Get Your Head in the Game: PETER BARSOCCHINI

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Wildcats, this is Bart Johnson and you're listening to
get your hitd in the game. Hey everyone, and welcome
back to get your head in the game today. I've
got a real treat for you. My guest is the
creative force behind the cultural phenomenon. The person who had
a vision, turned it into a script and used his

(00:23):
own daughter's name for the lead character. He didn't just
write this story, he helped launch a franchise that defined
a generation. Please give a warm welcome to the writer
and creator of High School Musical, Peter Barsacini. This is
the guy you walked in and he said, oh, don't
stand up. I was like, are you kid? I gotta say,
I gotta I gotta hug the man that changed my life.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
But Bart, we're like related, We're related, going, you know,
going all the way back to the beginning the filming
of High School Musical and all of a sudden what
it became and to the shack of all has continued
to be you know, I mean, I saw a thing
on social media of you the other day where you
were at where they were doing the stage version at

(01:05):
a school. Since two thousand and six, it's been like
a million performances of high school musical It's schools, you know.
At one point there was a production of high school
musical stage show going on in Israel and in Lebanon
at the same time, you know, And it's just so

(01:26):
it's like one of these things that's crossed. I had
no idea, nobody had any idea it would cross borders
like it. Yeah, you know, but so it's a cool
and I still get letters I get, you know, from
people around the world, and you know, it's pretty crazy.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
Well, this is this is a special one for me because,
like you're it, you were at the beginning. This is
none of this would I mean, it's easy to say
that about a lot of people, but this is actual,
literal you have created all you created this.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
Okay, But do you want to know how it started? Yes, okay,
I to tell you. It started when I was rewriting
another an action movie for somebody and the two producers,
Bill Board and Barry Rosenbush were the producers of this movie,
and the big executive on the movie was a guy
who was ran an hour late to every meeting. So

(02:17):
I'd be there on time, you know, and we'd wait
for an hour and so we started talking, you know,
and they said, oh, we're doing something a Disney channel.
And so we would talk sports and we would talk
music because those are the two things in my life,
you know, growing up, that was my life. And after
a month of us byessing, you know, they said, maybe
you should do something for Disney. Maybe because they've got

(02:40):
girls watching, they don't have boys. They want to do
something where the girls will still tune in, but the
boys won't gag and run out of the room, you know.
So they want to do a sports thing and this
and that. And I was a Jim Ratt growing up.
I played basketball my whole life, and we went to
pitch to Disney. He wrote a thing. So when I

(03:01):
was in high school, literally in high school. The music
part comes from I started as a writer covering rock
and roll in San Francisco at fifteen years old. Sixteen
years old, and we didn't know all the I didn't
know I was going to fill More West three nights
a week, Winterland. I didn't know these people were going
to be famous, you know, but they were cool. It
was Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Elton John, the Bowling style

(03:26):
and all these people were coming through there, so I
got my music fixed. Sports thing. I was on the
basketball team and the best player on our team was
Lynn Swann, who was a great football player who went
on to win five Super Bowls and he got a
Super Bowl MVP. So Lynn was like world class and

(03:46):
going to be a world class phenomenal athlete. And so
one night I'm in high school, junior year of high school.
This has to be like nineteen sixty eight or sixty nine.
I guess nineteen sixty nine. I'm sitting next to Lynn
the bus and like when you're the writer, it's like
people always say things to you. It's like they figure

(04:07):
you must know something, or maybe because I'm Italian, they
know I'll keep my mouth shut if they say to
And so Lynn says to me, you know, I'm going
to tell you something, and if you tell anybody, I'm
gonna kill you. So that was a nice breaker right there.
But he goes and you couldn't get a better jock
than Lynn. You know, every school in America literally was

(04:29):
pursuing him as a football player. And he said to me,
you know what I really wanted to do my whole life.
And I go, yeah, me know, he goes, I want
to be a ballet dancer. I go, what, Yeah, I
want to be a bally said the neighborhood where I
grow up. Man, you say you're a ballet dancer, you
get your kicked, you know. I go, wow, I mean
that's pretty amazing. Okay, file that into my feebrow brain

(04:53):
to you know, twenty thirty years later, you know, and
I'm sitting talking to these guys, and we go, well,
what if the biggest jock in high school, the big
man on campus, wanted to do something way out of
the box, like being musical theater. Now, remember we're talking
about this in two thousand and three. It's not like

(05:16):
today where nobody would care one way or the other
if somebody does anything. You know, back then, if you
if you were Tom Brady, you weren't starring in the
school musical. Yeah, trust me, you know. And so we go,
what if the big guy on campus and they say, okay,
you know, maybe we can get a great songwriter, you know,

(05:36):
And we're saying, well, the way to do the music
isn't one guy, you know, it should be the right
songwriter for the right song. Now Disney had great experience
with this, but I was in a Volkswagen Beatle sometime again.
I'm sixteen years old with Janis Joplin, right, and she
had asked me to give her a ride home from

(05:58):
Fillmore West because she just had a big art you meant,
with her boyfriend, right, and she was Southern comfort and
all this stuff. I said, I'll give me a ride
because I think I'll get in the greatest scoop. Now,
I didn't have a driver's license or a car, so
that was a little drawback. But I went to a
friend of mine. You gotta lend me your brother's car.
You gotta lend me, he says. If you no, I'll

(06:19):
be fine. Now, remember this is San Francisco, so it's
got the stick shift, you know, which our friends here
have never driven in their lives. And you get in
San Francisco, driving a stick shift is challenging. And so
I'm int the car with jan it's just trying to
not crash this car. And she's going on and on
about her boyfriend. In her big bag. She had one

(06:42):
of these big carpet bagger like you see and gone
with the wind bag. You know where she kept your
bottle whiskey. And she had these old eight track tapes.
This guy had an eight track as a machine bigger
than that phone over there, you know, and she would
say something about this son of a and then she'd
take out out a tape and shove it into the

(07:03):
thing and play and it'd be like Somebody to Love
by the Jefferson Airplane. And then she'd argue that and
and she'd pull out another eight track and she step
in and is Linda Ron's dad, you know, a long
long time or something. And by the end of it,
she was like doing the soundtrack of her breakup. But
I was thinking at the time, God, wouldn't it be
great too if you had those songs on one album. Now,

(07:24):
everybody under the age of one hundred, you know, look
at me now and go, what are you talking about?
That's what you know? Nobody there's no albums and you know,
everything's a playlist. Right back then, there were just albums,
right there was no compilation like that. And I thought, Okay,
let's do that for this movie. You create the emotional
arc of the story through what the songs are going

(07:45):
to be about before you even get into you know,
everything else. And so we pitched like ten songs to
the executive Denise Carlson at Disney, and eight of them
actually ended up in the movie. You know, written by
great songwriters, not by us. I was only involved with
creation of one song, but it that's where it started.

(08:06):
It started on a bus when I was in high
school in nineteen sixty nine, thinking what if the big
man on campus wanted to do something way out of
the box. So that became Troy Bolton saying I'll do
the musical. And when you're in high school, if your
girlfriend said, you know, would you do this, you do that,
You'll jump into a cauldron of burning flames for her,

(08:27):
you know, And so that's where it started.

Speaker 1 (08:32):
That's crazy, yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
Isn't that? And that's it's beautiful.

Speaker 1 (08:35):
It's a it's a you know, it's always such a mystery.
We were talking about like the longevity of the movie,
in the reach of the movie and crossing the boards,
and it's it's a it seems like a big mystery.
But then he starts looking at the roots of where
this came, like, that's a that's that's pretty amazing that it's.

Speaker 2 (08:52):
Well, I'll tell you, you know, people ask why, you know,
for anything to succeed in the entertainment business is anybody
in this room, will your twenty planets have to line up?

Speaker 1 (09:01):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (09:02):
And so it something happens. Sometimes it doesn't. But I
can tell you about High School Musical is that none
of the people who made it, me, the two producers,
Bill and Barry, Kenny Ortaga, none of us are cynical guys.
We weren't going in there trying to, oh, let's do
something with a message. We were going in there to
have fun. I mean I was doing at the time.

(09:25):
I was writing a pilot for Lifetime Television, a one
hour pilot about my wasted youth in New York with sex, drugs, models,
rock and roll, you know, And I go, oh, this
is a can't miss thing of the century. I had
two daughters, you know, and they're watching Disney Channel every night. Well,
we're making dinner and I'm sitting there, so I'm absorbing

(09:48):
this tone this thing. I said, I would love to
watch some write something they could watch, you know, And
so I named all the characters. My daughter is Gabriella,
their daughter is Taylor. My you know, I have a
niece named Kelsey. I have a nephew named Jason. Those
are the characters. And I thought that'd be cool if

(10:10):
it gets made to get to hear their name once,
you know, then then that happened. But in terms of
the movie itself, look, we just want to make something fun,
you know, for kids. You know this and that we're
all kids at heart, you know, and you're always a
kid at heart your whole life if you want to,
you know, if it doesn't get beaten out of you

(10:31):
or life event out of you.

