High School Musical’s Bart Johnson Reveals How Quickly the First Movie Was Made

Bart Johnson revealed that the cast got their heads in the game to film High School Musical in only four weeks.

Johnson, 54, who played East High basketball Coach Bolton, is hosting an iHeartRadio miniseries podcast, Get Your Head in the Game, which is the first spinoff from the Magical Rewind podcast. The first episode of the series, in which Johnson takes a walk down memory lane to the trilogy that launched the careers of several of its young stars, was released on Wednesday, Aug. 27.

In the first episode, Johnson said the cast and crew only had four weeks to shoot the original 2006 musical film in the halls of East High.

“That’s a lot of work and a very ambitious shoot,” Johnson, whose character was also Zac Efron’s onscreen dad, recalled. “And Kenny [Ortega] wants to do things really big.”

He recalled the iconic musical number “Status Quo” being choreographed and filmed on a tight deadline.

“I will ask Kenny. I’m gonna try to track him down and I’m gonna ask him. I think it was two days. It might have been one day. I mean, it’s amazing,” he recalled of filming the number, in which several of the film’s teen characters debate their roles in the high school social scene’s ecosystem.

The film focuses on Coach Bolton’s son Troy (Efron, 37) feeling torn between the world of basketball and musical theater – and his past and future. The series’ elaborate musical numbers were choreographed by Kenny Ortega.

When asked if the quick turnaround time was typical of Disney Channel original movies, Johnson revealed that most Disney films in the 2000s were “done in five weeks” with a $4 million budget.

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Johnson continued, “So you try to you gotta cram in lot, you gotta move, you gotta move real fast. You’re shooting five, six seven pages a day. You got to get through a lot of a lot of pages and tell a lot
of story. And then when you have extras and dancers and you’re moving a lot of bodies, it’s a lot.”

“So to do something special and to do it right, it’s a miracle. Yeah, it’s really a miracle,” the actor recalled.