Nigel Lythgoe on His Disco Cult Movie, 'The Apple': 'The Best Part of Making It Was Finishing It'

Nigel Lythgoe on His Disco Cult Movie, 'The Apple': 'The Best Part of Making It Was Finishing It',“So I’m a little scared. I’ve been told you wish to allocution to me about” – affecting abeyance – “The Apple,” says Nigel Lythgoe, best accepted as the ambassador of such TV aptitude competitions as American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance, as he answers the buzz in his Los Angeles office. Ironically, he’s cat-and-mouse there for a artisan to appear adjustment his television set.

It’s fair to accept Lythgoe didn’t accomplish that arrangement in adjustment to get his flatscreen anchored in time for a 35th ceremony examination affair of The Apple, the so-bad-it’s-amazing disco/rock opera/sci-fi flick for which he masterminded the alien choreography. When I acknowledgment that I in actuality own a mint-condition Apple DVD and would be captivated to host a screening in my own active allowance – to which he’d of advance be agreeably invited, as the bedfellow of account – he says with a dry laugh, “You absolutely charge to get out more, my dear.”

Clearly Lythgoe has confused on, even as The Apple has accomplished band status.

First, a little album for the 99.9 percent of you who chiefly accessory the capitalized chat “Apple” with iPhones, MacBooks, Dr. Dre, or the Beatles. The Apple (also accepted as Star Rock), which came out in the U.S. on Nov. 21, 1980, is advised by abounding critics to be one of the affliction films of the 1980s, or maybe even of all time. It was a box-office adversity that fabricated added about career-killing ‘70s/'80s cine musicals, like the Village People’s Can’t Stop the Music, the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Olivia Newton-John’s Xanadu, appropriately attending like Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, and The Godfather.

“My acquaintance John Farrar co-wrote the music for Xanadu. We met abundant later, in the 1990s or 2000s, and the one affair we had in accepted was Xanadu and The Apple are a double-header of the affliction two musicals ever,” Lythgoe laughs.

What makes Lythgoe’s Apple captivation abnormally notable – besides the actuality that afterwards this sole accurate choreography credit, his career not alone miraculously rebounded, but thrived – are the acutely able parallels amid The Apple’s plotline and, well, American Idol.

Basically, The Apple is about two accomplished alone innocents (Alphie and Bibi, the closing played by Catherine Mary Stewart, who aswell managed to appear professionally unscathed) aggravating to accomplish all their dreams of pop distinction appear accurate by aggressive in the 1994 Worldvision Song Festival. (Yes, 1994 – this was “The Future,” you see. Lythgoe and the blow of Apple aggregation allegedly didn’t adumbrate grunge was traveling to happen.) Eventually, Alphie and Bibi assurance a accord with music business villain Mr. Boogalow’s BIM (Boogalow International Music) label, alone to acquisition themselves trapped in a hellish, space-age abyss of Hollywood debauchery, record-label bondservant contracts, and abominable accumulation ball sequences.

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