Speaker 1 (10:33):
You know.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
And so there was that. But we also one thing
we consciously did. We said we don't want to make
and this is where you come in, Bart, because we
don't want to make the adults the typical idiots that
you see a lot of times the kids, well the
adults are, you know, coming in stumbling around, mumbling, you know. Yeah,

(10:54):
we want to make a real relationship between Troy Bolton
and his and where all these planets line up. We
got lucky with you because you brought authenticity to it.
And I remember talking to you about even the locker
room scene before their big game, and you brought a

(11:14):
lot of ideas to that and energy and things, and
you played it for real. One of my good friends
growing up in Hollywood, I used to play basketball again
the theme of my life at his house every Saturday
was Gary Marshall and Gary who was a you know,
fabulous guy, great director, right, but he said, the secret

(11:37):
to comedy and the secret to family entertainment is you
got to play it for life and death. If you
go for the joke, you're screwed. You won't get it.
Just play the reality of what's written, and it was
written as decent, then that will emerge, you know. So
we tried to make that through three movies with your character.

(11:58):
And again not because you're sitting here, but I tipped
my hat to you because you brought an authenticity to
that relationship between Troy and his dad that hinged our story.
None of the jokes work, none of his high school angst,
you know, where am I going to college? And am
I doing the right thing with a girl? And I

(12:20):
want to sing but my dad wants me to play basketball.
None of that would have worked at all if there
hadn't been an authentic relationship between Coach Bolton and his
son Troy. And you brought the game, brother.

Speaker 1 (12:38):
So it's the greatest compliment in my life right now.

Speaker 2 (12:40):
Yeah, that really you know, and you see it. We're
all geniuses in the rear view mirror. Right. And but
Steve job said something really really smart when he did
that famous Stanford commencement speech, and he says, you can't
you can only understand connect the diy of your life

(13:01):
in the rear view mirror.

Speaker 1 (13:02):
You know all these.

Speaker 2 (13:03):
Things that happen. And when I see high school Musical
and you look at the three of them, if you
go back and you just extracted the scenes between coach
Bolton and his son, you'll see sort of the emotional
it reveal it. It allowed a young actor Zach Efron

(13:23):
and a character Troy Bolton, to actually reveal their emotional
life in a bigger way than just I have a
crush on Gabriella, you know, and where Steph gets screwed up?
In my opinion? And I don't know, but I you know,
I just do what I do. But is where when

(13:44):
you're writing about young people, if you don't play their
emotional life authentically. You say, oh, he's fifteen, what does
it matter to him what he does here? What does
it matter to that his relationship with that girl? There's
going to be twenty more girls and marry somebody else?
What does it mean? But in that moment, that relationship

(14:07):
is the biggest thing in the world to them and
it's real and it's foundational, and so what if it
changes in morph But in that moment, if you don't
exist in the reality of that moment, you've got nothing.
And so I think if there's anything we did right
was believe in that. You know, even when you're doing
musical comedy, you know, and you know you have the

(14:31):
foil of Sharpey and you have all that. You know,
there's a moment in High School Musical two where Troy Bolton,
the whole their show is falling apart of course, thank god,
you know, and Trey Bolton comes into Sharpey, you know,
it says I'm gonna do your show because I said
that I wouldn't do that. And Ashley did the best

(14:51):
scene of her life where she played it and said,
that's so good. I wish you were doing that for me.
And in that moment, which they filmed it three in
the morning, she played it so real because she was exhausted,
and she played it for real and there and the
emotion was was there. And I'll just give you one

(15:13):
more example of when we did the film the film version,
and it was in theaters. We went to Me and
Bill and Barry and a couple of people went to
various theaters and we'd stand in kind of in front
in the dark to see what people reacted to. And
because they're the arbiters, the audience is, you know what

(15:34):
you think is hilarious. The audience stares at and then
you write a line like yeah, like a peanut butter sandwich,
and they fall out of their seats and you go,
what the hell just happened. But anyway, we're watching that
movie and there's a scene in it when Troy goes
to Stanford because that's where Gabrielle is and the problem
is going on back in Albuquerque, right, And he's up

(15:55):
in a tree and she goes walking by and she
sees him and she's, what are you doing here? It's
a prom and he goes, My prom is where you are.
The audience. When we looked at the audience, it wasn't
just the kids that were staring at. It was all
the moms who were sitting with their daughters saying, I

(16:17):
want a boy who says that to my daughter, not
a baby. Let's get in the car, you know. So
it's like those are but those are authentic and that
came from raising daughters. You know, I learned a lot
from raising daughters. It's another Jack guy, you know, Jason

(16:38):
girls around New York, and then I had daughters and
I learned a lot.

Speaker 1 (16:42):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The kids change it all they looking
through looking through that lens.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
Yeah. But that's why you know the authenticity of your scenes,
because you're a dad, you know, and you know what
it is to be a dad.

Speaker 3 (16:59):
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Speaker 2 (18:00):
You know, it's really funny because it's it's like at
school when she, you know, it came out. She was
in like fifth grade, sixth grade, you know, went to
school over here at Campbell Hall. And when that the
week you know, it comes out on a Friday night,

(18:20):
Well the next week, all hell breaks loose at school,
you know, because they go, wait, the character's name gabriel
that's Gabrielle, you know, and and then it's it's funny.
Then she, you know, lived in New York line and
she's living back here now she's just got married and

(18:43):
time warp. But she'd be like at dinner in New
York down in the village where she lived, you know,
with her friends, you know, and they'd all be out
being big shots, having glasses of wine. You know, and
say they'd heard somebody talking about high school musical at
the next table, you know, Zach and one of her

(19:03):
girlfriends goes, well, there's Gabriella and what are you talking about.
That's Gabriella, that's her.

Speaker 1 (19:09):
You know.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
She pulls out her phone, puts her Oh my god, healthy,
and she's like, she's pretty shot. You know. It's just
like Zach was so kind to during high school too,
you know, because it would be up filming for three
months or two months. I'd get Zach to call her
up to make her do her homework. You see, you

(19:31):
wouldn't listen to me, but Zach, oh, you're doing your math.
What are you working on? And she'd be like, I'm
working on you know. It's like and then and then
she do it. So there was a nice synchronicity to that.
And it's it's really kind of funny. My niece Kelsey,
she shit happened. You know. It's like, I get a

(19:53):
phone call one day from my sister in law says,
you gotta send me a high school musical script. I go, well,
Kelsey went to school. This is just after it was exploding,
right because their school and they were having like show
and Tell day or telling something interesting about their lives.
And well, the character Kelsey and High School Musical was
based on me. And the teacher goes, you don't have

(20:18):
to say something for us to think you're you know,
you're you're a very valuable person, and you know it's
really Kelsey goes, I'm crying, you know, and their mother
calls me and what you gotta be access to the
teacher and know, I go, what are you talking about?
You know? I did you know? I did?

Speaker 1 (20:38):
Like that?

Speaker 2 (20:38):
You know happens all the it's still it still freaking happens,
and it takes people back to just like with you.
You know you're gonna be cause you're the face. You're
a face. You know, they know you, you know. And
then I got to say hi Bart, the coach Bolton
and when you're the writer, people don't know it, you know.
And then somebody, oh, yeah, you were in high school

(21:01):
music got out of here right high school? Yeah, you're right,
what you know? And then it happens when you get
out into the civilian world that so.

Speaker 1 (21:13):
You know, what I always loved about the character you
made was in these kind of movies that you play,
you either play the dad or you play the coach.
So it's like and the coaches, like the discipline, are
supposed to pull this stuff and be hard on and
you're supposed to get the love and the support from
the from the dad at home to a certain degree.
And I felt like it created such a conflict for

(21:36):
for me to have to what's the line, what's the
line you balanced between those two And I try to
keep that very visceral, And like anytime we did a scene,
I'm looking at my son, I'm internally saying, what role
am I playing right now? Like the dad that's supposed
to be pumping up my son, and I supposed to
be the coach. It's supposed to be like, yeah, pushing

(21:57):
them hard. And I just love I love that, like
finding the kind of the complexity of relationship.

