Trivia / Footloose

• Cast the Runner-Up: Meghan Broadhead and her real-life sister Mimi auditioned to play the older sister, but in the end were cast together instead.
• Creator Backlash: Downplayed with Kevin Bacon, who seems to be cool with (or at least tolerate) it as long as the DJ or band doesn't play the song whenever he's at a wedding. In March 2014, he spoofed the end scene with style on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.
• Dawson Casting: The high school students were all in their mid-twenties, and it was six years since Kevin Bacon played a college student in Animal House, though he manages to look fairly convincing as a high school student. Averted with Chris Penn and Sarah Jessica Parker, who were both teens at the time.
• I Am Not Spock: In a 2013 interview with Howard Stern, Kevin Bacon admitted that he has actually tipped DJs at weddings NOT to play "Footloose". He stated that people expect him to dance the song as he did in the movie. In truth, while he did do some of the dancing there was also a dancing double for him as well.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Chris Penn could not dance, so they had to teach him in terms of what he already knew: wrestling.
• Method Acting: With the principal's knowledge, 24-year-old Kevin Bacon attended the Payson Utah High School as "Ren McCormack", a transfer student from Philadelphia to get into his role. With his narrow tie and new-wave haircut, he was treated pretty much like in the film. Bacon gratefully left with the location scouts on the afternoon of the first day.
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: Michael Cimino's proposed re-imagination of the film was said to be a musical-comedy inspired by The Grapes of Wrath.
• One-Book Author: This was Mimi and Meghan Broadhead's only film role, apparently because of unwanted attention from strangers and them being subjecting to name-calling at school.
• Real-Life Relative:
  • In the scene where Reverend Shaw shows Ren a picture of his deceased son Bobby, John Lithgow actually showed a photograph of his real son.
  • In the 1984 version, Ren's cousins Amy and Sarah Warnicker are played by actual sisters Mimi and Meghan Broadhead in the 2011 remake by Maggie Elizabeth and Mary-Charles Jones. Additionally, the sisters in both the 1984 and 2011 versions are locals of the Utah and Georgia filming locations, respectively and their sister Lillian Jones plays an background extra in the scene when Ren teaches Willard to dance.
  • Mimi and Meghan Broadhead's father J. Paul Broadhead played Mayor Dooley and their mom and brothers played extras in some scenes.
• Referenced by...:
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe: In Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Footloose is Peter Quill's favorite movie, and he considers Kevin Bacon to be "Earth's Greatest Hero". In Avengers: Infinity War, when Spider-Man recognizes a reference to the film, Quill asks if it's still considered the greatest movie ever made back on Earth (Spidey responds "it never was"). The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special revolves around Drax and Mantis kidnapping the real Kevin Bacon to give Peter a good Christmas present.
  • Young Sheldon: In "Crappy Frozen Ice Cream and an Organ Grinder's Monkey", Missy watches it and relates with it due to Mary forbidding her to go to the school dance.
  • The Flash (2023): Because of Barry screwing over the timeline, Footloose now stars Michael J. Fox instead of Kevin Bacon.
• Star-Making Role: For Kevin Bacon.
• Technology Marches On: A key issue with the remake is how much it ignores how such a law would be pretty much impossible to enforce once the Internet was around.
• Troubled Production: Perfectionist Michael Cimino — apparently having not learned his lesson from the Heaven's Gate debacle — went vastly over budget on this film before he'd even shot a single frame of footage, requiring him to be fired as director and replaced with Herbert Ross.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Tom Cruise and Rob Lowe were both slated to play the lead. Cruise was busy with All the Right Moves, while Lowe auditioned three times and had dancing ability and the "neutral teen" look that the director wanted, but he pulled his knee, and the injury prevented him from taking the part. John Travolta also passed on it.
  • Lori Singer beat out Madonna for the part of Ariel. Daryl Hannah was also considered for the part, but she turned it down to star in Splash instead. Elizabeth McGovern was offered the role, but turned it down in favour of Once Upon a Time in America. Other candidates included Rosanna Arquette, Jamie Lee Curtis, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jodie Foster, Melanie Griffith, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Diane Lane, Michelle Pfeiffer and Brooke Shields.
  • As mentioned earlier, Michael Cimino was originally chosen to direct, provided that he wouldn't go over budget and that he would deliver the film on schedule. However, Cimino demanded to halt production just weeks before shooting began until he rewrote the script as a much darker drama - he later described his concept as a "musical inspired by The Grapes of Wrath where Ren would be part of a family of itinerant workers who settle in Beaumont and are persecuted by Reverend Moore and the townspeople. (How the dancing ban would fit into this, he didn't bother to explain.) Dean Pitchford claims that he went through twenty-two drafts trying to accommodate Cimino, none of which the latter found acceptable. Besides which, Cimino asked for another 250,000 dollars besides his agreed salary for the trouble of doing all this. The studio heads then had flashbacks of the Heaven's Gate debacle going through their heads, panicked and proceeded to get rid of Cimino as fast as they could.

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