Imagine Fever Pitch in cahoots with Strictly Ballroom. You need to be nifty and smart to get around the football pitch, right? You need to be graceful and cunning to glide and sparkle across the polished floorboards of a ballroom, right?
Danny Mitchell (William Ash) wants to learn to dance. He particularly wants to learn the mambo, the rumba, and all those other fiendishly complicated and beautiful rhythmic sequences of movements. Why? He reckons if he can dance like a Brazilian, then he can play football like a Brazilian. So he goes to dance classes and meets, not Pele - or even peil - but Lucy . . .
Mad About Mambo is about football, South American dancing, lads, and lurve. The film is set in Belfast - George Best has a lot to answer for. Right now, it is nearing the end of its 10-week shoot in Dublin.
The film is a joint production with First City Feature, Plurabelle Films and is a Polygram/Phoenix Pictures presentation. It is due for delivery by the end of the year.
"For insurance reasons, we're not filming in Belfast," explains PRO Barbara Holloway, "so it's Sheriff Street pretending to be the Falls Road yet again."
Mad About Mambo has an assured and lively young cast and the plot looks as if it will deliver its stuff as a crowd-pleaser. Danny and his mates are in their last year at a Belfast school. Mickey (Paul McClean) wants to be a fashion designer, so he can "get to meet all those supermodels"; Gary (Russell Smith) wants to be a magician for much the same reason; Spike (Joe Rea) fancies being a mercenary, so he "can go around the world killing people for money".
Lucy, the female lead, is played by American actress Keri Russell. She has worked with a dialogue coach for a month before the film started shooting. "Playing Lucy with a Belfast accent is very similar to doing maths," she confides. "Getting the accent right, remembering the lines and acting. And also, we're in Dublin, which doesn't help!" Russell originally trained as a dancer and by all reports is a wow in the dance scenes. "But football, no, about that I knew nothing."
On the day The Irish Times visits the set, the crew is shooting a party scene at a private house in Blackrock. It's supposed to be the home of Oliver, Lucy's posh boyfriend. Later on, Danny and his motley lot will be turning up on the doorstep. There's a lot of people needed for these scenes.
All the extras needed for the day are assembling in the local church hall to be made up and to put on the frocks and glad rags which wardrobe has been scouring the high streets for all summer. It's early in the day, an overcast day, and passing motorists are probably thinking this is the fallout from some debs dance.
In fact, it's supposed to be a night scene, so the facade of the house is hiding under a crinoline of scaffolding and blackout material. All dressed up now, the extras are waiting to be called, on the pavement across the road from the house.
The teenage girls are like birds of paradise, all in brightly-coloured dresses with shiny fabric, sparkling hair-clips, strappy sandals. They cluster together in groups, giggling and preening and flipping their hair. The boys are much more reticent. They lean against the wall beside the coffee urn and look faintly embarrassed.
There is pandemonium when Jenny Faherty, who is overseeing the extras, starts matching boys with girls for the party scenes. "Meet your boyfriend," she announces, marching among the birds of paradise with scarlet-faced boys in tow.
"Hello," says one girl to her new beau, and roars with laughter. "You're my fella."
One chap, lurking in a gateway as far from the melee as possible in the delusion that he will thus escape the match-making, discovers he has been allocated the part of the unattached chap who will have to kiss a girl at the party. He looks truly appalled. Everyone else whoops delightedly. This is a mini-drama within a drama. It's the best action by far to be seen over the three hours of attendance at the set, during which time less than 20 seconds of film are shot.