Ashley Tisdale stated in an interview along with filming a new movie in August finishing up "Suite Life" she will rerelease the album. Here is the full interview incase you want to read it
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With the phenomenal success of The Disney Channel's High School Musical, they have now produced High School Musical 2 which will premiere Friday August 17. The film has been reproduced by high school drama departments around the country, and the network is jumping on the popularity with another show, High School Musical - The Music in You, which will follow high school kids as they get ready for their own production.
Recently Disney Channel executives and the cast of the film presented their new movie to television critics and answered questions about the film and the enormous success the original movie brought to them. There is no one who can doubt that it was wholeheartedly embraced by millions of tweens and teens around the country.
GARY MARSH (President of Entertainment at Disney Channel Worldwide): For the last few months, the question that people have asked me most about High School Musical is, "How can you top yourselves?" And the reality is, that's not how we approach this production at all. Our challenge to the filmmakers was not, how do we do it better, but how do we do it differently and still maintain what the essence of High School Musical. The question is, how do we evolve the relationships organically? How do we strengthen the relationships? How do we surprise the audience musically and choreographically? How do we explore new themes and retrace our steps from what we created already?
So if High School Musical, the original, was about expressing yourself and following your dreams, High School Musical 2 is really more, if you will, a cautionary tale about learning to pay attention to your own internal moral compass, and understanding that if that compass loses its bearings, there are consequences that are real and painful. In a nutshell, the movie is about how Sharpay, who is still licking her wounds from the humiliation she suffered at the East High winter musical, hatches a plan to reestablish her rightful place in the high school social order. And what that means is she's going to score the biggest prize of all, Troy Bolton. So she arranges to get Troy a summer job at the Lava Springs Country Club, which, not coincidentally, is owned and operated by Sharpay's family, and that way she can isolate Troy from his teammates, she can separate him from Gabriella and she can go in for the kill.
Unfortunately, Sharpay's plan gets a bit more challenging when we find out that, unbeknownst to Sharpay, Troy has arranged for all the of the Wildcats to get jobs at Lava Springs Country Club for the summer, including Gabriella as the new lifeguard. So now Sharpay sets out to woo Troy in the only way she knows how, which is by basically bribing him, by offering him a membership to the country club, by offering him his own golf cart, and actually by offering one of the things that really, truly matters to him, which is a scholarship to the University of Albuquerque for basketball, something that he really can't afford to pay for. It almost works, until Troy realizes at the end that if he accepts Sharpay's offerings, what he'll have to give up and compromise, his friends and his own integrity, really aren't worth trading out for the material trappings of what Sharpay has dangled.
Given the enormous success of High School Musical, was this a much bigger production?
Bill Borden: It was bigger, yes. It's bigger than the normal production that Disney Channel puts on. It's the same length movie, but we had a little bit more to work with.
Gary Marsh: Budgetarily it was more than the first one, and it will be less than the next one.
Talk about working on a grander scale.
Kenny Ortega: Grand isn't a great way to put it. What's grand about this is this cast and the energy that they have and the enthusiasm that every single person behind the scenes, in front of the scenes, is about on this project. It was modest in terms of its size growth, but enormous in terms of the energy and spirit growth. Everybody was thrilled to come back and to do the second one. That in itself was like a celebration that we never got over. Day one seemed to have this sort of spirit that, again, thrust us through the entire filmmaking experience.
Bill Borden: We didn't try to make a bigger movie, by the way. We just tried to make a good movie.
Zac, between High School Musical and Hairspray, was high school ever this good?
Zac Efron: No, gosh, absolutely not. I wish. Of course I'm having a blast right now. This is a dream come true. We're all in a great place and having fun working, having fun promoting these movies. No, high school was not this great.
I noticed a lot more sports in this musical. Was that to draw in more boys? Also, do you have the breakdown of male to female viewers in fans?
Kenny Ortega: Yeah, you know, it's summer, we're outdoors, and it's a big part of our world. We have our academia and our athletics and our drama department. All of them are, I think, wonderfully represented in the second film. In our travels, we've discovered that we have an enormous young male audience and family audience.
Gary Marsh: One of the things that High School Musical did, is it broke down barriers to entry for music and musical theater. Clearly what our challenge is, is to help create those entry points in the next one. So certainly putting in another sports element was a natural extension of that, and hopefully it will work.
Peter Barsocchini: (Writer): Yeah, you know, in terms of kids accepting that, the show High School Musical, is being licensed to schools around America to perform. Drama teachers are constantly calling us, they're shocked, that kids are coming from the sports teams to audition. There's a school in Maine, I believe, of 2,000 students. And when they have a production for their musical, they usually get about 30 to 40 kids to audition. For "High School Musical", they had 700 kids show up to audition, and the drama teacher didn't know what to do, and a lot of them were athletes. I think to separate what -- we just set out to do a fun story, but the feedback we're getting is that at schools it's having an influence of being inclusive, rather than exclusive, between athletes and drama kids and that is a good thing from our perspective.
