that Pan had a few ideas, and the dancer was invited over. Pan demonstrated a brief break he had picked up from his street days in New York. From then on the two began a lifelong professional collaboration and friendship. Pan worked on all the RKO Astaire pictures. He was nominated for Academy Awards for the "Top Hat" and "The Piccolino" numbers from Top Hat (1935) and for the "Bojangles of Harlem"' number from Swing Time (1936). In 1937 he received the Academy Award for Best Dance Direction for A Damsel in Distress (1937), in which Joan Fontaine starred with Astaire. The Astaire-Pan collaboration, involving 17 of Astaire's 31 musical films and three of his four television specials, is widely accepted as one of the most important forces in dance choreography of 20th-century film and television musicals. Astaire called Pan his "idea man," and while he generally choreographed his own routines, he greatly valued the assistance of Pan not just as a critic, but also as a rehearsal partner for the purposes of fine-tuning a routine. Given Astaire's obsessive rehearsal habits, this was no mean task. Pan also performed the essential function of teaching and rehearsing Ginger Rogers, whose many other commitments during the filming of the Astaire-Rogers musicals often conflicted with Astaire's rehearsal schedule. In addition, Pan recorded Ginger's taps in post production on all their movies made after Roberta (1935). Pan continued to collaborate with Astaire until the latter's last musical picture, Finian's Rainbow (1968), which was a disaster on a number of fronts. The young director, Francis Ford Coppola, had no prior experience with musical films and rode roughshod over Astaire's and Pan's plans for the film's dance routines. Coppola reintroduced the style of dancing camera of the early 1930s, which Astaire had done so much to banish from the Hollywood musical. Eventually Coppola fired Pan, who had a small walk-on part in the film; Coppola has since acknowledged his own primary responsibility for the film's artistic failure.Coppola was embarrassed that Astaire's feet were cropped out on some dance routines when the film was reformatted to 70mm. Film appearances Pan's first on-screen appearance is as a clarinetist during the Astaire-Goddard routine, "I Ain't Hep To That Step But I'll Dig It," in Second Chorus (1940). He dressed as The Ghost in the deleted (and only) Astaire-Pan routine, "Me and the Ghost Upstairs," from that same film. He