In the first months of 2014, New York police charged 46 subway dancers with reckless endangerment for the pole swings and flips commuters knew by one shouted word, according to NBC New York. The year before, the same charge had been filed against two. Twelve years later, that Harlem dance is the subject of a Paramount feature shooting in the city right now, and its director grew up inside it.

Nia Long is the newest addition to Get Lite, the feature directorial debut of Teyana Taylor, joining a cast led by Storm Reid and Ceyair Wright. Variety reported the casting last week, and the studio is keeping her role under wraps while production continues in New York City ahead of a wide theatrical release on August 20, 2027.

Nia Long comes to the set after playing Katherine Jackson in Michael, and the film reunites her with Reid, her co-star in the 2023 thriller Missing. She also has a working history with producer Kenya Barris, having appeared in his 2020 series #BlackAF and his 2023 Netflix comedy You People. His company, Khalabo Ink Society, is one of the producers behind Get Lite.

The rest of the crew came together in September, when Leslie Odom Jr., Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jodie Turner-Smith, Asante Blackk and Woody McClain signed on, as Variety reported. Wright, the NFL rookie who appeared in Space Jam: A New Legacy, plays a talented but sheltered dance student who finds inspiration, love and family on the subway. Reid plays the girl who opens that world to him, and Tylil James and Khayr Bullock round out the younger end of the cast.

The story has been in circulation for close to six years. Eric Gross wrote the original script, which landed on the Black List in 2020. When Deadline broke the Paramount deal in March 2024, the logline described a studious teenager who falls for a beatmaker played by Reid and gets recruited into her Litefeet crew. Maurice Williams wrote the screenplay Taylor is now shooting, and Billboard reported this spring that the studio had the film dated for April 9, 2027, before it moved to August.

Reid is producing through her company, A Seed & Wings Productions, alongside Barris and Anni Weisband of Khalabo Ink Society and Bill Karesh of Offbrnd. Taylor is producing with Courtney "Coco" Gilbert under their banner, The Aunties, so the director also holds a producer credit on the film.

The dance itself started on the basketball courts uptown. AG, the streetball emcee known as the Voice of Harlem, is credited with coining the term in 1999. The footwork that grew around it borrowed heavily from the Harlem Shake, which amNY traces to a dancer named Maurice "Motion" Strayhorn.

By the middle of the decade, records were carrying the style past 125th Street. DJ Webstar and Young B's "Chicken Noodle Soup," with AG on the track, put a Harlem party dance on national radio in 2006. Ron Browz's "Pop Champagne" made the same trip from neighborhood parties to the charts a couple of years later. Around 2011, a younger wave of dancers and beatmakers pushed the tempo up to 107 beats per minute and thickened the bass, producers told Vice. "The thing about 'Chicken Noodle Soup' is that it was just a dance," said Randy Vargas, the Litefeet producer known as Kid the Wiz.

The subway car became the main stage for that younger wave, and it is where most New Yorkers first saw the style. A routine usually ran between two stops, with a speaker on the floor and a dancer hanging upside down from the center pole. A fitted cap could travel from a sneaker to a head without a hand touching it. Crews like W.A.F.F.L.E., short for We Are Family For Life Entertainment, built whole sets inside cars full of strangers and passed the hat before the doors opened.

Taylor, born in Harlem in 1990, came up in the middle of that. "Between Harlem Shake and Chicken Noodle Soup and Get Lite, it kept us out of trouble," she told WWD this fall. In 2006, the same year "Chicken Noodle Soup" broke, she was credited at 15 as choreographer on Beyoncé's "Ring the Alarm" video. Her first mixtape, two years later, was titled From a Planet Called Harlem. Long before Paramount, she was directing music videos for herself and other artists under the name Spike Tee.

The 2014 arrests came out of a broader policy decision. Police Commissioner Bill Bratton put train performers inside his return to broken windows policing, and the MTA began forwarding rider complaints to officers in real time. Roughly 50 more dancers were charged with disorderly conduct on top of the reckless endangerment cases. By July of that year, more than 240 people had been arrested on misdemeanors tied to subway acrobatics, compared with fewer than 40 at the same point in 2013, the Associated Press reported. Bratton said the 5.5 million daily riders "have the right to expect a ride that's hassle-free."

The dancers kept going anyway, on express trains with longer runs between stops, in Union Square and eventually on television. W.A.F.F.L.E. has appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show three times and won a Golden Buzzer on America's Got Talent. A short film featuring crew members was later selected for the Tribeca Film Festival. Jacob Israel, one of the crew's leaders, described what it took to perform legally once the trains were off limits.

"We had to really break barriers to be able to perform somewhere. People say we should perform outside, but they don't understand the dynamics of needing permits in certain locations," Israel told amNY in May.

His crewmate Arnstar went back to the beginning in the same interview. "The culture started with the idea of saving our lives through dance," he said.

Taylor went looking for those dancers before cameras rolled. On July 21, she posted an open call to her Instagram Story for auditions in Harlem three days later. She asked for Litefeet dancers and crews, street-style performers and anyone with tumbling or acrobatic tricks, and she said she wanted people who could "represent New York." Some of the routines that once ended in a summons will now be shot for a Paramount release.

The film lands in the busiest stretch of her career. Taylor won a Golden Globe and earned an Oscar nomination for One Battle After Another. In June, Janet Jackson presented her with the first Icon of the Year honor at a BET Awards where she tied Clipse for the most wins, as we covered. A few weeks later, HitsCulture ranked her among the ten women closest to filling the stadium vacancy Rihanna and Beyoncé left behind.

She has said very little about the film itself. "I mean, I can't really say much about it because I don't want to curse it. I want people to really take it for what it is," Taylor told WWD while preparing to start production. The public has the cast list, the subway setting and a date, August 20, 2027, thirteen years after the city started charging subway dancers for the moves at the center of her film.