--- title: 10 Legacies of Flashdance description: 'Flashdance' was released 30 years ago this week — TIME looks back at the movie's impact on pop-culture canonical: https://time.com/archive/7119270/what-a-feeling-10-legacies-of-flashdance/ author: Gary Susman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2013-04-15T09:45:02.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-16T05:44:30.205Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: 10 Legacies of Flashdance og:description: 'Flashdance' was released 30 years ago this week — TIME looks back at the movie's impact on pop-culture og:url: https://time.com/archive/7119270/what-a-feeling-10-legacies-of-flashdance/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8177fb70ac16f134/698a8eef929fadb478c022a5/beals-e1365806230396.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: Beals in shirt og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 10 Legacies of Flashdance twitter:description: 'Flashdance' was released 30 years ago this week — TIME looks back at the movie's impact on pop-culture twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8177fb70ac16f134/698a8eef929fadb478c022a5/beals-e1365806230396.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # What a Feeling: 10 Legacies of Flashdance by [Gary Susman](https://time.com/author/gary-susman/) Apr 15, 2013 9:45 AM UTC  Paramount Pictures by [Gary Susman](https://time.com/author/gary-susman/) Apr 15, 2013 9:45 AM UTC ‘Flashdance’ was released 30 years ago this week — TIME looks back at the movie’s impact on pop-culture ## Jennifer Beals's Acting Career 
Legend has it that, the night before her audition for Flashdance, Jennifer Beals was so broke that she had to sleep in New York's Central Park. Actually, Beals had grown up middle-class in Chicago and was a freshman at Yale when she tried out for the role of Alex Owens. The then-unknown actress landed the lead role and found the proverbial overnight stardom when Flashdance became a smash. Her Cinderella luster dimmed when she acknowledged that a dance double named Marine Jahan had performed Alex's celebrated moves, and despite lead roles in such films as The Bride and In the Soup (directed by her then-husband, Alexandre Rockwell), Beals soon was relegated to character-actress status.



She ultimately found the richest role of her career on cable TV, as Bette Porter, leader of a clique of chic Los Angeles lesbians, on Showtime's The L Word (2004-09). Her last high profile gig was the starring role on the 2011 police-drama series The Chicago Code (pictured). At 49, Beals remains beautiful and glamorous, and the enduring popularity of Flashdance suggests she'll always have a fan base. niennunb ## MTV-style Filmmaking 
Flashdance wasn't a traditional musical, but it played like one, with a series of meticulously choreographed montages instead of traditional singing-and-dancing numbers. Critics derided the result as little more than a series of MTV-style music videos connected by thin threads of plot and character, but the quick-cut editing style soon became vastly popular in Hollywood. And not just in music- or dance-oriented films like Footloose or Purple Rain, but in comedies and action movies, too. MTV returned the hat tip by airing videos for soundtrack songs that were cut like trailers from otherwise non-musical films (like the clip for Berlin's "Take My Breath Away," from the Top Gun soundtrack).



Critics continued to complain that the MTV montage style emphasized flash and sensation at the expense of narrative, character, and emotion, and that the technique had effectively dumbed movies down for the short-attention-span generation. One study found that average shot length had declined from 8 to 11 seconds in the 1930s to three or four seconds in the 1980s. Action films (many of them bearing the stamp of Flashdance and Top Gun producer Jerry Bruckheimer) were rendered especially incoherent.



But some directors argued that MTV-style editing was a way of packing more content for multitasking young viewers who were accustomed to processing visual information faster. In fact, it took directors trained on music video shoots, like Spike Jonze and David Fincher, to figure out how to use the abstract nature of MTV-style editing to tell more complex, non-linear stories.



\[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4a6ampIGao\] niennunb ## Joe Eszterhas's Screenwriting Career 
Before Flashdance, reporter-turned-screenwriter Eszterhas had completed one produced screenplay, for Sylvester Stallone's blue-collar drama F.I.S.T. With Flashdance, he started writing about strong and sexy women in difficult circumstances, stories that often bordered on the pulpy or exploitative – defense attorney Glenn Close falling in love with her killer client in Jagged Edge, Debra Winger infiltrating a group of white supremacists in Betrayed, Jessica Lange discovering that her father may have been a Nazi war criminal in Music Box.



