Making Newsies

The musical Newsies was a months-long, $15 million dollar labor of love for the film makers involved, especially director Kenny Ortega. Transformed into a musical, Newsies challenged all departments to work with song and dance in mind.

Originally a drama

Originally screenwriters Bob Tzudiker and Noni White wrote Newsies as an ordinary period drama. Producer Michael Finnell brought the movie to Kenny Ortega, who choreographed Dirty Dancing and directed the "Material Girl" and "Coming Out of the Dark" videos, and Newsies became a musical.

Although Newsies marks Ortega`s directorial debut, he has choreographed more than 40 films and videos in the past twenty years. "When I was a child I watched a lot of musicals on television," Ortega says. "They were entertaining but they also inspired me on many levels. They offered hope and a beautiful place to go to."

Picking Alan Menken

Finnell also picked Academy Award®-winning composer Alan Menken to write the movie's eight songs and three reprises. Menken teamed with lyricist Jack Feldman and fellow composer J.A.C. Redford, who wrote the underscore. Menken composed the songs and scores to Disney's previous hits The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast.

Musicals a challenge

A musical feature film is among the most difficult movies to create. Every aspect of production took music and dance in account:

• To maintain the period setting, Newsies had to be shot around the schedule of the Universal Studios Tour tramcars.
• Sets were designed according to the dancers' needs. Concerned that cobblestone streets, which were true period, would be hard to dance on, art director Nancy Patton had dancers test them out. Cobblestones worked.
• During some of the more strenuous musical numbers, costumers were stitching split seams between each take. The cast wore custom-made boots with special dancer's soles.
• Because of the size of some scenes, director of photography Andrew Laszlo was at the mercy of natural light. One scene, "The World Will Know", took six days to film because of the need for good sunlight.
• With so many minors in the cast, Newsies had its own one-room school trailer, so that the actors could keep up with their studies.

Newsies, based on articles chronicling the New York City newsboys' strike of 1899, began production on April 15, 1991, and premiered one year later.

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