More than fancy footwork
In town to make the Frankie Drake cast dance, star choreographer Paul Becker recalls how he got his career moving
Atop Paul Becker’s lengthy list of Internet Movie Database credits is the description “one of the world’s top choreographers.” What’s missing is the story of how Becker, a 33-year-old Victoria, B.C., native, got to that spot: a tale with enough twists and turns to merit his own biopic. Becker, who now lives in Los Angeles, was in Toronto recently to choreograph for the CBC series Frankie Drake Mysteries. In a phone interview, he talked about how he went from being a self-trained 12-year-old breakdancer to working on projects like Disney’s Descendants, Marvel’s Deadpool 2 and Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, and it comes down in part to a FedEx envelope. Becker, who beefed up his street dance with classes in hip hop, ballet and other styles and a year of training in Las Vegas, was working as an actor and dancer in Vancouver when one job set him on a different career path: watching Rob Marshall direct and choreograph the 2002 movie version of Chicago. The young Canadian bought a camera and taught himself to shoot and edit, but there was still the issue of getting his foot in the door, which is where the FedEx envelope comes in. David Winkler, producer of the films
Rocky Balboa and Creed, was in Vancouver making a ballet movie.
“I knew that all these actors send manila envelopes with their head shots to production. I knew that those go in the trash,” Becker says. So he put his own highlight reel in a FedEx envelope, and talked his way past security and Win- kler’s secretary at Lions Gate studios using the official-looking envelope. Winkler hired him on the spot. That job, choreographing the 2006 TV movie The Obsession, led to other TV and movie projects. Becker got busier and busier, successful enough to buy several properties in Vancouver, and began working more in New York and L.A. Then the story takes another turn — a “crazy” one, in his words.
Becker sold his Vancouver properties and bought a brownstone in New York, which he planned to renovate and turn into an apartment.
“I put all my savings into this house,” he says. “Within that year, there was the writers’ strike, the SAG strike, the Broadway (stagehands) strike and the U.S. economy collapsed.”
With his building not yet ready to rent out, “all of a sudden I had no money. The house was foreclosing. I was losing everything. … I couldn’t get hired to teach; I couldn’t get hired to edit someone’s demo reel, nothing. I had to get a job just to get food.”
He got fired his first day as a waiter at the Times Square Planet Hollywood. He had better luck at New York’s FAO Schwarz toy store, where he helped little kids play the Big Piano. But he says he would hide when movie and TV people he knew came in, like Ice Cube and Kristin Chenoweth.
And then legendary choreographer and director Kenny Ortega, in the midst of promoting High School Musical 3, walked into the store.
“I was like, OK, I need to meet this man,” Becker says.
Becker introduced himself and, the next day, sent Ortega his demo reel in — what else? — a FedEx envelope. Ortega called him a week or two later, asked him if he liked rock ’n’ roll and told him to be in Seattle the next day where he became the choreographer for a new boy band Ortega was developing: the Jonas Brothers.
“The next thing you know I’m on private jets with the Jonas Brothers flying all around,” Becker says. Ortega was “like an angel to me.”
Asked what he saw in Becker, Ortega says he was “absolutely captivated” by Becker after seeing him dancing on the toy store’s giant keyboard, entertaining his daughter. “I knew that this was a special person and wanted to know him. I came to find out that I was right.”
The jobs have been steady since and they’ve included some gigs in Becker’s home country: TV’s So You Think You Can Dance Canada and Canada’s Got Talent among them.
As a choreographer, Becker says he begins each project not with the dance steps but with the story. Then he thinks about how the scene will be shot, and only then starts “decorating it with dance.”
For Deadpool 2, he didn’t even have a script, just a request from director David Leitch to “create a musical number where Deadpool blows himself up in the opening scene” and the Bjork song “It’s Oh So Quiet.” The scene ultimately didn’t make the film, but a test version shot by Becker can be seen on YouTube.
Ortega says he and Becker are alike in their “vast appreciation for dance history, classic films, Gene Kelly and filmmaking … I came to discover that Paul is really a renaissance man with an amazing appreciation and knowledge of dance, filmmaking, music and simply art.”
Becker rearranged his schedule for Frankie Drake, a Shaftesbury drama about a 1920s female detective in Toronto, because he had worked with producer Teresa Ho on another project and “she’s been good to my career.”
“It turned out to be a fun episode,” Becker says. The scene, a dance competition, is part of the Season 2 opener. “All the cast was great. Everyone can actually dance,” he adds.
These days Becker’s dance card, if you’ll pardon the pun, continues to be very full. He choreographed the upcoming Mirror Mirror Wreck-It Ralph sequel, Ralph Breaks the Internet, which is due on American Thanksgiving, and he wrote, choreographed and directed Breaking Brooklyn, starring Louis Gossett Jr., which has been picked up by Lions Gate for a 2019 release.
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Yet Becker says he feels like he’s just getting started. “I look at a career like Kenny Ortega’s. That’s a career.”
Let’s leave the last word to Ortega, who says Becker’s transition from great choreographer to great director “is only a matter of time.”