Eventually, Eszterhas crossed the line into full-blown exploitation – and became the most well-paid screenwriter in Hollywood as a result. He wrote Sharon Stone's erotic thrillers Basic Instinct and Sliver, then found his Waterloo with Showgirls – essentially, Flashdance with nipples and catfights. His career has never fully recovered, though he tried to write a screenplay about ancient Jewish heroes the Maccabees for Mel Gibson to direct. For perhaps obvious reasons, that didn't work out, though it did yield a book by the Eszterhas about the failed partnership, titled Heaven and Mel. In his own Hollywood misadventures, the 68-year-old screenwriter may have found his most outrageous yarn yet. niennunb ## The Bare-Shoulder Look 
Jennifer Beals says she invented the collarless sweatshirt by accident. "When I was in high school, I had a favorite sweatshirt that had remained in the dryer for too long, so the hole for my head was too small, I couldn’t get my head through," she recalled in a 2011 interview. "So I cut around the hole. I wore it to one of the auditions, and they liked it."



The torn garment became a fashion must-have for women, who often wore it with one shoulder exposed, a la Beals. You couldn't go to a gym without seeing women dressed like Beals with ripped-collar sweatshirts and leggings – probably doing aerobic exercises to the sounds of Michael Sembello's "Maniac," from the Flashdance soundtrack, to boot. Soon, the off-the-shoulder look expanded to everyday-wear,(some boutiques would rip your T-shirt collar for you for a small fee), suitable for secretaries and teenage girls. The look was a precursor to the layered, punk-ish, artfully-ragged thrift shop look soon to be popularized by Cyndi Lauper and Madonna. niennunb ## Bein's Believing 
Is there any movie more emblematic of the 1980s than Flashdance? It's hard to overstate the impact that the movie — released 30 years ago, on April 15, 1983 — had on styles of music, dancing, fashion, and filmmaking. Plus, it launched careers and trends that persist to this day. It also launched a thousand parodies (remember 1984's It's Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown?).



Here, then, are 10 ways that steelworker/hoofer Alex Owens forged a permanent place in pop culture. niennunb ## Adrian Lyne's Directing Career 
Like Joe Eszterhas, Adrian Lyne specializes in films that center on strong women in often hostile environments, stories of female empowerment that often cross the line into exploitation. After the success of his second movie, Flashdance, with its sultry-but-tame strip-club sequences, Lyne followed up with the unabashedly hard-R 9 ½ Weeks. The tale of a sadomasochistic affair between chic New Yorkers Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke, it applied to its sex scenes the MTV-style montage techniques Lyne had perfected on the dance numbers in Flashdance.



Lyne's Fatal Attraction (pictured), in which Glenn Close stalks Michael Douglas after their weekend affair, became a smash and a hot-button topic of debate. Lyne pushed buttons again with Indecent Proposal, in which a married Demi Moore agrees to sleep with tycoon Robert Redford for $1 million. Lyne's career stumbled when he made a faithful adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita – pedophilia proving one hot-button topic too many – but he rebounded with Unfaithful, featuring a career-best performance by Diane Lane as a cheating wife.



Since that 2002 film, however, Lyne has yet to complete another, though the 72-year-old has had his name attached to a couple of thrillers currently in development. One of them, crime drama Back Roads, has a lead role for which Kristen Stewart has been approached; apparently, Lyne's fascination with resilient women continues. niennunb ## Breakdancing 
Flashdance, of course, didn't invent breakdancing, but it was one of the first movies to popularize the street style and bring it to Middle America's shopping malls. (And where breakdancing became popular, the hip-hop music and culture that gave birth to it were sure to follow.) The movie contained a celebrated sequence where Jennifer Beals comes a cross a group of b-boys, played by Wayne "Frosty Freeze" Frost and the Rock Steady Crew, showing off their moves to the tune of Jimmy Castor's "It's Just Begun," soon to be a breakdance anthem.



It wasn't long before the art form got its own movies, notably, Beat Street (also featuring Frost), Breakin', and its wonderfully titled sequel, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. Pretty soon, oldtimer Don Ameche was winning an Oscar in 1985's Cocoon for spinning around on his back on the dance floor (like Beals, with the aid of a dance double and a song by Michael Sembello). You'd think that would have killed the fad, but it persists to this day, practiced by street kids who've never heard of Frosty Freeze.



\[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3ZNFGE8PZE\]



niennunb ## Jerry Bruckheimer's Producing Career 
The success of Flashdance made Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer more than successful producers; it made them auteurs of their own mini-genre of movies. They were mostly action films (the Beverly Hills Cop series, Top Gun (pictured) Days of Thunder) defined by slick surfaces, expensive hardware, MTV-style editing, and shallow scripts. After Simpson's death in 1996, Bruckheimer continued making such films, often with director Michael Bay at the helm (Armageddon, Pearl Harbor).



