Follow this main character, audience, with his starry-eyed and idealistic aspirations and his tragic idol by his side as his guiding light…why, dear audience, is he suddenly lost and going down the same path?

What does this say about one’s self-worth versus the worth of public favor?

What does it say about the values of our culture?

What does it say ABOUT YOU?

I am who I say I am. I responded to your website because I liked your take…drugs and pornography, glamour and failure and dark unshiny 1970′s things, indeed.

You must understand this: the remake was no mere attempt at homage, or a desperate attempt by a failing studio to reap profits off it’s back catalogue. It was part of a much bigger and much more sinister agenda of revisionist propaganda that had been going on with the film specifically through much of the Reagan/Bush Years and continues to flourish all across the board these days with the majority of mainstream Hollywood output..:hence the non-stop proliferation of remakes, do-overs, and “inspired-bys”. It is a fact, probably not known by many, that a controversial and much-derided organization backed by Christian fundamentalists with connections in the film industry produced and finallcially backed a major release in 2004 called “Raise Your Voice” which was unquestionably an attempt to recast a “Fame”-like scenario in the strictest pro-religious, pro-aspirational , and pro-”family values” terms.

Fame 09 was just the more covert mulit-ethnic version if it.

As to my career…a Tony Award, leading roles with Coppola and Scorsese, the starring role in 1977′s Saturday Night Fever…this was hardly the stuff of anonymity.

I just did it in a world without YouTube and MySpace….where Warhols “fifteen minutes of fame” was considered an insult and not a blueprint.

I became an actor in a galaxy long ago and far away…where to be an artist, and not a celebrity, was the greatest of dreams.

Really, really, really, really cheap?

MGM got exactly what they deserved. Let it stand as a testament to the fact that unlike the admonishment of the drama teacher in the remake who boldly proclaimed that there is no room for anger in the theatre, that it was precisely that anger that made the 1980 film a classic and the censorial removal of it within the 2009 version that doomed it to failure.

Barry Miller

AKA RALPH GARCY