Speaker 2 (22:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:04):
And then Zach is playing it real. I mean, it
doesn't matter if this was Disney or any other movie.
He played it so real and he was really feeling,
feeling all the fields.

Speaker 2 (22:15):
You can't lie to the camera.

Speaker 1 (22:17):
You can't the camera season yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:19):
One way or the other. If it's an act there
with the scene, if it's a singer on a stage.
They saw a lot of singers on a lot of stages. Yeah,
and I saw the ones that were you go, you'd
see him for the first time and you'd go, oh
my god. I remember I saw Elton John his second

(22:40):
show he ever did in America. He did his first
show down here at the Troubadour, and then he went
up three days later up to San Francisco, played the
film where nobody knew with him.

Speaker 1 (22:48):
This fresh he was.

Speaker 2 (22:49):
Yeah, this is when he first time he came to America.
And when I saw him, I didn't know who he was.
He was second on the bill. The headliners were a
band called the Kinks. There was four acts on in
those days. You go to Fillmore West before acts and
two sets. You could stay for both shows. But it
was Ball and Jack, Juicy, Lucy, Elton John and the
Kinks on the bill. And so on comes this guy,

(23:12):
Elton John, and he does a song called Your Song,
and I listened to it. I never heard it in
my life. Didn't know who this guy was, and I said,
I don't know what just happened, but this guy is magic.
There's something so real in what he's doing that you

(23:33):
know he might become something he did.

Speaker 1 (23:36):
Yeah, yeah, I think it was ooda Hoggen that said,
your audience can't feel any emotions, you're not genuinely feeling yourself.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
It's a great quote. That's a great quote.

Speaker 1 (23:47):
Yeah, and I think it's so true. And you know,
Kenny was it was great to create the environment on
the set to get us there and kind of hold
us to that, you know, to the authenticity. It isn't
seeing that the the authenticity seems to be like a
something that keeps coming up in in for all the actors,

(24:08):
for how they felt like Kenny would organically get performances
out of people and even dance moves, even some of
the choreography. Lucas was telling me that he said, you
do the dance to this song the way you think
you would do it right, And they'd watch him and go,
okay that and then let me pull some like authenticity
out of even your movements.

Speaker 2 (24:27):
That's it. That's it, and it's you. You know, the
thing that separates the great from the one timer or
something is then being able to do that on take twelve,
you know, it's you know, you can deliver Anton and
then the drugs that I need that but our lighting
was I did Joe Peshy is a friend of mine

(24:48):
and he I sometimes talk to him about working because
I admired his work so much, you know, and he
said to when he works with Martin Scis says he
he said, Chis says, he would let you try anything
for the first two weeks of rehearsal, try anything. But
then when he picks a take, he said, that's what
he wants on the day, and if it takes twenty

(25:08):
three takes, he still wants that take and he wants
it to be you know, and that's where you get it.
I think, Kenny, it goes back to what I was saying, Kenny,
like all of us on that film, those films or
big kids, you know, we're not cynical. We're not I
think we're smarter than Hollywood or we know what kids like.

(25:30):
You know, you know we're you're professional because you deliver
your stuff on time and you know, sometimes you get fired,
sometimes you get hired. But we're open to being big kids.
And that's why we liked doing that. And for anything
to work, there was there's fifty people that had their

(25:51):
hand in high school and just us. You know, it's
like Gary marsh the Disney Channel who was running. You know,
he gave us a lot of rope. We got a
ideas here, music supervisor, the people on this head. You know,
there's so many people behind the curtain. You don't see that.
And it's just as easy. You work just as hard
to make a flop as you do to make hit.

Speaker 1 (26:12):
Yeah, yeah, I'm just as you're talking, I'm thinking about
all the the different elements of this film that there
were not one dimensional, right, even even the characters. I
think maybe from the outside or someone that might want
to try writing their own high school musical, you have
a tendency to write the what it appears to be
on surface, and these one dimensional like I all the

(26:32):
time I'm offered jobs I played like the coach and yes,
very one dimensional or the dad buffoon, you know, one dimensional.
But all the characters, like pretty much all the characters
in this movie had had real complexity, real real conflicts.

Speaker 2 (26:50):
Yeah that either feel real or they don't. But there
was this stuff out of my life, you know, half
of the you know stuff in the in those movies,
the character takes the actors take what's in the script
and make it better, bring colors to it, bring you know,
that's why I was talking to you about what Coach

(27:10):
Bolton did because you found stuff in it that made
it what it is. You know, there was enough in
the script for you to go, Okay, I get that. Now,
let me see what I can do with that, you know.
And that's what a script is. It's not carving something
into stone. You know. You have to discover it on

(27:31):
the day. You have to, you know. And that's why
it takes a village to make a good movie. Because
Kenny was you know, and it's funny with high school musical.
It's the only script that I've ever written for anything
where they greenlit the first draft. You know, they got
the first draft, and I didn't hear from them for
like six weeks, which in Hollywood is the kiss of death,

(27:55):
you know. Then I get a phone call from the
producers saying, oh, they're going to send it out to
send it to directors. It's the first track. No, they like,
they're going to send it to the first person they
send it to is Kenny Ortega, who, at the time,
he'd be the first one to tell you, was sort
of in director's jail. He was doing Gilmore Girls. This
said he had done big feature films at Disney which

(28:16):
have since become perennials, you know, like Hocus Focus and Newsies.
But he wasn't getting offered features. He got that he says,
I want to put my toe back in the water
of a musical and boom, you know if that planet
had no lined up where you know, so there it was.

Speaker 1 (28:35):
Yeah. Yeah, by the way, I love the character. So
grateful for the character you will for that I got
to play. But I really like when screenwriters they don't
get I don't know if you see this a lot
where they try to tell you all of your behavior
and movements and you're supposed to look here and do
that and make this gesture, and it's like, let me,

(28:56):
let me feel my emotions.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
And every actor, every director, the first sometimes there's a
draft that you do for the studio executives so that
they understand what the emotional component of that scene is.
And they say, Coach Bolton looks at his son like
he's looking at a person he's never met in his life,

(29:19):
you know, so that they understand this is news to
him that his son sings right now. On the day
when you start hiring actors and stuff, first thing you're
going to tell me this. But the first thing the
actors they take their pen it goes through, cutting out
all the stage directions, the director couts through, cuts out
the part where the writer says, and then the helicopter

(29:41):
shot comes in and goes underneath that. You know, and
you do a reading draft for the studio. But then
when you start making it, step one, cross that out,
step two. Hire a good actor and he'll make you
look good like yeah, and that's the that's the ticket.

(30:01):
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Speaker 1 (30:03):
Yeah, yeah, well yeah when they when you have the
freedom there, then then you could just you know, I
just because I had kids at the time we were shooting,
and I just always looked at my son Troy, like
like Mike, like how much do I love my kids?
And like put that much love?

Speaker 2 (30:18):
Wait, your son is Troy?

Speaker 1 (30:20):
No no, not no no. But a funny story by my
Uh when the movie came out and started becoming more
and more popular, by my oldest boy Bailing. He's like, hey,
so is Zach my brother. He was so good, Like.

Speaker 2 (30:36):
Well, that's what I love when I read that. Ashley Uh,
when her daughter finally watched high school music or something,
she was saying to people. My mother is shar Pay.
My mother's shar Pay. That name came Sharpay, came from
a dog who bit me. I was trying to think

(30:58):
of a name for that character. And there's a still
annoying dog who bit me. I said, s p right, careful,
you get a bit Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (31:17):
I'm curious how the early process eater of Like, so
you're having this conversation with Barrows, Bush and Billboard, yeah,
and about a different project, right, and then you start
different because you have this hour before the executive comes along.
You start spitballing these ideas and was everybody just interesting?

Speaker 2 (31:36):
Yeah? I mean Bill and Barry were great and they
have you know, their DNA is all over high school musical.

Speaker 1 (31:42):
And it's like, I know they're big basketball fans.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
Huge basketball fans, but they have good story instincts. We
worked out, you know. And the reason Bill and Barry
and I got along for three movies and maybe another
one is the best idea wins. You know, we sit
in the room and it's not what are you putting
down my you know, you just get in there and

(32:07):
let the best, let the ideas emerge. And so that
that came, you know, and as a writer, you grab
what whatever you hear. I heard from a a there
was a Disney executive who wasn't executive on the film,
but she was a production executive. Her name was Donna Ebbs,

(32:28):
and I remember being in a meeting where she is
reading the script for something for a budget or something
like that. Just oh, I love that. I love that
Sharpey character, you know, because if she could that girl,
if she could play you know, Romeo and Juliet, her
brother be out of a job. And I thought, hey,
that's a good line. There was somebody to have, you know,
and so you just steal every I heard Woody Allen

(32:51):
say one time he just keeps a notebook where he
just write down you know that somebody says and might
use it ten years later. You know, when I said
to Lynn Swan, I said, you know, I got kind
of an idea from you, not for high school music,
for a concept for you know, and you did. I said,
You're not getting any of the royalties, but I'm telling you,

(33:13):
you know, you just pick pick stuff up. So there
was a lot of job owning going around, and then
for the next two movies there was a similar, you know,
similar process where like the second movie sequels are really hard.

