Twenty years ago, Tucson High School morphed into a movie set for a little ditty called "Can't Buy Me Love." "The school was turned into a major studio. Every child on that campus became a backdrop," says Ed Arriaga, then principal of the high school. "The bell would ring and the cameras would go racing down the hallway. I was later told that it was the only major movie ever done while actual school was in session."
This was no quickie shoot, says Arriaga, who remembers the movie being filmed over several months during the 1986-87 school year.
While several other Tucson high schools had been approached, says Arriaga, he thinks Tucson High got the gig because it was a fine-arts magnet school.
The movie, starring Amanda Peterson and Patrick Dempsey — currently starring as Dr. Derek Shepherd, aka "McDreamy," in TV's "Grey's Anatomy" — is your classic geeky-boy-gets-cool-girl teen flick.
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The film's stars, says Arriaga, wanted to "acclimate" to high school life. "So I quietly enrolled them for three or four days."
Merry Portillo-Corral, then a senior at the school who also worked in the office, remembers escorting Dempsey to the school library, where the movie producers were meeting.
"I never got an autograph," she laments. But she did pick up some scenes in the movie.
"There was an announcement saying if kids wanted to be in the movie."
After the requisite parent permission forms were returned, would-be extras filled up signup sheets for various scenes.
In one scene, Portillo-Corral is standing in the school's mall area when Dempsey breaks up with his girlfriend. "She goes to slap him, and we had to react in the background. We had to do the shots over and over."
More fun was the big dance scene, filmed in the high school gym. "Paula Abdul was the choreographer," says Portillo-Corral. "She taught us this little dance. We practiced it in the mall and then they shot it in the gym."
Portillo-Corral missed two weeks of school and was paid minimum wage. "I got two checks," says Portillo-Corral, who still works in the high school office. "One was for $32; the other for $49."
The school did considerably better.
"We squeezed two dance floors and a rye lawn out of it," says Arriaga. "I wanted winter lawns in the mall area, and they refurbished two dance studios with floating floors and big mirrors."
When the movie hit Tucson in the summer of '87, "there was not a seat that a Tucson High student was not in, cheering and hollering," says Arriaga.
"It's on cable all the time," says Portillo-Corral, who has four children, one of them a sophomore at Tucson High.
"When the movie comes on, they always say, 'Mom, your movie's on.'"