In the last decade or so, Bruckheimer has branched out into more imaginative fare, including the CSI franchise and The Amazing Race on TV and the Pirates of the Caribbean and National Treasure franchises on the big screen. Lavishness remains a Bruckheimer hallmark (his upcoming 2013 version of The Lone Ranger was set to cost upwards of $250 million and feature a spectacular train wreck before Disney forced him to scale back a little). Considering the Bruckheimer movies it spawned, Flashdance (with its star-free cast, lack of special effects, and $7 million budget) seems like an indie art-house film by comparison.



\[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9DDCKVrZfU\]



niennunb ## Jennifer Lopez's "I'm Glad" video 
Perhaps the ultimate return tribute that MTV paid to the movie that made its house style a screen staple was J. Lo's 2003 video, directed by David LaChappelle and featuring a re-enactment of Flashdance. (Of course, this MTV version is more economical, sacrificing narrative coherence to tell the story in just four minutes of quick-cut scenes.)



In fact, the re-enactment was such a perfect shot-for-shot homage that it engendered two lawsuits. One was a copyright infringement suit from Paramount, rights-holder to Flashdance. The other was from Maureen Marder, the construction-worker/dancer who'd sold her life story rights to the makers of Flashdance. She'd long ago sued them, too, complaining of exploitation for having sold the rights for a mere $2,300 to filmmakers who'd grossed $150 million at the domestic box office. Now, she argued, J. Lo had, by remaking Flashdance, stolen her life story again. (Marder's suit was dismissed, and Lopez's record label settled out of court with Paramount.)



In a way, of course, Lopez was re-enacting her own life story, that of the Bronx girl who'd used street moves to dance her way to fame. Unlike Flashdance, "I'm Glad" starred a woman who could perform her own dance moves.



\[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNL32eIOuo0\] niennunb ## Cynthia Rhodes's Acting/Dancing Career 
Nashville-born Rhodes had been a dancer at Opryland before breaking into movie musicals with a small role in 1980's Xanadu. Her role as dancer Tina Tech in Flashdance led to even bigger parts. She played the John Travolta's love interest, a Broadway dancer, in Staying Alive, and then her most memorable role, resort hotel dance instructor Penny Johnson (pictured) in 1987's Dirty Dancing. She showed she was equally adept at tearing up the ballroom floor with Patrick Swayze and playing wrenchingly emotional dramatic scenes (Penny was the one whose botched illegal abortion is the catalyst for much of the plot).



The 31-year-old blonde could have had her pick of roles after that. Instead, she married pop star Richard Marx in 1989 and retired from show business to raise their three children. She had no regrets, Marx told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2012, adding that Rhodes now found dancing intensely painful. Still, the 56-year-old mom can boast a lasting legacy of screen roles that continue to wow viewers with their poignance and dazzling dance moves.



\[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sYKI4A3uhc\]



niennunb ## Dance Movies 
Imitation is the sincerest form of Hollywood, and the most enduring legacy of Flashdance may be the mini-genre of MTV-flavored dance movies that it inspired. First up was Footloose (1984), another set of music video-like set pieces strung together by an underdog-makes-good plot, and Dirty Dancing (1987), another movie about a girl who blossoms into an empowered woman on the dance floor. The genre sagged during the '90s, but it picked up again with Save the Last Dance (2001), which solidified the genre's conventions – street-inspired dancing, forbidden romance, and fiercely determined women.



The last decade has seen a virtual explosion of such movies, many of them produced or heavily promoted by MTV, including You Got Served, How She Move, and the Step Up (pictured) series that introduced moviegoers to hunk-of-the-moment Channing Tatum. Here was a real-life male variant on the Flashdance narrative, an actor who'd started out as a dancer in strip clubs but then sweated his way to legit mainstream fame. His semi-autobiographical retelling of that journey in last year's hit Magic Mike showed just how far we've all traveled since Flashdance. Today, any rising star can be Alex Owens, and without shame.



\[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0t9rMxTjBo\]



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