Speaker 1 (33:31):
You know.

Speaker 2 (33:31):
And I was talking to John Lassiter about how he
did Toy Story Too. And I happened to run into
him at a Disney event and I said, okay, here's
my one chance one of the masters. I said, how
did you come up with the idea for Toy Story Too?
You're you've got the biggest animation film in history, and

(33:53):
and he said, I know, I couldn't. I'm working, I'm
going nowhere for six months. My kids are in my
office playing in my office, and I have all the
merchandise from Toy Story, you know. And I kept saying
that don't don't take that out of the box. You
got to keep it in the box. Don't take this
one out. And he goes, wait a minute, I'm telling

(34:14):
kids not to play with toys, my own kids. And
then that's where Toy Story two came from, when they
were in the you know, cellophane boxes. And so I said, huh.
So I'm going, okay, what's the best day of high school?
Last day of school? So let's two. Let's start it

(34:35):
on the last day of school, you know, So stuff
like that, you know, And then high school three it
kind of they're going to graduate, so you kind of
you kind of you had to go there. But summer,
So where did the summer come from? Okay, I as
a kid, I used to be a caddie. As a kid,
I used to caddy for some rich people. And you know,

(34:58):
and uh so I we saw what the country clubs
were like. You know, I grew up, you know, looking
through the fence and then saw so I said, wow,
what if Sharpay's family owned a I could write a
country club because I saw a club you know where
the daughter of the owners like ran the place. I go,

(35:19):
we got our girl Sharpai, you know, and so it started.
It started with that, and we go, how could we
get them all in one place? And so we did.
Again the reality of them wanting summer jobs. I mean
when we were kids, we all had summer jobs. Kids
now get screwed because you know, there's like fifty people

(35:40):
lining up for what today would be a summer job.
You know, then it was a summer job. And again
I grew up in no rules. You know, I was
working for newspapers when I was fifteen sixteen. You know,
there were no labor laws, there was no nothing, you know,
and so we just worked and we thought, okay, how
do we get all the kids together? But there was
a real thing about it because at that time in

(36:01):
my life, I'm thinking, got two girls here, we got
to put through college. It's not going to be easy.
It's really expensive, you know. And so that's what they're
talking about in High School Musical too, you know, college
is going to be We got to get jobs, man,
we got to do something, you know. And so it
came from reality and then it turned into fun, you know,

(36:22):
to just and I knew how to screw around to
the country club. You go out at night and you
jump in the pool and all the stuff to get
you in trouble. And that's what you want. That's what
you want in a movie. And it tests and like
in high school too, again, it tests your friends because
Troy's the star, you know, in fictional world, he's being recruited,

(36:45):
you know. And I'm sure I don't talk to the kids,
the actors, you know, I don't run into them on
a regular basis, you know. But I'm sure after High
School Musical went through the roof, there's Zach all of
a sudden, you know, I saw him there in London.
Our first trip, we're on a little bus going to
a little screening. On the second trip, we're at the
Soho Hotel and there's four hundred girls pitching tents outside

(37:07):
our hotel hoping to get a glimpse of Zach.

Speaker 1 (37:10):
You know.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
So, what's it like, all of a sudden he's being
offered million dollar movie and there another kid that was
in there. What's happening there? Was just like in high school,
if you're the star athlete, some of your best friends
aren't the star athlete, and so how do you manage
that territory? And so we had some meat on the
bone there to.

Speaker 1 (37:28):
Play with you again, authenticity, like this is the real
things to happen.

Speaker 2 (37:33):
Yeah, And because you can't force the joke. Everybody who
watches anything immediately knows when the joke is forced, you know,
and you're saying, oh, they're trying to be funny, or
here's an old guy trying to make young people funny,
you know, and it.

Speaker 1 (37:49):
Never works so funny.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
Yeah, yeah, So you just have to take something that's real,
throw the dice and take your chances.

Speaker 1 (37:58):
Yeah. Yeah. People love number two, they love it. And
I've always found that to be interesting in trying to
explore why they love it. I think just the idea
of you've established the school and now the kids get
to leave, and I think get to go stay on
the road with other parents. Of this like magical Summer
country Club pretty much.

Speaker 2 (38:17):
Did you ever see the South Park High School Musical episode?

Speaker 1 (38:20):
I haven't seen it.

Speaker 2 (38:21):
Oh, my god, You've got to see it. You're in it. Well,
they in the South Park High School Musical. They did
a whole thing where the dad is furious that his
son doesn't want to try out for the school musical.
My dad is a coach with the Whistle Way and
he says, I don't want to do what you know,
and it plays it a whole different. You know, they

(38:42):
do a South Park version of it, but it's hysteric.

Speaker 1 (38:45):
Oh that's great.

Speaker 2 (38:46):
There, you got to see it.

Speaker 1 (38:48):
It's so good.

Speaker 2 (38:49):
It's very funny.

Speaker 1 (38:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:51):
Well, you know what movie played in the White House
on the night of the inauguration Obama's two thousand and
eight inauguration. It was High School Musical three. Because Michelle
wanted something that the girls could watch in their friends,
but they were going to all the inaugural balls, and
so she calls her office calls Disney and said, could
we have a copy of High School Musical three? They go, yeah,

(39:14):
maybe so yeah, and so that played in the White
House the night of Obama, and she went to the
play in Chicago, took her Michelle took her girls, Sasha
and Wellah to the play. It got in line, went
to the show in Chicago. They were big. They're big fans,
so they would know you.

Speaker 1 (39:33):
Well, that's wild. Yeah, those kind of situations still totally
shocked me. Yeah, I don't know if you heard all
the Do you know about all the movie stars that
wanted my part for High Schools three? No, Bill won't
tell me. Bill Borden, he said, oh, you wouldn't believe

(39:53):
who's breached out and said, hey, I want my kids
love this movie.

Speaker 2 (39:57):
I want to be Oh, I have some idea then yeah,
but oh yeah, I mean that was again. You can't
you can't fake kids. You can't. You know, everybody says, oh,
the Disney marketing machine, d da da, da da da.
They didn't. When High School Musical premiere, nobody had any

(40:17):
idea on the first It was just that era. It
was the first hint of texting was happening in two
thousand and six, right, and the big carriers actually contact.
We're trying to figure out what happened that night because
our texting thing went like insane. People. There was like

(40:40):
millions of which has never happened. What is what's happening?
Was there a nuclear holocaust? And it was a bunch
of kids going turn on Disney channels acts cute, you know,
and so it was they weren't. You can't make them
like something. You can't, you know, you just put it
out there. They either go for it or they don't.

(41:01):
But the big win for Disney was they got Boys,
And the biggest win was after a full week of
it playing, they won the night of all cable and
all broadcast networks. In women eighteen to forty nine, we're

(41:23):
watching it. And then in college, like my daughter went
to Barnard, Gabrielle went to Barnard and Columbia and I
went back there, you know, moving or in one time,
and they were having once a month they had high
school musical nights in the dorms where everybody'd come in
as a character, and I'm going, God, damn, this is

(41:44):
crazy stuff, you know, but it sort of embraced it
and then another generation, you know, took it on. I
mean it's still like the school version of it because
it doesn't have a lot of bad language like I do,
holding myself back, but it plays. Schools are constantly doing it,

(42:06):
and so it's found another generation out there.

Speaker 1 (42:11):
Yeah. I hear a lot of people say, I'm raising
my kids right. They're watching the movie like I did.

Speaker 2 (42:17):
It's it's amazing, and you know the part that where
I got, they still get teared up when I get
a letter. I remember getting a letter from a drama
teacher at a school in Pennsylvania that said when they
would do their school musical, and this is two thousand
and six, they'd get sixty kids to sign up, you know,

(42:41):
for tryouts and this and that. After high school musicale
when they did their next musical that spring, they got
nine hundred kids to sign up, and like boys felt
it was okay to go out because again this is
two thousand and six, you know, there was no boy.

