The Tommy Steele Story (1957)

Interesting facts

The Tommy Steele Story is a 1957 British film directed by Gerard Bryant and starring Tommy Steele, dramatising Steele's rise to fame as a teen idol. Along with Rock You Sinners, it was one of the first British films to feature rock and roll. In the US, where Steele was not well-known, the film was released under the title Rock Around the World. The film was announced in January 1957, three months after the release of Steele's first single "Rock with the Caveman".

Production

Producers Nat Cohen and Stuart Levy noted the success of low budget American rock musicals like Rock Around the Clock (1956) and thought they might be able to do a similar movie in England with Tommy Steele. "We knew that if we could sign him [Steele] in time we'd have a winner," said Cohen later.

Steele wrote in his memoirs that Cohen and Levy "were quite different from that other British film mogul, J. Arthur Rank. Where Rank was C. Aubrey Smith, Cohen and Levy were Abbott and Costello. They didn't so much as hold a meeting as do an act." He added "there was a degree of madness about them – but you had to be mad to take the chances they took – with a little eccentricity for good measure."

Steele agreed to make the film for a reported fee of £3,000. Variety put this at $7,000.

He met with Mike Pratt and Lionel Bart and they spent a month writing the songs. Bart considered the film premature, reflecting "Here's this guy, he's only 20, he ain't even started his story".

Norman Hudis was hired to write the script by Peter Rogers. Hudis completed his task in ten days saying "it was one of the easiest I've ever done" as "I was a cockney like Tommy Steele. I came from the same sort of street: I knew how he talked. I knew how he thought."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.