Do you guys know the breakdown in fans, though, those who watch the show?
Gary Marsh: Fairly typical of the network. The network tends to skew slightly more girl and the movie breakdown is pretty much that same skew.
How has this personally changed all of your lives?
Lucas Grabeel: We're sitting on a stage in front of tons of people that I don't know, and you guys are asking us questions on a sequel that's yet to come out. I mean it's a testament to how much -- at least my life has changed. I definitely didn't do this before High School Musical came out. People didn't stop me down the street and ask for a picture, just to meet them or something. Things change all the time in Hollywood, and "High School Musical" has definitely given us something that, not only the Hollywood lifestyle, the fantasy aspect of what you can get from it, but just being able to have the opportunity to do a lot more things that we didn't do before. We've traveled the world. We performed in front of 65,000 people in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Now, that's something I would never do if it weren't for "High School Musical." That's just amazing. Things like that, you can mark off the "10 things to do before you die" list.
Why do you think High School Musical became such a phenomenon?
Corbin Bleu: I think that's a question that we are asked frequently, and I still don't know if we're exactly sure. It's something that there's a magic to, that every single thing that's done in the name of "High School Musical" always seems to be able to create some phenomenon, whether it's the original movie, the fact that there's millions of productions across the country that are doing it now, there's going to be an ice show. We went on tour all across the U.S., all over South America. Now all of our own careers separately are taking off, and we've been able to have so many different opportunities to just pursue our own careers. I think it's just an unexplainable connection and a feeling that was there on the first day of set when we got there. Obviously, you know, music is just a universal language that everybody is able to connect to, especially kids. The movie itself is such -- kids watch it, and they just feel like they're part of this whole other world, that they embrace and they really just want to be a part of and they really want it in their lives. It gives them a wonderful message.
Monique Colman: I think, also, it's really accessible. We live in a day and age where there's so much technology, and we have the ability to actually find out and meet people and have MySpace pages and have blogs and kids all over the world -- I mean millions of children voted for specific things to be in "High School Musical 2," which is wonderful, because it doesn't take away from the story in any way and what, obviously, our producers and writers and director created for us to go and do, but it enhances it. It makes them feel like they can be a part of it, they can be inside of it. It's just a wonderful combination of demand, wanting something, and then being able to play us, being able to step into our shoes and play us in a karaoke game or play us in a DVD game or play with our dolls or whatever. I think that every place that needed to be touched upon, we said, you know what, let's support literacy and have a line of books. Let's do a number of different things that are all-encompassing, and I think that that really helped to spread the message. It would just sort of be sad if we had this great film but we couldn't get it to the people.
Which one of the numbers in High School Musical 2 was especially challenging, both dancewise and musicwise?
Monique Colman: I think all of them.
Ashley Tisdale: All of them.
Zac Efron: "What Time Is It."
Vanessa Hudgens: "What Time Is It," yeah.
Zac Efron: "What Time Is It," actually, the opening number, we kind of start the movie off where we left the last one, which is with our biggest production number. And I just remember there were so many sections to filming it. I remember, day after day, it was like we haven't finished "What Time Is It" yet. But, again, I think it's one of the more exciting numbers in it. We are going to start it off with a bang, you know.
What would you want to see in Number 3?
Zac Efron: I think this movie, regardless of what specifically happens, this is the legacy that this group of Wildcats is going to leave East High. So I would like to see a senior year, a real senior year.
Ashley Tisdale: Yeah.
Vanessa Hudgens: Definitely.
Zac Efron: I think a graduation or a prom/dance would be great.
Ashley Tisdale: Yeah. I think that would be great.
Lucas Grabeel: I think all of the members -- all of the Wildcats should join a space program and go into space, "High School Musical with Aliens."
(Laughter.)
How far along have the actors signed up, or how far into the future are they committed to this?
Gary Marsh: You know, we are in conversations with everybody. We are hopeful and optimistic that we will be able to pull everybody back together and recreate the spirit of what we created in High School Musical 1 and High School Musical 2.
At what age did you start in this direction?
Vanessa Hudgens: I think we all started off really young. We all started out really doing musical theater. I think we all kind of had a knack for it and fell into it and, you know, grew up watching these musicals, grew up doing them. And I think we all share a strong passion for acting, singing, and dancing. I think it was something we all just loved from the start.
Ashley Tisdale: Yeah. We worked really hard. I mean, we've done tons of acting classes, you know, singing lessons. Some of us have worked in malls before, you know. When I was in high school, I worked at clothing stores, anything to be able to do this. I've always loved to act. I've always loved to sing. And I have been doing it since I was three, and most of us have been doing it since we were really young. So it hasn't been an overnight success. It's been a long time coming, and it's just really cool to be able to be recognized for something, you know, something big like this, and that's wholesome, and it's a really good movie.
