Gotta Preserve Dance on Film

The cozy Hollywood apartment, built in 1918, already had a Tinseltown pedigree: It was once owned by Mickey Hargitay, one-time husband of sex goddess Jayne Mansfield; and in the 1980s, members of the band Guns N’ Roses lived there, where the digs were appropriately dubbed “Disgraceland.” Since 1998, however, Larry Billman, former hoofer-turned-stage director, writer and researcher, has transformed the two-bedroom flat into a repository for all things relating to commercial dance.

It’s the Academy of Dance on Film. If you want to see a newspaper clipping of Fred Astaire and his daughter, Ava, at her debutante ball in 1959, this is the place. (She told Billman she’d stepped on her famous daddy’s toes while twirling around the floor with him.) The archive is also the place that houses more than 1,000 videotapes: Jackie Chan sits comfortably beside Leslie Caron and across the shelf from tapes devoted exclusively to alien movies, ape portrayals and “hootch” dancing, or, as Billman likes to say, “wiggling girls.” For those with a yen for watching Indian musical films featuring bharata natyam or Drew Carey’s second season TV dance number, “Five O’Clock World,” you’ll find them at the Academy of Dance on Film too.

A self-proclaimed pack rat, Billman has been amassing dance-related memorabilia for the past 25 years through donations and his own purchases. In the periodical room alone, there are 1,500 magazines, including copies of Rolling Stone dating from the mid-’80s and a complete set of Dance magazine, from 1949 to the present, for which Billman paid $3,000. The archive also contains nearly 1,000 Playbills from film, stage musicals and dance companies, and boasts an exhaustive array of photographs, arranged alphabetically in notebooks, including an entire binder in which actress Teri Garr can be found posing as an adolescent on pointe, as well as preening in a variety of beach party movies.

“Teri and I did ‘West Side Story’ together at the [now defunct] Valley Music Theater,” says Billman, who, at 63, is fit, handsome and liable to break out in a simple one-two combination. One such move he calls the “Here she is, boys”: Gesticulating with outspread arms, it’s basically what Billman says he did as a backup dancer with Ann-Margret, a friend who is an honorary chairwoman of the Academy of Dance on Film, along with John Travolta, Chita Rivera and Ann Miller.

A nonprofit organization, the archive has an annual operating budget of about $70,000, with grants from sources such as the Jerome Robbins Foundation. The American Choreography Awards--an L.A.-based competition for all kinds of commercial (as opposed to concert) dance and whose proceeds benefit the archive--has its office in the apartment. It’s adjacent to the kitchen, with its huge portrait of Robbins and Slapsy Maxie posters. (Maxie was a boxer-turned-comic who often presented the Jack Cole Dancers at his eponymous Wilshire Boulevard nightclub in the late 1940s.)

Another source of funds comes from supplying still photos to production companies such as Van Ness Films, which creates biographies for A&E.; Documentaries have featured Donald O’Connor and Mitzi Gaynor, and can be watched in the archive’s video screening room along with another recent acquisition: 300 broadcast tapes of the works of Michael Peters (a music video pioneer, he choreographed Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”) and Lester Wilson, the man behind Travolta’s classic “Saturday Night Fever.”

Billman comes by his passion for the ephemera of film dance through experience. Hollywood born and bred, he studied tap at age 5, segueing into modern dance in his teens with Lester Horton acolyte Don Martin. Billman enrolled in theater courses at Los Angeles Community College, where he says he had an epiphany. “I realized I was not that good of a [modern] dancer and wasn’t dedicated enough, but I fell in love with musical theater.”

Billman spent the next 15 years performing in regional shows before he was drafted in 1961 and shipped off to Germany for two years. “I had a great time,” the gray-haired, hazel-eyed Billman says of his Army stint, “and when I got out, I worked Vegas--with Ann-Margret, Joey Heatherton and Johnny Mathis. It was at that time that I fell in love with a Japanese dancer, and we got married and had two daughters.”

Figuring he needed to settle down, Billman also thought he could bluff his way through choreography. It was 1969, and Miriam Nelson asked him to assist her in choreographing a square dance sequence in “The Great Bank Robbery,” with Zero Mostel and Kim Novak.

“That taught me how to move 300 extras around. It scared me, but by then I was writing and directing regional theater. The next thing I knew, Miriam hired me to assist her with ‘Disney on Parade,’ a show at Disneyland.

That kicked off Billman’s three-decade career with the theme park conglomerate. His first solo effort, a 30-minute revue, “Show Me America,” ran for a year at Disneyland. Starring his crony, Garr, it was the first “book” show that had no relation to the famous Disney rodents, Mickey and Minnie. Another Billman show, “Hoop Dee Doo,” has been running for 28 years, three times a night, seven days a week at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla. (“If I’d have known it was going to run this long, I’d have made it better,” Billman quips.)

In the early ‘90s, though, Billman says he became a little “Disneyed out.” Continuing to work for the company, he also answered an ad in a movie book club publication. “They were looking for someone to write a book on Betty Grable. I’d written articles for dance magazines and oodles of scripts, so I sent a sample and got the job.”

Published in 1993 by McFarland & Co., it was followed by another on Fred Astaire in 1997. But it was while doing research for Film Choreographers and Dance Directors, a 652-page encyclopedia illustrated with 200 photos, that Billman realized he needed a facility to house his ever-growing collection of research material.

“I had a heck of a time finding all this information, but when I started amassing files of all these people--[from] Busby Berkeley and Hermes Pan to Bob Fosse--I decided to set up shop because I wanted to share this with everybody.”

The encyclopedia was published in 1998, the same year Billman founded the academy. A decade-by-decade history of dance on film, the book is filled with thumbnail biographies and filmographies of more than 900 choreographers and dance directors who provided work for nearly 3,500 films from 1893 to 1995. One of the entries features the Nicholas Brothers, Harold and Fayard, tap dance icons famous for their acrobatics in a slew of ‘40s movies.

Harold died in 2000, while Fayard, who recently celebrated his 87th birthday, is on the academy’s board. When asked why the organization is important, the dancer energetically replied, “You have to keep history alive so new people and students--other generations--will be able to see what came before. We can’t let all of the beautiful work that’s been done slip through our fingers.”

Getting nonprofit status and putting a board together that includes development and education directors have been boons to reaching the academy’s goals. Daughter Saadia also pitches in when Billman, who still works for Disney, is away. Currently creative director for Tokyo Disney Resort, he supervises directors, writers and choreographers for the company’s two theme parks and four hotels in Japan.

When Billman is home, the keeper of the dance flame also teaches at Cal State Long Beach and USC. In addition, he publishes an annual academy newsletter. His long-term goal, he says, is for commercial dance to receive its due within the film community.

“I want dance on film to be a recognized craft, like makeup and scenic design, but I don’t see the Academy [of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences] handing out a choreography Oscar anytime soon.

“Dance is how we are,” he adds. “It’s a barometer of our culture, and I want scholars, but more importantly, kids and students, to know how and where these movements came from--that the Nicholas Brothers are tied to break-dancing, and Astaire, by defying gravity, leads to ‘The Matrix’ choreography.”

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THE ACADEMY OF DANCE ON FILM, 1547 Cassil Place, Hollywood. Hours: 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Price: Free . Phone: (323) 463-7009.

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Victoria Looseleaf is a regular contributor to Calendar.