High School Musical’s Bill Borden

October 2006

By Anna Carugati

There is hardly a
child between the ages of 6 and 14 in the U.S. who hasn’t heard of High School
Musical (HSM). And as this Disney Channel original movie airs around the world,
it is taking kids in Australia, Southeast Asia and now Europe by storm. HSM is
thrilling youngsters with music and dance. It’s the story of the star athlete
Troy and the beautiful brainiac Gabriella, who discover a passion for singing,
and for each other, and decide to try out for their school’s musical. Their
audition turns their world and their school upside down. Sales of CDs, DVDs and
merchandising have made HSM one of Disney’s highest-grossing properties ever.
Bill Borden, the movie’s creator and one of its executive producers, tells TV
Kids how High School Musical–mania got started and where it is headed.

TV
KIDS: How
did HSM come
about?

BORDEN: I have three boys, and over the
years, as a family, when we’d talk about what we could watch with the kids, it
seemed like we always turned to The Sound of Music, Grease, Hair, and musicals I always really
loved. You can watch those over and over again. It’s funny, you can’t do that
with a lot of movies, but with musicals you can.

I spent my career doing films like White Nights, which was a dance movie [with
Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines], and La Bamba, and I loved Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and
Juliet, which was
a phenomenal movie. So I decided one day, I’ve got to do a musical. My
inspiration came from Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story. I felt there was a story to tell
my kids that they are not familiar with. They didn’t really know Shakespeare
and they didn’t know the Broadway musical format. They only knew the musicals
that I had shown them in movies. So I decided to try this. That’s how it came
about.

TV
KIDS: How
did you pitch it?

BORDEN: My pitch to people actually was,
“I want to make a musical on Broadway called The High School Musical. It’s about kids who want to put
on a high school show. It’s going to be a big hit on Broadway, and you are
going to want to make it into a movie, so let’s make the movie first.”

That was my pitch to everyone, including Gary Marsh [the president of
entertainment at Disney Channel Worldwide] and they would always ask, “Well,
what’s the music?” And that was always the problem, and I would answer, “I have
the music in my head. I want to do a Stomp-like song,” [which was the idea for the HSM song “Get’cha Head in the Game,”
with the kids doing a music and dance routine with basketballs]. “And I can give
you an example of the type of song, but I have no music to demonstrate.” And
that was the problem about selling it. I didn’t know what to tell people about
the music except to give examples.

I was not able to sell it as a feature film, but Gary Marsh had the
insight to listen to my pitch, and understand that, yeah, this stuff in my head
could be made into the movie.

TV
KIDS:
Casting was crucial, wasn’t it?

BORDEN: What Disney discovered over the
years is that you don’t want to cast older kids to play younger kids, you want
to cast generally within the age range of the characters that you are dealing
with. We had 16- to 17-year-old kids we were trying to cast. The goal was to
find teenagers who had talent. We actually met about 300 to 400 kids. Then we got
it down to about 30 or 40 kids who had acting talent and could sing and dance.
We put on a Broadway-like casting session. It was like A Chorus Line. We brought them in at 9 a.m. We
put them all in a room. We presented a song to them and we had choreographers
put the kids through a routine and they all learned it together. And we watched
how they danced. Then we pulled the boys aside and we gave them some
basketballs, and designed a routine and we watched how they bounced the ball
and how they moved. Then we brought them in as pairs and asked them to sing the
song that we had given them, which was a duet. It took from 9 o’clock that
morning to 8 o’clock that night, and at the end of that time we basically had
the four principal kids.

TV
KIDS: What
was it about the movie that made it so successful?