(43:01):
Then they go in musical theater. It's all gay. You're
gay if you want to be in a high school musical,
you know. Yeah, then that changed. High school musical changed
that for a lot of kids. I got so many
letters from kids who said, oh, you saved my life.
You know, you guys saved my life. I got because
I love doing this and I felt like I should

(43:22):
keep it a secret, and you know, and so it
it opened the door for a lot of kids to
be and just that concept of getting out of your
little because well, you know, high school and the clicks
and you know, look out brilliantly. You know, brilliantly Tina
Fey did it in Mean Girls, and you know that's

(43:42):
a big component of high school. You know, all the
clicks and this and that. But be able to step
out of that and then to maybe, you know, it
sounds cornball, but the letters that I've gotten from people
over the years made me make a different career choice.
When I was twenty was twenty five, having seen high school,
I wasn't scared to get out of my lane and
try something else. Yeah, and so that's cool that that

(44:05):
made us feel good.

Speaker 1 (44:06):
Yeah. I get a lot of probably the most, I
get a lot of really fun letters like that too,
but probably the best one of saying some people say
like I didn't have a dad, yeah, and I just
like you you're you're my dad, And I listened to
what you said. I'm like, oh my gosh, man make
me so emotional by like wow, yeah, like they didn't
like my or my dad wasn't present, or you never

(44:27):
talked me. You didn't care what I what I did.

Speaker 2 (44:29):
And that's the bonus, you know, because for all the
crap you take in the entertainment business, because the entertainment
business is, you know, as an actor, I know, as
a writer, anybody who works in it knows ninety percent
of what you hear is no, you know, no, whatever
you want me, your idea, no, no, no, you know.
And then when something works and that it actually has
some ripple effect in a positive way, that's just such

(44:54):
a bonus, you know, because you can't the people who
plan for that and the people that try and create show,
Oh we're going to do the positive influence musical, you know,
it falls flat, like because kids smell a rat from
a mile.

Speaker 1 (45:08):
Yeah, don't tell me something positive.

Speaker 2 (45:11):
Exactly, no way, exactly exactly.

Speaker 1 (45:14):
Yeah. I was always kind of intrigued with how well
the message seemed to land because the songs and the
points they're making are beautiful and they're they're so good
and they're so meaningful, but it almost is like, yeah,
they're not presented in an overly serious way. They're presenting
really fun kind.

Speaker 2 (45:34):
Of musical comedy. But when when you do Breaking Free,
if you're a girl or a boy or anything combination thereof,
don't you want somebody in your life who will lift
you up and pull you, pull the best part of
you out into the open. I mean that's you know,

(45:58):
as you the path through life, you know, that's the
biggest win you can have in your life, whether it's
a spouse and family and who you can't be the
best version of yourself without them in your life. Well,
if you can do that in a story, you know,
and in Breaking Free in the song, when you see

(46:21):
Troy pull Gabriella into the into her spotlight, you know,
once that lab coat comes off, there's no hold in
her back. But it's like you want that this subliminal message.
You know, it's never the scene's never about what it's
about the scenes. You know, if you have two people,

(46:43):
if you have Gabriella dumping chili fries on sharpey, it's
what is that scene about. It's not about, oh, you've
made a mess of my blouse. It's about uh oh,
my supremacy at the school is now in jeopardy. That's
what it's about. Yeah, you know. And there's a scene

(47:04):
that gets quoted back to me a lot when they're
on the rooftop and and Troy is saying too and
she's saying, wow, it must you know, you're like everybody
in school's you know, bowing and scraping to you. And
he says, yeah, you know, but sometimes I don't want
to be the basketball boy. I just want to be
a guy. Yeah, you know, And that is the Scene's

(47:25):
not you know, about anything other than oh, there's layers
to ourselves that we know in our private life.

Speaker 1 (47:34):
You know.

Speaker 2 (47:35):
He goes, anybody seen that layer, you know, other than
me and my private moments. And if you meet someone
who will unleash that layer, hold on to them.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
Yeah yeah yeah yeah, real real friend, real true friend.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
Yeah. That's why we go to shows, you know. It's
why people went in Shakespeare's time, you know, would go
because they got to see the king being made fun of,
and you know, and they said the royalty, you know,
because they're all getting squished down to the ground, you know,
and they get to see those people made fun of
just like that they have the same foibles as I do,

(48:12):
you know. And so that's why we go to we
go to shows. You get to test things out. Would
I have the right stuff under pressure? Well, you see
it in the movie, and we love to see it tested.
Most people, most people fear the rejection, and that's why
they don't make it in show business because you're kind

(48:34):
of here, no ninety five percent of the time. Yeah,
you know what, I know. I've heard you know, five
thousand no's and twenty yeses, you know. But it's if
you can take that and you don't make it the
definition of your self worth, then you might get somewhere.
And that's what high school is. When you're in high school,
you're a very vulnerable age, you know. And if somebody

(48:57):
says to you, you know, oh you know, no, I
won't go to the prom with you, you go, oh,
what's wrong with me?

Speaker 1 (49:05):
You know?

Speaker 2 (49:06):
Now that girl might be Katie Perry who then became
a big star and went back to her high school
and said, you know, all you people said I was
nobody hi, you know. And so some people use it
as a you know, an engine to do somewhere else,
you know, something else. But that's what high school is.
A very famous casting director once said to me, you know,

(49:30):
when she's doing readings, and she discovered a lot of
great people as you discovered, you know, Kevin Costner, Kathleen Turner,
she cast a lot of great movies, Wallace Asita. And
she said, when I get an actor in there in
a room and they're playing, they're acting instead of just
reading the line, so I can see who's in there,

(49:52):
she said, I'll interrupt them and say, hey, tell me
about your life in high school. And they start typing,
and that waterworks come out out and then they go
out and it says, okay, now I get you, Now
I get you, and I see the real person in there. Yeah. Yeah,
So I think that's why high school comes back over
and over and over, and you know a lot of movies.

Speaker 1 (50:12):
Yeah, yeah, we got some scars.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
Okay. Yeah, if you've lived a life, you've got scars.
And sometimes sometimes people never get past the scars of
high school, you know, but if you if you do,
and then you can reflect on it and sometimes we
see it in good you know, and we can laugh off.
And I love this show English Teacher that's on Hulu

(50:35):
right now, where you know, you see the the kids
there because I get a window into that generation of
high school because that's pretty funny.

Speaker 1 (50:44):
You know. Yeah, I've heard that expression that when you
go when you watch a movie, you watch yourself, like
you always put yourself as the lead. And I think like,
as a screenwriter a lot of times, I mean, obviously
you've put so much personal experience in your character. Right,
do you see your elf is one of one or
more of those characters.

Speaker 2 (51:02):
Yeah, there were certainly parts of me in a bunch
of those characters, you know, in this thing. Because in again,
in uh high school, I was a jock. But then
I played music. I wanted to go see music, you know,
and there were some people that I liked some of

(51:24):
the music that I like. My friends said, oh, you're
such a girly boy. You like Joni Mitchell, you like
you know this and that. I kind of like that, so,
you know, and so you there was that push me
pull you about it. I liked theater. I like, I
thought that was God. I'd like to get up on
stage and try that, you know, But I didn't have

(51:45):
the I said fit. You know, all my teammates would
think I was you know, I'd lost my mind or
something like that, and so stuff like that would show
up in different parts of characters, you know, would show
up in the part of Gabriella, who just wanted to
do a reset in high school, you know, she was

(52:05):
I was like the brainiac little girl, and you know,
I want to try out being somebody else, you know,
And I think I think that's why we love rock
stars and things like that, because they go they're playing
out the fantasy, you know, then it goes to full
arc to where it becomes you know, camp, you know,

(52:26):
but you see somebody, we go see a great performance,
you know, and you go, God, do I have the
guts of Billie Eilish to get up in front of
eighteen thousand people in Madison Square Garden by myself, whether
my brother on a piano and talk about my crush,
you know, and not have people laugh at me and
think I'm an idiot, but pay two hundred and fifty

(52:47):
dollars to listen to me, you know, And those that's
what we gravitate to those people because we want to
discover those parts. And there's part of you in every character,
you know, and there's part of Sharpay in me. I
wish I could, you know, just have that agency to
tell everybody, go do this, go do that, go do this,

(53:09):
you know, And that's the that's the fun of writing,
you know. The pain, the pain in the part is
the writing. But when you do have the actual fun
is when you do discover something. I didn't know that
about myself until I wrote that. And that's that's the only. Yeah,

(53:30):
if you if you're lucky enough, if lightning strikes, and
you're lucky enough to make a living doing it, you're
a lucky cat, you know, because you know, it's like
with acting, how many actors are out there, how many
can make a living doing it? Well, if but that
moment of discovery, you know, the great choreographer Agnes Demil

(53:51):
once said, and she was talking about ballet dancers, there's
being an artist of an again, there's no satisfaction of
any kind what soever. Anytime. You're just a little more
alive than the rest. And that's what that's what you
get for all the no's and people you turn in
a script and say, well that sucks. What else you got,

(54:12):
you know, or something like that, Oh, bart, try it,
just give me anything but that, you know. And yeah,
but when you have that moment of elation, You have
a moment of elation that you can't explain to anybody,
and that almost no one gets to feel. So it's cool.