Lucas Grabeel: We are also surrounded by amazing talents that, honestly, make us look really good, you know.
Corbin Bleu: Kenny Ortega.
Ashley, here in the front. Maddie is the good girl in The Suite Life, and Sharpay is the schemer in this film. You, probably better than anybody, can tell who is seeing you where by how the public approaches you. What kind of feedback do you get?
Ashley Tisdale: You know, it's really funny. For a long time I never got Sharpay. Like, nobody ever called me Sharpay. They knew me as Ashley Tisdale as soon as "High School Musical" came out. So it was always like "Ashley, Ashley." And I was kind of bummed because Sharpay is such a weird name. It's pretty cool. But when I did the tour, kids started actually yelling "Sharpay" and stuff. I think kids knew me as Maddie first just because, when they see you first as that character, they kind of, you know, relate to you always as that character. So they know. And I'm really relating to Maddie. I'm the girl next door, the hard-working girl. So I am definitely more like Maddie. But, yeah, I think they know that it's just playing different characters, and Sharpay is the mean girl that I play. But kids, they are awesome. I love my fans. They are great.
For each of the cast members, what are you all going to do after "HSM2"? What projects do you have lined up?
Zac Efron: Who knows. I have a few projects that I'm looking at right now, just trying to find the right one with, selfishly, an exciting role that I would enjoy playing, you know.
Vanessa Hudgens: I have the same exact answer.
Ashley Tisdale: I'm doing a project in August, relaunching my album, and just finishing up "Suite Life."
Lucas Grabeel: I leave tonight. I'm shooting another film in Salt Lake City for a month. It's called "The Adventures of Food Boy." And after that, just, you know, my own projects that -- I'm going to start my own production company and make films myself.
Corbin Bleu: I actually just arrived this morning. I'm on tour right now with my album, "Another Side," and it's going great. I'm going to be touring all summer all the way through until about September, and then, after that, just other projects that are in the works, different
scripts, different people I've been working with, and just sort of like them down there as well, just figuring out the next project to go through.
Monique Colman: The same. I'm with Zac. I feel like "High School Musical," this whole enterprise, was such an incredible opportunity that I think we are in a position to make really good choices and decide what kind of work we want to do now and what -- like, right now, I've been more involved with, like, charity kinds of things and
with things that have to do with what I want to say as a person. I'm thinking in lines of, like, books and tapes and, like, all kinds of other things that aren't necessarily acting-related but that are sort of personal and important to me. While I do have this moment that people recognize my name and face, I want to sort of take advantage of that while I can, and then, hopefully, other work will come from that.
For Vanessa and Zac, let me ask you to just go back for a minute. Tell us what you first thought of the show when you first got it, when you first read the script, and then tell us when you first -- one of the early times when you first realized just how big this was becoming.
Vanessa Hudgens: Gosh, you know, I was a struggling actor looking for a job, and I loved musicals. Like I said, I grew up doing them. And to know that this was going to be put on TV was something I was truly thrilled about. I went in there, gave it my best, and got fortunate enough to book it. And, you know, I always loved the project. I thought I was working with an amazing group. I had tons of fun. So, with just that, I was very happy, and I felt accomplished with everything that happened. But once "High School Musical" started to blow up and just become what it's still becoming. I don't know. I'm still really blown away with it. I mean, I think I was -- we were on "Good Morning America," and we were performing in the middle of Time Square. And I look up. And it was the first time I'd ever been to New York, and I'm looking at my surroundings just realizing where I am. It's very touching to know that this is what it's becoming. I don't know. The whole thing is still very overwhelming for me, but I'm very blessed and appreciative for it all.
When you guys are choosing other projects that are coming before you, do you have to keep in mind your big "High School Musical audience, I mean, such that you won't be the killer on " Law&Order" or something that would shock them?
Zac Efron: I don't think we have to. It's something I enjoy what I'm doing. I love where I'm at with my fans at the moment. So, of course, when I look at projects, I try and find things that can take that audience and bring them on new and fun and interesting adventures. I don't want to shy away from them at all.
High School Musical premieres Friday August 17 on The Disney Channel.
smart move. because now she is finally starting to shoot videos for her singles & the album has been out for a while & now she is just starting to do an actual video for a single that way the album might get more noticed now if she re-released it kinda like a do over.
In a recent interview at The Fuse-TheSauce she said that along with filming a film at Montreal this August, she will rerelease her debut album in September, including New songs and the music vids will be released around that time or sooner
It is not really a flop considering that she is still known as a "Disney Girl" and it just wasn't promoted right. It did pretty well for not having an appropriate single and harldy promoted
