Trivia - Fran Drescher on working on the Fame Pilot

In an interview with Concord Monitor in 2020. Fran Drescher described her experience working of the Fame TV series Pilot:

Drescher almost became a household name on another TV series altogether — Fame, based on the 1980 movie of the same name set at the New York High School of Performing Arts.

Alas, that job didn’t quite work out as planned.

My worst moment …

“Many years ago, I auditioned to play a student on the television series Fame. I had to sing for the audition and the feedback I got was that I was great. They loved me and I was going to be in it. And it was a big deal, really, because we had all seen the movie and loved it. They were actually going to work in a part for me that didn’t already exist; I think I was going to play a beautiful student who maybe wasn’t as talented or something, I don’t know.

“So I got hired and it was all very exciting. In the pilot I was going to sing a song similar to the one in the audition. They told me to practice, learn this new song and sing it a couple of times with the music coordinator so that when it came time to shoot everything would go smoothly.

“When the day came for me to do my song, the director started screaming ‘Cut!’ and came running onto the set. And I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ And he said, ‘What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘I’m singing. I practiced all week!’

“And he said, ‘No, we want you to sing off-key like you did at the audition.’

“(Laughs) And needless to say, they ended up not picking up my option.”

Was Drescher able to sing it off-key in subsequent takes?

“No! I don’t have an ear. But they shouldn’t have ever put me through the motions of rehearsing with the musical director. You know, maybe nobody told him I was supposed to sing off-key because he got me to memorize it the right way. So it was really their bad. They should have told the musical director, ‘We don’t want her to sound good, let her just learn the song and don’t correct her.’

“That’s a true story. And I was very taken aback because I thought I did well in the audition. But I did well in a bad way and that’s what they wanted me to preserve. Nobody told me that, though.

“It was a disappointment. But I never felt like I was an ensemble player and I never felt like I wanted to make a career out of playing a teenager; I was already in my 20s and married.

“So I was in the pilot but I really didn’t have that much to do and I didn’t get picked up to do the series, which I’m actually very grateful about because it’s really hard to play a teenager when you’re an adult and the show ended up going for a couple of years (it ran for six seasons from 1982-1987) so I was much better off skipping over that.”