Speaker 1 (54:28):
Yeah, I love that. That's amazing. Well it's a I
just you know, I almost feel like this podcast is
turning into deconstructing the mystery of like why was this
movie so successful? You know? And then you hear these
stories like the all the ones you brought, like calling back,
like pulling stuff from Janis Joplin. You're pulling things from

(54:49):
so much out of you and so many real, honest,
authentic moments, and it's like, well, these are the pieces,
these are the pieces that have made it so special,
and it's yeah, yeah, okay, yeah it was lightning in
a bottle bat. When you start having these like longer
conversations about it, it's like, well, these are pieces of
why it's you.

Speaker 2 (55:09):
You can deconstruct, you know. Again, as Steve's Jobs said,
you can see it in the rear view mirror. You
can connect the dots in the rear view mirror and say, oh,
that's where that came from. You know, when I was
writing high school musical, I wasn't thinking about Linn Swan
or that moment, and I'm saying I want to be
a ballet. But then when I start thinking about it afterwards,
I go, oh, that sort of.

Speaker 1 (55:29):
Happened, you know, they felt it in here.

Speaker 2 (55:32):
Yeah, yeah, you have the you know, the emotion comes
from somewhere, you know, and then you discover it. And
it's no different than I Writing is like being in
a relationship. You know, say you get in an argument
with your significant other and you go, what the hell

(55:53):
why did we get in an argument about that? And
you know, three weeks later, you're driving in a car
and you're going, yeah, I remember that afternoon when she
was talking to her old boyfriend and they seem so connected.
That was like three months ago, you know, and you go, oh,
that's where that came from. It didn't have anything to
do with the pasta being cold, you know. Yeah, so

(56:16):
and that's what that's what writing is. It's like kind
of sort of panning for gold and seeing what occasionally
might might pop up there and those characters, you know,
I don't I don't know that there there's a lot
of people that want to know what happened to them
twenty years later.

Speaker 1 (56:33):
Oh a lot of people asking that I hear that
every day.

Speaker 2 (56:36):
Yeah, I'll get my head handed to me if I
say anything, but stay tuned.

Speaker 1 (56:39):
Yeah, okay, Peter, you you wrote these characters that has
given so people so much healing and peace and allowance
or or the confidence to be themselves or who they are,

(57:01):
or you know, explore things that maybe they were raised
to be of a lot of my kids now are
picking careers and I see their friends. A lot of
the friends are doing just what their dad does. Right,
my boy, I'm my boys graduate right now, and all
those friends are like, well my dad does this, I'm
gonna do this. And there is this thing you've created

(57:24):
in this the culture of high school musical where it's
like explore, go, go explore. It's okay, it's okay to
do something else. And now I see parents seem to
be affected by this. And when I raise my kids,
I want them to know, like, you don't have to
do what I do. You could go do look inside
and go find your own passion. And it's it must

(57:44):
be amazing to write a movie like this. It's like
having a cultural influence on a next generation.

Speaker 2 (57:49):
I've done a lot of speaking at schools and stuff
like that. And when you ask kids who's your favorite character,
about eighty percent of the time they say Sharp And
it's and the reason they say that, in my humble opinion,
is not because they want to be Sharpey. It's because

(58:09):
they want to have agency in life, you know. And
so that's what they really mean when they say that.
You know, they know they don't want to be, you know,
dressed in pink, driving a pink Mustang, you know, flitting around,
you know, but they do want to have agency that
they feel empowered to be themselves. And so that you

(58:29):
see that beneath the hood, you know, that's what they mean,
you know. And because it's hard to say I want
to be you know, it's like when you say, what
do you want to do? I want to be Lebron James.
You know, well, you're five foot five, so that may
not happen, you know, just have a backup plan.

Speaker 1 (58:49):
You know.

Speaker 2 (58:50):
And but what's underneath, you know, Lebron James is somebody
who with all the skills and six foot nine and
is somebody who works harder than anybody in the NBA. Yeah,
while you're still playing. Yeah, And so if you really
want something from Lebron James take that work ethic, you know,
and apply it to whatever.

Speaker 1 (59:10):
Well, that's interesting you should say that because you know
Sharpey as flawed of a character. She is like everyone
should be. She's passionate, like she's driven. Yeah, and I
will I'm just thinking, like, is she the most driven
character in the movie, because she obviously think she goes
well beyond what she needs to, like for the audition,

(59:31):
She's right, theyhood work they put together, you know, they did,
they did a way beyond what normally you do. So
she's like, she's yeah, she's like strong headed, independent, very aggressive,
and very like passionate. She's very like very maybe she's
the most passionate. Is she the most passionate character?

Speaker 2 (59:51):
Well, in some ways, you know, And it would be
interesting to see where she is twenty years later, and
it's like there is someone she's also the most vulnerable
in a way because under you know, you know, from everybody,
who's the the in life. I'm sort of stammering because

(01:00:15):
but you find out, you know, you look at the
most blustery person ever you know, and they're full of
the you know right away after you've lived a little
bit what they're worried about themselves, what aspect of them.

Speaker 1 (01:00:30):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:30):
It's like the guy who wants to come to high
school and beat up all the gay kids. Oh, because
he's uncertain about his masculinity. So he's got to go
hit somebody in the face who's out, you know. And
it's not because he's a tough guy. It's because he
can't come to terms with his own sexuality, right, you know.
And so you'd see that time and time and time again.

(01:00:52):
And you see it a lot of times with performers,
you know, you see it a lot of times where
they day. Look, I grew up worshiping the Beatles, you know,
to the extent that I took my daughters and my
wife all we went to Liverpool because I wanted my daughters,

(01:01:13):
you know, they were Beatle fans, because they didn't have
a choice, you know, because I was playing all this music. Okay,
fast forward to me taking them to Liverpool and in
they have John Lennon's house where he grew up as
a little kid, as part of the National Trust, and
it's restored to exactly how it was when he was

(01:01:34):
a kid, in his little room, in his little radio,
and I took and they only let like twenty people
a day in there, right, And so we got in
there and we went up to John's room, you know,
and it was set like when he was fourteen years old,
fifteen years old. And I saw the girls looking at
it and going around, and I go why they had

(01:01:57):
a surfa weird? I couldn't. They were like confused almost,
you know, And I later on figured out that it
was the first time they'd see, you mean, somebody that famous,
that great could that's how they started. And just a tiny,
barely turnaround room, the little transistor radio and old beat

(01:02:17):
up guitar. You can start from there and end up
being the biggest music star in you know, at the time,
in history. And they really saw that, you know, they
saw that thing that it starts from somewhere, you know,
And that's just an interesting theme to me, you know,

(01:02:38):
of where you know when you see And I'll give
you one secret to writing. If you're going to write something,
it's the anybody wants to write a movie, you write
a thing. If you have your ending, that's where you start.
Because if you have your ending, you are Everybody's got
like twenty good pages in their drawer. Somewhere where they

(01:03:01):
started writing something, but they got to page forty and stop.
But if you have your ending, then you work backwards
from that and going how far from this great love story,
this great ending where boy kisses girl? How far from
that could I start to make it interesting to get there?

Speaker 1 (01:03:23):
You know?

Speaker 2 (01:03:23):
And that's the secret of thinking of things in reverse.
And so I think for our characters, you know that
we're talking about knowing where they sort of would end
up at the end, you know, where it's we're all
in this together, you know, Okay, how far away from

(01:03:45):
that could we get in the first act? And you
try that for each movie. You know, if Troy and
Gabrielle in high school three are going to kiss and
you know, go to colleges near where, how can we
make that impossible?

Speaker 1 (01:04:00):
You know?

Speaker 2 (01:04:00):
And so that's the that's the fun of exploring characters,
and that's the sometimes why kids like it because they
get to see they get to test out their emotional
life in a story. You know, what if I went
up to that girl and said, can we you know,
can we go to a dance? Can we do that?

(01:04:20):
People still go to dances?

Speaker 1 (01:04:22):
I don't know, not my kids.

