`FOOTLOOSE' FLIES AGAIN; LYRICIST-SCREENWRITER DEAN PITCHFORD TURNS HIT '80S MOVIE INTO '90S BROADWAY MUSICAL.

Byline: Reed Johnson Staff Writer

Meeting Dean Pitchford at his impeccably appointed Hollywood Hills home, you may wonder: Is this a middle-aged all-American boy, or a 40-something rebel with a cause?

You detect a hard-driving, aggressive streak behind Pitchford's graceful smile and charm-school manners. There's a steadiness in his storm-gray eyes that says, ``I may be nice, but I'm no pushover.''

Then you remember that this is the guy who once wrote, in all innocence and good faith, the following lyrics:

Cut loose, Footloose 

Kick off your Sunday shoes.

Please, Louise

Pull me off of my knees.

Jack, get back

Come on before we crack.

Loose your blues

Everybody cut Footloose

James Dean, or Andy Hardy? Or perhaps Kevin Bacon? Who better, after all, than the intense and boyishly likable Bacon to portray the intense, boyishly likable Pitchford, the guiding creative force behind ``Footloose,'' that hip-swiveling slice of Reagan-era optimism?

Tonight, those familiar lyrics will be sung by Joe Machota in the touring production of the live stage version of ``Footloose,'' which is opening a two-week engagement at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. With the blessing of Pitchford, who penned nine new songs for the show, ``Footloose'' has been reborn as an acrobatic Broadway musical directed by Walter Bobbie, who helmed the recent acclaimed revival of ``Chicago.''

Already, the stage version has logged nearly 400 performances on Broadway, while the touring production has been drawing stronger notices than the show did in New York.

The Broadway show closely follows the 1984 movie version of ``Footloose,'' in which Bacon portrayed a hip city kid transplanted to a hick town where dancing has been banned. After several run-ins with the local hellfire minister, played by John Lithgow, Bacon's character converts his classmates and soon has the entire town shaking its collective Midwestern tail-feather.

The ``Footloose'' soundtrack, which teamed Pitchford with seven composers, including Michael Gore, Kenny Loggins, Tom Snow, Sammy Hagar and Eric Carmen, spent 10 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Albums chart. It went on to sell more than 16 million copies worldwide and yielded six Top 40 hits, including the title track, ``Let's Hear It for the Boy,'' ``Almost Paradise,'' ``I'm Free'' and ``Dancing in the Sheets.''

``This is the house that `Footloose' bought,'' says Pitchford, laughing, as he indicates the surrounding stylishness.

Composer Snow, a friend and collaborator for 20 years, says Pitchford's lyrics are what gave the ``Footloose'' soundtrack its coherency and identity.

``What I thought was his (Pitchford's) greatest achievement was writing lyrics that could stand alone as a pop song,'' Snow says, ``and yet when you see the film, you realize it related to the action without sort of breaking into `Oh, what a beautiful morning!' ''

The success of ``Footloose'' certified Pitchford as one of Hollywood's hottest young songwriters of the 1980s. Four years earlier, he had broken into the club with ``Fame,'' another kinetic flick about gyrating adolescents, for which he supplied the lyrics to Michael Gore's music.

Yet although he wrote both the lyrics and screenplay for ``Footloose,'' Pitchford says it didn't occur to him at the time that there were autobiographical elements in the film.

``A year after the movie came out, somebody pointed out to me that this was my life's story,'' says Pitchford, settling into a pastel sofa. ``And I had no idea what they meant.''

Today, he concedes a few parallels between himself and his restless hero.

``It was hard,'' says Pitchford, who was born in Hawaii but moved to Missouri when his parents, who'd split up a few years earlier, tried to pull the family back together again by relocating to the American heartland.

``I think that any kid from a broken home, as you lose one family and try to form another, there's a kind of desperation that you might cover over with a kind of nonchalance,'' he continues. ``But there really is a kind of `Agghh! Where do I go next?' And all of that eventually made its way into `Footloose.' ''

Imagine, if you will, the screen treatment for ``The Dean Pitchford Story'':

A whip-smart kid from Honolulu gets plunked down in Kansas City, circa 1968. Feeling like a tropical fish in a cornfield, he does his gosh-darnedest to fit in.

He joins the pep squad, the speech club and the student council. He writes poetry for the school literary magazine. He allies himself with any number of cliques, as if to say, ``See? I'm one of you.''

