Corrective Steps

By DENNIS McLELLAN

Feb. 21, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

They’ve created some of the most memorable moments in movie history:

Who can forget Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson tap-dancing up a stairway in “The Little Colonel”? Or a white-suited John Travolta pointing into the air as he heats things up on the dance floor in “Saturday Night Fever”? Or Al Pacino and Gabrielle Anwar doing the tango in “Scent of a Woman”?

Yet who’s ever heard of Nick Castle, Lester Wilson or Jerry Mitchell?

They’re among the legion of choreographers and dance directors whose work added immeasurably to the success of motion pictures dating back to the turn of the century.

But despite the mountain of research done on the history of American film, “little or no attention has been paid to the people who made the movies dance,” says a Brea writer who spent nearly five years researching movie choreographers for a new book.

Indeed, during the heyday of the movie musical in the ‘30s and ‘40s, choreographers and dance directors often weren’t even included in a film’s credits.

“For what we call the golden age of the movie musical, I believe that they are really the core of how those films look and feel,” said author and former dancer Larry Billman, 58, who made it his mission to give credit where credit is due.

The result is “Film Choreographers and Dance Directors,” which Billman says is the first book to tell the complete history of dance in film.

Published by McFarland & Co., which produces reference books for libraries and schools, Billman’s work is a 652-age encyclopedia illustrated with nearly 200 rare black-and-white photos.

The book provides a detailed, decade-by-decade history of dance on film, along with biographical sketches (and filmographies) of more than 900 choreographers and dance directors who contributed to nearly 3,500 films between 1893 and 1995.

Included are the well-known--Busby Berkeley, Hermes Pan, Jack Cole, Bob Fosse--and the less well-known but no-less-important such as Ernest Belcher, the ballet master who did the choreography for silent film classics such as “Broken Blossoms” and “Phantom of the Opera.”

Choreographers, as Billman points out in his book, also add movement and dance to nonmusical films.

Every high school prom, nightclub sequence and even fight scenes had a choreographer to create its patterns, rhythm and adaptation to the camera. Choreographers also invent “specialized movement” for actors to enrich character and heighten dramatic effect, Billman said.

In the recent “Mars Attacks,” for example, choreographer Dan Kamin spent two months developing Martian movement for actress Lisa Marie.

Billman’s book, available in movie and theatrical specialty shops such as Larry Edmunds and Samuel French bookstores in Hollywood, retails for a princely $110. Or, as a review in American Cinematographer puts it, it’s “a whale of a good reference book” with “a whale of a price tag.”

“I can’t do anything about that, unfortunately,” said Billman, explaining that books published for the research market tend to cost more than commercial books because they’re published in smaller quantities.

The extensive number of photos also added to the book’s cost. But Billman insisted that it be heavily illustrated. As he told his publisher, “dance is a visual art.”

For a reference book aimed at the research trade, Billman is finding it has “crossover appeal, especially in the dance world.”

Booklist, a book review publication from the American Library Assn., called the book “a treat for dance fans as well as those interested in the history of the film musical.” And Hollywood Reporter columnist Robert Osborne devoted a column to the book, saying Billman “is likely to be recommended for sainthood” by members of the dance community.

The Hollywood-born Billman’s show business career began as a singer, dancer and actor in stage shows in New York and Los Angeles in the ‘60s. Hired by the Disney company in 1970 to choreograph “Disney on Parade,” a touring arena show, he is now artistic director for live entertainment for Walt Disney Imagineering, the Disney firm that designs all of the Disney theme parks and hotels.

“Film Choreographers and Dance Directors” is Billman’s third book. He’s written two others for the research market, “Betty Grable: A Bio-Bibliography” and “Fred Astaire: A Bio-Bibliography,” both for Greenwood Press.

The idea for a book on movie choreographers came to Billman in 1993, while doing research on Betty Grable.

“I’m writing about Betty Grable and suddenly I come across a couple of films that I can’t find who the choreographer is, and I know that Betty Grable could not walk and chew gum at the same time without somebody telling her what to do.”

Faced with the problem of tracking down Grable’s uncredited choreographers, Billman said, “I suddenly realized that that expertise has been ignored by the industry. We know who did the makeup, who did the costumes, who did the screenplay, but many times we don’t know who did the dance.”

Blame Hollywood politics of the 1930s and Berkeley, the era’s best-known movie dance director, for that.

As a motion picture dance director, Berkeley took the dance steps created by a choreographer and staged the dance routines for the camera, Billman explained.

“Berkeley got so famous that the ads at the time had his name above the title rather than the director’s name, so the Directors Guild of America had a meeting and said choreographers could not use the term ‘dance director’ anymore.”

Billman said the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented Oscars for best dance direction for three years, 1935-37, but after the Directors Guild action, the academy eliminated that category.

“Choreographers didn’t have a union, so their credit was never assured or protected,” he said. “Suddenly they couldn’t be called dance directors, and they were dropped to the bottom of the list in terms of recognition.”

Today, Billman said, it’s gone to the other extreme.

“Choreographers usually get credit, but if you’ve ever sat through the end of the movie, so does the man who empties the toilet and the caterers.”

To write his book, Billman viewed hundreds of movies, “looking at dance styles and how the various choreographers worked in conjunction with the camera.” He also read dozens of star biographies and autobiographies, which gave him clues as to who did what, and he pored over the files of the movie academy library and industry obituaries to flesh out his biographical sketches.

Though he lists 970 choreographers and dance directors, Billman in some cases was able to provide no more information than a name and the title of a film.

“I took it as far as I could,” he said. “I was fortunate that the dance community in Hollywood was helpful. People are still alive who worked with Berkeley. It was like an underground thing, ‘Call this person.’ At one point somebody said, ‘Let’s call Milton Berle,’ to find out when somebody died, and, by God, he knew.”

Though the heyday of the extravagant movie musical is long over, choreographers are still much in demand in Hollywood--even, Billman said, if audiences aren’t aware of their work.

“What they do now is they are first of all making the actors comfortable with their own styles of movement and giving them dances which extend their character,” Billman said. “I mean, those guys in ‘The Full Monty’ didn’t make those ratty routines up. A choreographer taught them and selected steps that would make audiences laugh or make them cheer.”

Credit choreographer Suzanne Grand for making the unemployed British steelworkers-turned-strippers look so wonderfully awful.