my shoes off, which was a big mistake because I cut my foot and this water here is not the cleanest and I got an infection and a fever and we had to close the movie down for a day because of that.

Here in this photo of you, it looks like there's some kind of bandage on your leg there though.

Oh yes, that's where I got cut -Oh my goodness.

How did you get cured?

John Travolta gave me a Scientology touch assist.

He came into the dressing room, I was lying there with a fever, and he poked me with his finger and said, "Feel my finger?"

I said, "Yes."

"Thank you," he says.

"Feel my finger?"

"Yes," "Thank you."

He did that all over me, and the next day I was cured.

He didn't touch your foot, he touched your-- Just different parts of the body, and I did have some antibiotics too, though.

What about Cha-Cha?

I heard that she was also sick.

What.. Cha-Cha had some kind of problem.

She was in the hospital, actually, and we said, "Okay, well, we'll just drop that scene of you starting the race."

"No, you don't."

She got out of the hospital, came down here and shot that scene where we were doing an homage to Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause, and she didn't want to miss that moment.

She got out of the hospital, came down and did that scene where she starts the race, and then went back to the hospital.

She was sick while she's doing that?

-Yes.

-Wow.

She looks pretty healthy in that scene.

She's great.

It does seem like there's a little bit of an homage, not just to Rebel Without a Cause, but to Ben-Hur here.

Can you talk about your original vision for the Thunder Road sequence?

I wanted the race to happen around the high school track, and we were going to put big floats, paper-mache floats in the middle of the track that looked like the Ben-Hur structures.

That's where we had the Ben-Hur wheels crush the Grease Lightning car.

The studio said it was too expensive to build the floats, and that they should come down to the LA River.

I thought, "Oh, that's terrible."

I wanted to have that float thing.

I came down here, and I saw how nice it is in Panavision, the widescreen with this place is perfect, and especially when we filmed it, and I looked at it on the screen, I realized that it was a much better idea to come here than to do my original one.

There's nothing like being out and about and getting the wide scope of a location, as opposed to being inside a soundstage.

You get more texture, more reality, although in our movie, we weren't looking for reality, but it did give a big scope to the movie, to be outside on location.

There's a very ambitious truck here coming right down the middle.

I hope it doesn't sink.

I think he might.

Oh my God.

This reminds me of the end of the Thunder Road sequence He went down there.

How did you end that sequence, and you just decided, okay, we got to go have the villain defeated?

The stunt guys worked it out.

We had a map of all the three bridges and where they would go and turn around, and then they came up with the idea of going over that culvert there.

Travolta's car could go up and over it, and we filmed in slow motion, so the whole car is all moving around, falling apart almost.

[music] In the end of the movie, it's almost a surreal moment when John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John take off into the atmosphere.

Want to talk about that?

Well, a lot of people on the internet came up with this theory that Olivia was actually dead in the beginning, and it's all flashbacks.

Is this the end?

Of course not.

It's only the beginning.

[music] That's very creative for them to think of that, but the reality is that we started the movie with a cartoon, and then we ended it with them flying off into the sky, just to let everyone know that it was just a fantasy.

The whole movie is not supposed to be real.

It's not a documentary.

It's a musical with some elements of fantasy.

That's what we did, and there's no death in the movie at all.

[music] You're the one that I want (You are the one I want) Ooh, ooh, ooh, honey The one that I want This is John Marshall High School, is that right?

Yes.

Where the carnival takes place Yes, that's right.

Pat Birch, the choreographer, and I showed up that day to figure out where we would shoot You're the One That I Want.

We saw this shake shack, this thing behind it, and we went in there and said, "Well, maybe they could come in here and go out that side."

We figured it out on that day, and the funny thing is that the shake shack has become a restaurant all over the world, based on that name.

No way, I didn't know that.

Yes.

Speaking of on location, here is the dance scene This is at Huntington?

Huntington Park High School, which happened to be right next to a slaughterhouse, and so it was really hot that day, over 100 degrees, and the smell of dead pigs.

It was horrible, but it looks great on film.

Then when we did the premiere of the movie, Paramount built an exact replica of this on a soundstage for the party.

They're thinking, "Why didn't we just shoot on the stage?"

Exactly.

Exactly.

We had to go to the gym at the high school Okay, so here we are.

That's right down there, yes.

Jeff Conaway and Travolta.

I see there looks like an umbrella back here, which is not in the.. Was that just some shade for some of the actors?

Was it that hot?

Probably so, yes.

They were all wearing leather jackets, so it was quite hot This cast was so excited to be in this movie that nothing bothered them.

When we shot the carnival scene, it was also very hot, and they were all wearing hot clothes and they were dancing and putting all kinds of effort into it including the extras.

Everybody gave their all.

You never identify this as the Los Angeles River.

No.

They never even say you're in Southern California No.

It's kinda like it's an everyman kind of place.

Like magic time.

Well, we were going to do a fantasy movie Hollyood version of it We've just made it anywhere USA type of thing.

Don't you feel that people from around the world, like my wife is from South Africa, they look at Grease people from around the world and they say like, "Oh, that's Southern California."

Well, I guess so.

It was Southern, California.

You saw the beaches and all of that.

It wasn't meant to be Southern California.

Just a fantasy land This book is a treasure trove of information, especially for people who love locations.

One of the things I love about it is on almost every page you've got another story that says "The Location" on it.

Yes, because people always want to know where things were filmed and those people go around and shoot exactly where different movies are filmed.

I'm sure you know.

You're probably one of them.

I am.

Love it.

It's fun because when you go back to the place where it was shot It brings back all those memories Amazing.

They want to enter the movie They want to be part of it.

A lot of people want to be part of Grease and that's why we are here today.

Thank you for helping share all of this information.

It's really valuable.

-My pleasure.

It's fun to be back here Thank you so much, Randall.

I really appreciate it Just before COVID, John and Olivia and the T-Birds and I went to Florida and did some sing-alongs there.

The audience went crazy when they saw John and Olivia reunited.

They were so close.

[music]