Roller Boogie

Roller Boogie (1979)

It's love on wheels!

Teen lovers Bobby and Terry band together with other roller skaters to try and prevent a powerful mobster taking over the land their favourite skating rink sits on, and compete in the Boogie Contest.

Date of release
1979-12-19
TMDB
5.6 / 10 (46)
Runtime
1h 44m
Genres
Drama, Romance
Director
Mark L. Lester

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Los Angeles

Roller Boogie is a 1979 American teen musical exploitation film about roller disco, directed by Mark L. Lester and starring Linda Blair, Jim Bray, Beverly Garland, Roger Perry, Mark Goddard, Jimmy Van Patten, and Kimberly Beck. Set in the Venice suburb of Los Angeles at the height of the roller skating fad of the late 1970s, it follows an upper-class young woman (Blair) who falls in love with a working class skater (Bray). The two seek to thwart efforts from a powerful mobster attempting to acquire the land where a popular roller rink is located.

Production

Roller Boogie was written by Barry Schneider with Irwin Yablans, who is credited with creating the story. Yablans' Compass International Pictures, founded with Joseph Wolfe, would distribute the movie. Compass International Pictures had unprecedented success the previous year with John Carpenter's slasher Halloween.

In an earlier version of the script, Bobby James' primary interest was songwriting. In the movie, Bobby and friends were trying to write a new song by humming into a tape recorder. Once he meets Terry, she assists him in scoring it using her musical abilities. By the film's ending, Terry leaves for her music scholarship whilst Bobby pursues his musical career. There is no mention of the Olympics in the earlier version.

Linda Blair was cast in the lead role of Terry, and at the time had intended on moving away from the horror genre in favor of more lighthearted pictures, after her breakthrough appearance in The Exorcist (1973).

Although originally hired as a stunt double, Professional roller skater Jim Bray was cast as Bobby James, and was paid approximately $20,000 for his appearance in the film. Bray did not appear in any other films after Roller Boogie, despite achieving something of pin-up status in teen magazines largely based on his appearance in the film.

Stoney Jackson would appear in the third and final season of The White Shadow as Jesse B. Mitchell before its cancellation in 1981, and in Michael Jackson's music video "Beat It" (1983). He also appeared in Diane Lane's movie Streets of Fire (1984) as the lead singer of a doo wop group.

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