Speaker 2 (01:04:28):
I don't know about that. My kids are thirty two
now thirty one.

Speaker 1 (01:04:31):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:04:41):
The High School two premiere was at Disneyland, right, and
they took over the whole California Hotel. They had this
thing and they closed Disneyland for us to have a
party that night, you know, at the thing. And so
we're going down the red carpet and all these people.
I take my daughter, you know, she's there, and all

(01:05:04):
these people are like Peter Man sign this sign that
you know, and my daughter. He says, why do they
want you? And then we go in the theater and
we sit down and we're waiting for the thing to start,
and this guy taps me on the shoulder and he goes,
do you think do you think you could, you know,

(01:05:27):
get my kids to meet sharp ash sharpey Ashley. I could, Oh, probably,
it's been so much of it be everything, you know.
And I turn around and it's Beckham and his wife
and it's there, you know, and so that kind of
that's when you realize it's big. You were shocked to

(01:05:47):
find out who the fans were, just like you were saying, guys,
I wanted to play that, you know, and then you'd
see Beckham and then you'd see some big Kobe Bryant.
You know, wait, high school music. My girl loves get
over Erica. You gott to meet the guy, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:06:05):
And so I've had some professional basketball players. Oh say,
that's because they obviously they go they.

Speaker 2 (01:06:11):
Do the triple type.

Speaker 1 (01:06:11):
Yeah, there were kids when the movie came out. Now
they're like now the pros.

Speaker 2 (01:06:14):
Yeah, and it's Michelle Obama, you know, and you know
former President of the United States, Barack Obama. You go,
if I hear those goddamn songs one more time, you know,
and we're all like you. But it's it's really it's

(01:06:36):
really fun because you don't think of famous people as
being fans. I think they're more interested in being that
famous person. But when something that connects with people's kids,
they get real interested.

Speaker 1 (01:06:48):
Yeah. Yeah, because you'll do more for your kids than
you know.

Speaker 2 (01:06:52):
You know. It's like everybody in that theater wanted to
take a selfie with Beckham, and all he wanted to
do was meet Sharpey, you know. And it's just I
can't imagine, you know, at the actor and you know
what it was like for all you guys, you know,
but the prime minister. Tony Blair was a prime minister.

(01:07:14):
His wife asked us if we could do a screening
for her. We're in London, you know. So we go
and there's you know, I'm talking to Tony Blair's wife,
you know, and she's going, so, where did you get
the idea? Gabriello is so she's so shy and she's
so composed, and I'm going, she is okay, you know,

(01:07:34):
And it's just funny to see people out of their context.
And a show like that that touches people in some
way takes them, takes them out of their content, and
we all want that to some extent. We want to
be taking We want to see the world through a
different lens, you know, just to see what happens. And

(01:07:58):
you get that a lot with high school musical, and
it's also dancing. Everybody wants to dance, you know, And
I go, if I could have danced like that in
high school, my whole life would have been I would
have never written high school. Yeah, so it was. That's
that's been a fun enterprise from my point of view,

(01:08:19):
just to get allowed into other people's lives because of
that that show.

Speaker 1 (01:08:25):
Yeah, you know, yeah it is amazing. Did you have
alternative endings or did you was it the story? Did
you make some choices?

Speaker 2 (01:08:34):
Yes, I mean we didn't have that ending in the script.
I well, give myself any credit. I came up with
that ending, you know, at crunch time, right before you
know we're filming, because we how are we going to
end this? And then I said, okay, what about if
you had the kids, because they want to do the audition,

(01:08:57):
but we have the basketball game and we have the
you know, the brainiacs in there doing their you know,
Jempardy challenge or academic to Kathlan. How can we do it? Well,
we could have them shut off the power in the
gym so they could come in there. And then Disney says, says, oh,
that's pretty malicious. We can't have students thinking they can

(01:09:20):
shut down the power in the school like that. Icho
can we just do a you know, we can't. We
won't show them pulling the thing. You just see him
tap on a keyboard, because they're supposed to be And
so they led us to we kind of came up
with that ending, and the two hail Mary's of the
ending were breaking free because it was so good that

(01:09:43):
you go, oh my god. And then Kenny Ortega took
that back in the gym. That's Kenny Ortega, Kenny Ortega,
Kenny Ortega. You know, uh, we're all in this together.
But we didn't have that title for the song. No
one had that title. It was called something else. And

(01:10:03):
we kept going. You know, there was like four songs
that weren't working. They were figuring out, and Gary Marsh
kept on the songwriters. You just needed, we need a
kind of we're all in this together kind of song
for that guy. And the songwriters go, hello, there.

Speaker 1 (01:10:22):
We go and sometimes on the noses.

Speaker 2 (01:10:25):
Sometimes you just say it and then but it's got
to be good, you know, it's got to be good.
And you know people that say, oh, how can you
go wrong with good looking kids singing and dancing, Well,
try it sometimes, you know, try it without Kenny Ortega. Yeah,
and uh yeah. And it's as I say, there were

(01:10:47):
a lot of everybody every writer has got their you
know flap story about studios destroying the soul creative. There's
creative soul, you know, and everybody's had something. But in
that prod, everybody that put their hands on it made
it a little better. All the people at Disney that
we worked with, Denise Carlson and Michael Healy, but it

(01:11:10):
was really we were left alone. We were left alone
for the first movie. They shot the script, and Kenny
and the songwriters you know, and choreographers and the actors
came in and raised the level of everything that was
on the page. And I'm the first one to say it.
You know, it's like we really were all in this together.

Speaker 1 (01:11:33):
I love that. Love that. Did you have alternative names
for the movie? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:11:38):
The way the name happened is Disney wanted it to
be middle School Musical. They not the title, but they
wanted to be about middle school. And I'm saying, my
daughters don't want to see middle school. They want to
see where they're going, not where they're at, you know.
And They're looking at me like what you know, you know,

(01:11:58):
and I'm going telling you that's what my daughter they
want to And so all I did was they said, well,
it's going to be middle school and we're gonna call it,
you know, jump and Twist or something like that. And
so I kept putting on the treatments and the drafts.
I just kept writing High School Musical Project, High School
Musical project, high school musical project on everything, and at

(01:12:23):
one point they still they was up to them, you know,
they're the boss. But then at the end they couldn't
come up with a better time, so they just took
project off. They said, what, you know, what about if
we call it high school musical. So I'm sure somebody
I don't know who which was Rich Ross or which
boss said high school, I'm sure they're saying. Well, I

(01:12:44):
was sitting in my office one day and I thought
we should call it high school Musical, you know. But
we'd been chumming those waters for months to Bill and Bury,
you know, and I have been chumming those waters for
months to try and put that into the zeitgeist so
that every piece of paper somebody saw at high.

Speaker 1 (01:13:05):
School that's so good. I remember when I got involved
with the project, they said, oh, it doesn't have a
name yet, we're just called.

Speaker 2 (01:13:12):
Yeah. No, I'm not lying. And so that's, you know, again,
that's something that's become iconic. You know. It happened in
a very you know, sort of shifty way. You know,
we were trying to be so close. Let's just keep
calling it high school Musical project so they'll think high school, high.

Speaker 1 (01:13:32):
School, high school. Did anybody float any bad names at
you anymore?

Speaker 2 (01:13:36):
Yes, there was some. I don't remember them, you know,
I don't because I blocked them out of my consciousness,
like please know. Yeah, but I go, oh, you gotta
be kidding me. You know, I had no power.

Speaker 1 (01:13:46):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:13:46):
It was the Walt Disney Company, you know. And but then.

Speaker 1 (01:13:50):
Yeah, they're going to take your movie, They're going to
market it, They're put.

Speaker 2 (01:13:53):
There, it's going to be the Walt Disney Company. And
this is you know, me and my gym shorts and
a t're studio city writing a movie. And it's but
that that's like, that's something that worked out, you know.
But again the shock to me was how big it
got in other countries because they at first they told
us it's never going to play in the UK because

(01:14:15):
they don't have high school like we have it here.
You know, we okay, we get to the UK, it's
like bigger in the UK. It's like exploded in Israel.
It exploded in South America, so huge, and soul exploded
in China. In fact, the Chinese made their own version
of it. And if you want to see something amazing,

(01:14:37):
look at the Chinese you can see it on you
know YouTube, the Chinese version of High School Musical. They said,
they got in touch with me, and they said, well,
they want to make a couple of big changes. And
I go, okay, well why they're asking me the you know,
the Walt Disney company calls the tune here. But so
they get in touch with it and they said it's

(01:14:57):
too sexual, and I go, whoa, wait, what did you
read the pilot I wrote at the same time I
was writing, And they go, it's too and they go yeah,
and they said, and in China, the girl would never
have a crush on the most popular athlete. She'd have

(01:15:18):
a crush on the smartest boy in class. And they
changed the first song. It's like they changed get your
Head in the Game to a song about the glories
of investing in the stock market.

