While studying at Yale University, Pitchford performed with numerous campus drama groups, but his focus gradually turned off-campus, where he worked with the Wooster Square Revival, an experimental theatre company that offered acting opportunities to recovering addicts and alcoholics.
In 1969, Pitchford returned to Honolulu as an assistant to authors Faye Hammel and Sylvan Levey in updating the popular guidebook Hawai'i on $5 and $10 A Day, and researching Trans World Airlines' Budget Guide to Hawai'i, the first of a series of guidebooks that would eventually turn into the popular series TWA Getaway Guides.
[citation needed] As a result of performing his early songwriting efforts in cabarets around Manhattan, he was invited to write with such composers as Stephen Schwartz, Alan Menken and Rupert Holmes.
[1] "You Should Hear How She Talks About You," another Snow/Pitchford composition, was a Top 5 hit for Melissa Manchester for which she won the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 1983.
That same year, Pitchford, Kenny Loggins and Steve Perry wrote and composed "Don't Fight It," a Top 20 hit that was Grammy-nominated in the Best Pop Vocal Duo category.
Inspired by a 1980 news story about Elmore City, Oklahoma, a town which had finally lifted an 80-year-old ban on dancing,[2] Pitchford wrote the screenplay for the motion picture Footloose (1984).
7, was co-written with Eric Carmen, and was performed by Mike Reno of Loverboy and Ann Wilson of Heart; "Dancing in the Sheets", which reached No.
Pitchford received two Grammy nominations: Best Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media, and Best R&B Song "Dancing in the Sheets.
"[citation needed] Paramount Pictures's remake of Footloose, which was again based on Pitchford's original screenplay and featured six of his songs, was released in October 2011.
That led to Pitchford being hired as director of HBO's Blood Brothers: The Joey DiPaolo Story (1992), which won that year's Cable Ace Award for Best Children's Program.
[1] With Marvin Hamlisch, Pitchford wrote Welcome, the Invocation for the Opening Ceremony of the 1984 Summer Olympics; it was performed by a choir of 1,000 voices in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
The soundtrack for the 1988 film Oliver & Company, to which Pitchford and Tom Snow contributed "Streets of Gold," sung by Ruth Pointer, was Grammy-nominated.
A previous production of that show had been presented in 1988 by the Royal Shakespeare Company, first in Stratford-upon-Avon in England, and then in a famously short run on Broadway at the Virginia Theatre.
[citation needed] Pitchford has contributed songs to The Lizzie McGuire Movie (2003), Shrek 2 (2004), Ice Princess (2005) and Bambi II (2006).