Through hard work, rah-rah spirit and a chameleonlike eagerness to please, he helps set the school dancing to his own uptempo rhythms. Pitchford is the type of kid your parents askedyou to invite over, ``instead of that rough crowd you're always hanging out with.''

Two years later, he graduates near the top of his class and heads off to major in English at Yale. But his plans take a sudden swerve when he goes to New York City, auditions for a barely heard-of Broadway musical called ``Godspell,'' and gets cast. At age 19!

Pretty soon, he's living in Manhattan, commuting to New Haven by train at 6:40 in the morning and taking classes until 2:30 p.m. before hopping a train back to New York, catching a short backstage nap and performing in ``Godspell.'' Then getting up the next day and doing the same thing all over again.

And loving every minute of it.

``I just felt like I was living some kind of exotic movie that I'd seen.''

Thirty years later, with an Oscar, a Golden Globe Award and two Grammy nominations under his belt, Pitchford is a seasoned entertainment pro with a lengthy track record in writing songs and screenplays for film and television. He also has a directing career that's been steadily gaining momentum, with several current projects in various phases of development.

He has written or co-written pop, dance and country hits for some of the recording industry's biggest stars, such as Melissa Manchester (``You Should Hear How She Talks About You''), Dolly Parton (``Don't Call It Love'') and Whitney Houston (``All the Man That I Need'').

Calvinistically hard-working, he has found time in between for offbeat projects like the Royal Shakespeare Company production of ``Carrie,'' a 1988 musical version of the Brian De Palma horror film. The show was a legendary Broadway bomb, closing after just five performances. But it endures among cultists as an example of the kind of envelope-pushing Broadway purports to want but seldom manages to produce.

``My career, if anything, has been indicative of somebody with an attention-deficit disorder,'' Pitchford says.

Asked what kept him balanced all these years, between the frantic deadlines and the ego-driven stress of collaboration, Pitchford replies with characteristic candor.

``Oh, I think 17 years of therapy. Also, I've been doing yoga now for 11 years, and I've been doing meditation for six years. ''

``The other thing that grounded me was losing so many hundreds of friends in the AIDS epidemic. On any number of projects I would find myself in the throes of, `They want to change this line of my lyrics,' and I'd be so caught up in it. And then I'd get word that somebody was HIV-positive, or somebody was in the hospital, or somebody had died. And everything that had loomed so large in my life went ssssh-ooomp! and shrank down. It didn't happen just once or twice or 20 or 50 times, it happened hundreds of times. And after a while you kind of, like, get the message of the universe.''

Tom Snow agrees that the AIDS crisis altered his friend.

``I think there was a tempering of Dean,'' he says. ``He kind of arrived in L.A. riding on the wave of `Fame,' and an Oscar, and everything he touched turned to gold. It's even embodied in the lyric of `Fame': `I'm going to live forever.' ''

``These are things that happen, and they're terribly sad and tragic, but they temper a person. I've really seen him go full circle, and I admire what he's done with his life.''

Pitchford says he ``had to be dragged kicking and screaming'' to revisit ``Footloose'' after putting it away so long ago. It was Carol Schwartz, wife of ``Godspell'' author and longtime friend Stephen Schwartz, who convinced Pitchford to adapt the movie, arguing that high school performers needed more shows with uplifting messages that allowed them to play characters their own age.

Pitchford believes that the stage version is better than the movie, in part because it gives a fuller account of the central clash between the minister and the juvenile protagonist. He says he appreciated having the chance to flesh out the secondary characters and ``to populate a town.''

But in the end, Pitchford says, the story of ``Footloose'' is a simple one.

As simple, at any rate, as any boy's life.

``We remember it as a big hit, but it's a small story,'' he says. ``It was just a small movie. It was made for $8 million! It's a little, tiny slice of humanity.''

The facts

What: ``Footloose.''

Where: Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd.

When: Tonight through Sept. 5. Performances at 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays.

Tickets: $32-$57. Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos, box

PHOTO (1-- cover -- color) Hit musical arrives at the Pantages, and its creator is kicking up his heels. The stage version of ``Footloose'' follows in the footsteps of the 1984 film that starred Kevin Bacon.

(3) Dean Pitchford

Charlotte Schmid-Maybach/Staff Photographer