Speaker 1 (01:15:35):
Is that in the movie?

Speaker 2 (01:15:36):
Yeah, it's in the movie. Wow, you can see it.

Speaker 1 (01:15:38):
You can write that, does she have a crush on
the smartest boy?

Speaker 2 (01:15:42):
Yeah? It was just different. So, yeah, there were different
versions of it. Is an Indian version, you know, there's
more Bollywood. Yeah, I haven't even seen that. But there
was a Mexican a Mexican production company made a version
from Mexico. Yeah, and then there's a Brazilian I think

(01:16:04):
version of it.

Speaker 1 (01:16:05):
And I hear a lot from Brazil Argentina. Yeah. Yeah,
it's tons from the UK.

Speaker 2 (01:16:11):
Because they knew how to dance in high school, unlike
me down in Argentina and Brazil.

Speaker 1 (01:16:16):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:16:16):
But yeah, there it but it connected globally. I mean
there are this I do know that there have been
close now close to a billion unique viewers of High
School Musical. How many people are on the planet even billion?

(01:16:37):
Eight billion? Okay, they've had because they had fifteen ten
years ago, six hundred million unique views of High School Musical.
I mean on the night the second movie debuted, it
was the biggest cable audience ever for a movie because
at Disney said, well, the rating will say there was

(01:16:58):
eighteen million people, but there were twelve million slumber parties.
So they say that is kind of as I say,
we think eighty million people watch that night.

Speaker 1 (01:17:10):
Yeah. Oh, I can't believe how many people tell me
they had a viewing party slumber party.

Speaker 2 (01:17:15):
Yeah, so imagine how many people are going to go
to High School Musical four?

Speaker 1 (01:17:20):
Anyway, So well I saw that I saw the local
theater production, and I was kind of surprised, like how
many unique things they put in the stage.

Speaker 2 (01:17:29):
Yeah, they Disney controlled the stage versions of it, you know,
and the home team gets a little taste of that.
But it's like, it's amazing that the schools, because the
schools a sometimes they have a hard time finding something
that the parents won't object to, you know, so that

(01:17:52):
helps us, you know. Yeah, and Hollywood, Look, it was
a global hit, but Hollywood, there's a very family friendly audience.
Everythings of Disney as family friendly, but there's a whole audience.
Didn't he Disney didn't even know how family friendly. People
were looking for entertainment that they could watch with their
kids and not be embarrassed. Because adults, believe it or not,

(01:18:15):
can stomach high school musical. They can watch it and
they can have fun with it, you know, and they
don't have to oh my god, the kids taking the
girl's bra off, you know. Or I watch, you know,
watch Ginny and Georgia and you know, summer I turn
pretty and stuff like, you know, like that, and it
gets a lot of young audience. But when I look

(01:18:37):
at the audience for Ginny and Georgia, congratulations of the
people for making it their success and all that, but
I'm going, Wow, if I'm a parent and I see
that my daughter having sex with a boyfriend in her room,
I'm not sure that's for me. Maybe when I'm out
of the house, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:18:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:18:58):
Yeah. So that's where High School Musical a big win
because it wasn't lecturing anybody on anything. It just wasn't are.
What we were trying to do is we were trying
to have a relationship that was more crush oriented. And
in fact, we made a thing out of it in
the first movie that they never kiss. They never kiss
in the first movie. They don't kiss until the end

(01:19:19):
of the second movie, and it was like a big moment,
you know, and because it was Disney Channel at the time,
you know, well, we don't really have people making out,
you know, we go they gotta kiss, you know, there's
sixteen sixteen year olds are kissing, trust me, you know,
And so that came into it. But it wasn't like

(01:19:41):
a forced thing. We just cast the actors, you know,
who were good.

Speaker 1 (01:19:46):
Did you write any scenes for the movie that you
were sad to see not make it in the movie?

Speaker 2 (01:19:51):
Yeah, there was stuff, you know, there was you know,
extended parts of scenes. You know that you go, oh,
there was some pretty good stuff there, you know, But
when you add in forty five minutes of music or
for you know, and then you have you have a
ninety minute movie. You know everything.

Speaker 1 (01:20:09):
It's kind of be hard for a screen press because
you want it.

Speaker 2 (01:20:11):
You want your a pressed class of Hollywood screenwriters. Our
genius is rarely shared with the rest of the world,
but it's yeah, you get sometimes the fun the most
fun thing is when you go to test screenings and
like I was saying before, what you think is some
great line somebody the audience stares at, and when something
out of the blue they react to. That's very That's

(01:20:34):
where you go. You know, that's why there's so many
bad movies. Nobody knows, nobody knows anything. There's you know,
William Goldman, the famous screenwriter. So then nobody knows anything.
You put it in front of an audience and you
get shocked.

Speaker 1 (01:20:48):
You know, what was your reaction when you saw the
movie for the first time?

Speaker 2 (01:20:52):
My reaction was, you know what, I kind of like this?
Will anybody else like it? You know, because you go
you don't know, you know, when you turn you don't
know what a scene when you write, you know, the
Vanessa's doing the song when there was me and you
and she's coming down the staircase and it's very dramatic,

(01:21:15):
and you know, I go, are people going to think
this is corny? Or will they be invested in the character?
And the one line when I saw it that I
was happy that people laughed at that I put it
in just for me was when they see that there's
gonna be callbacks, you know, and Sharpay screams callbacks where

(01:21:39):
they they didn't even try it, and Ryan goes, maybe
they're being punked. Maybe maybe Ashton, you know, we're gonna
meet Ashton because I used to watch Punked, so I
put it in an Ashton Cultchier Raver didn't think anybody
would get it, and that guy one of the biggest
laughs of the move. All the kids watch Punked. So yeah,
my reaction was, you know, I actually kind of kid

(01:22:00):
you know, but will other people anybody else like it? Yeah,
that was my honest reaction.

Speaker 1 (01:22:06):
It was early screening, I guess with you then.

Speaker 2 (01:22:07):
Yeah, when I first saw you know, first saw a
cut and then the first time I saw it with
the audience, you know, I saw all the There were
a bunch of music people there and they all laughed
when Sharpay says to Kelsey, listen, my sought off Sondheim,
and I got kids are never going to get that
joke because I put that in for me. I'm not

(01:22:28):
going to hoo Stephen Sondheim is, you know. But then
all the music and sometimes you write a line just
for yourself in case the movie gets me. And that
was it because I was a big admirer of Stephen Son.
And then that's become a popular line from the movie,
you know, so you never know.

Speaker 1 (01:22:43):
That's great.

Speaker 2 (01:22:44):
Yeah, I'll write you Kats.

Speaker 1 (01:22:47):
Well, Peter, thanks so much for your time, Peter Barsky.
This is where it all, this is where it all began.
It's so great to hear these stories. Thanks for sharing everything.
Twenty years later.

Speaker 2 (01:22:59):
Well, we're we're connected. We're connected for life. I think
for life for sure. Yeah, and it's great, you know,
and it's great. And I said, then let me again say,
you know, with High School Musical, you're such an integral
part of its success, and you know that as the writer.
You know it more so than oh everybody like High

(01:23:19):
School Musical because Zach Efron's cute and you know, and
I go, none of that works if that, if you
didn't see the dimension of his emotional life raised by
his relationship with his father, that's what made people care
about that character. They don't know why they care about
that character. I know why they did after, you know,

(01:23:43):
but that's you brought a very magic paintbrush to three movies.

Speaker 1 (01:23:49):
So thank you, nicest complixens over that. I appreciate that.
Now the movie means a great deal to me. So
so words like that like you know a lot, so
thank you, thank you for that.

Speaker 2 (01:24:01):
You never know, you never know?

Speaker 1 (01:24:03):
Yeah yeah, yeah, and and twenty years by what will
will you do anything when the on the on the
night we we celebrator have any plans? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:24:13):
All right, all right, Peter, Yeah, stay tuned, stay tuned.

Speaker 1 (01:24:19):
All right. I like that. Thanks your time, Thanks for
giving my pleasure so much for our fans that we
love so much.

Speaker 2 (01:24:26):
So let's uh until next time

Speaker 1 (01:24:29):
Until next time, okay, Thanks Peter,

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Get Your Head in the Game: PETER BARSOCCHINI