High School Musical 3: Senior Year 歌舞青春3：畢業季

Zac Efron, 20, who plays alpha dog and basketball star Troy in the series, nuzzled the neck of his on-stage and off-stage girlfriend, Vanessa Hudgens, 20, who plays the lovely brainiac Gabriella. She then bumped shoulders and banged fake swords with Corbin Bleu, 19, who plays Troy’s best friend, Chad. At one point between takes, Efron and Bleu threw themselves into the canvas chairs recently vacated by director Kenny Ortega and cinematographer Daniel Aranyo and requested a playback, watching the scene they just shot the way any other guys might review their Grand Theft Auto IV scores.

“Did you think about asking the director if it was OK to sit in his chair?” Ortega said, looming suddenly over the two for all the world like a high school principal. Efron grinned sheepishly and leapt from his chair, but everyone, including Ortega, laughed.

After five years of working with this cast, Ortega is clearly a director who rules through love, not fear — and it’s hard not to love a man who walks around orchestrating an extremely complicated dance number with his teacup terrier Manly (yes, the same one owned by the scheming Sharpay in the movies) carelessly cradled in his arm.

But don’t be fooled. The minute the cameras and lights are ready, everyone is all business, and if something — a light, a car, a line — is not the way he wants it, Ortega’s displeasure is expressed in clarion tones.

For all the playfulness, high spirits and collective chorus of “we really are one big happy family” that infuses the set of Disney’s bullet train of a film franchise, the folks involved in the third “HSM” are focused. Because there’s a lot at stake. The little movie Peter Barsocchini wrote as a simple paean to his own high school experience, that Ortega took as a way to get back into films after spending years choreographing dance numbers at mega-events like the Super Bowl, that was cast with kids previously known only to Disney Channel devotees, has become an international multibillion-dollar industry.

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