BORDEN: I think it was a combination of
several things. One is that I always said we have to make a movie that is
emblematic of kids’ experiences in high school. Some of the criticisms of HSM have been, “Well, this is a
Disney high school, the kids aren’t drinking and smoking, they are not getting
in trouble, etcetera.” Yes, that is one experience in high school, but the
experience of being in cliques is one that I see as universal. In high school
you have to fit into your clique. You have to feel like you belong. And that is
something that affects all kids, including my own. They have that social
pressure every day in their school. My eight year old is saying, “I’ve got to
wear these pants.” And I ask, “Why?” And he answers, “Because I have to be like
everybody else.” And the 12 year old says the same thing. They have to fit in.
There are so many other pressures, they want to minimize the social ones.

So this is the theme of HSM. It’s similar to Romeo and Juliet, they went against
social pressure. In HSM Troy and Gabriella go against their cliques. And when we told Gary
Marsh that he said, “That’s good; that’s something we deal with at Disney and
kids react to it all the time.” And, of course, there’s the music in HSM that the kids just love.

TV
KIDS: Will
there be a sequel to HSM?

BORDEN: We will do a sequel. It’s about
the basketball team from the first movie. To stay together as a team during the
summer, they get jobs at a country club as caddies and bus boys and cooks, and
it turns out to be the country club that is run by Sharpay’s parents. [Sharpay
is the spoiled, nasty drama queen in HSM.] Every year the country club puts on a summertime
show—like a Fourth of July show—in which all the club members get
to put on acts and the employees put on their own acts. Sharpay organizes the
club members and our kids organize their end of the show as employees. It’s the
haves versus the have-nots, and it’s about cliques. Everyone learns a lesson
and there’s a lot of music and a lot of fun things that go on at the country
club with golf, tennis and numbers that kids will like. We have a great dance
and swimming pool number.

TV
KIDS: Will
the budget of this movie be in line with the budget of the first movie, or will
it be bigger?

BORDEN: That’s a question we haven’t
closed yet, but I’m sure they will give us a little more money. We’ll probably
get the most money anyone ever got to spend on a Disney Channel movie. The last
one cost $4.2 million—we’ll ask for $5 million and see what happens! I
don’t know.

TV
KIDS: This
question is top of the mind of all die-hard HSM fans. Will Troy and Gabriella
kiss? They didn’t in the first movie.

BORDEN: There was kissing in the first HSM that got cut out in the editing
room by us and not by Disney. Troy actually kissed her, but we liked the idea
that at the end of the movie, just as he is going to kiss her, he gets handed
the winning game ball and has to go off with his teammates. We looked at the
takes and thought, “It’s kind of fun that he doesn’t kiss her.” It was actually
a subject of debate at Disney: What happened to the kiss? We thought it was
more fun that he didn’t. But will they kiss in the next one? Yes. It’s very
romantic on the golf course at nighttime.

TV
KIDS: Will
HSM make it to
Broadway? Will your dream come true?

BORDEN: I’ve asked Disney that question
many times. I always said this was a Broadway musical. And I heard rumors
they’ll do it, but no one has called me yet!

TV
KIDS: Did
you ever expect HSM to take off this way?

BORDEN: During the filming I was with
Gary Marsh and he asked, “So, what do you think?” And I said, “You know Gary,
I’ve made more than 25 movies and this is the best movie I have ever made.” And
he said, “Come on. You’ve made some really good movies: White Nights, A Midnight Clear.” But I said, “This one is really
great.”

TV
KIDS: Is
it harder to work with kids than with adults, or do kids have more energy and
stamina?

BORDEN: The kids were so talented, and
they’ll work themselves till they fall over. Working with adult stars there are
considerations, because they have their own lives and commitments. When you are
working with 16-, 17- and 18-year-old kids, you can say, “Run and throw
yourself against that wall!” And they go, “OK!” They’re great! At the end of
the day, after they’ve been dancing for eight hours, Zac [Efron, who plays
Troy] would come up and you could see the pain on his face. And I’d say, “How
are you doing?” and he’d say, “I’ve got the worst shin splints. I’m dying.” And
I’d say, “OK, go home and rest because tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. you have to
be here and do it again!” But they managed; they can do it.