Dirty Dancing

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Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a surprisingly layered look at class differences by way of the celebration of dance.

As always, I am Chris Winterbauer, and I am joined this week by Lizzie Bassett, who is not entirely back from maternity leave, but through the power of time travel, namely recording ahead of time, we get her this week.

Lizzie, how you doing tonight?

I'm doing, Chris, excuse me, I am having the time of my life.

There you go.

Thank you.

Took me a while to get there.

We are covering, honestly, what I think I didn't realize is maybe one of my favorite movies, which is Dirty Dancing.

Wow.

I don't know.

I love it.

I love it so much.

And a lot more struck me about this movie this time around versus the, you know, many, many times that I watched this as a kid and as a teenager.

I am assuming, Chris, that you have seen this before.

What's your memory of it and what was your reaction this time?

I had seen it a number of times in high school.

It was always a film, if you had kind of a co-ed friend group, I feel like it was the film that like the girls had on when you went to the girls' house.

And so I saw it in the background in the same way that when they came over, like, you know, Die Hard was on TNT or something.

Weirdly, that was not my experience at our co-ed movie nights.

They always put on pulp fiction or the rules of attraction.

You had a more interesting friend group than I did.

But then, yeah, I hadn't seen it since high school.

And I similarly, I liked it fine in high school.

I didn't think a ton of it.

I really enjoyed it.

I thought it was really fun.

I thought Jennifer Gray and Patrick Swayze are extremely appealing.

It seems like a film that kind of perfectly suits their strengths, but also limitations as performers.

And I agree, there's a lot more going on.

Yeah.

Class structures, the dual class society that is America, you know, upstate New York, old Jewish money versus the local goyam brought in to entertain the mothers, so to speak, in this world.

And obviously, Marvelous Mrs.

Maisel touches on a similar theme if you've watched that show.

Yeah.

And I believe it's second season.

But yeah, I'm excited to talk about the film because it's...

Not only was it more entertaining than I remembered it, it's very funny, but it had a little depth that didn't feel forced that I appreciated.

Yes.

I mean, as we're going to get to in this episode, if any of you have not seen this, a main part, arguably sort of the linchpin of the movie that everything hinges around is an illegal abortion, which kind of, I mean, it goes over your head a little bit when you're watching this at, you know, 14 and 15, but we're definitely going to talk about it because it was, it was a bone of contention in this movie.

So let's get through the basic info.

It was released August 21st, 1987, written by Eleanor Bergstein, directed by Emile Ardolino, starring Jennifer Gray, Patrick Swayze, Jerry Orbach, who I love.

When Jerry Orbach cries, I cry every time, can't control myself.

Cynthia Rhodes, Kelly Bishop, Wayne Knight, and allegedly Matthew Broderick in a cameo as one of the talent show attendees, but I cannot find him.

I watched it so many times.

I don't know.

Apparently he's there.

Weren't he and Jennifer Gray kind of dating at this point?

They were very much dating at this point, which we're also going to talk about.

As always, the IMDb log line is is spending the summer at a Catskills resort with her family.

Frances Baby Hausman falls in love with the camp's dance instructor, Johnny Castle.

A log line that conveniently leaves out the illegal abortion entirely.

It's important, but it is a subplot.

I thought you were going to say it's implied.

Well, it is also implied.

They never explicitly say the word abortion, I don't think.

No, I don't think so.

But it is technically a subplot, so I think it's fine to leave it out of the log line.

Like the log line's line's your A story, not your plan B story.

Sorry, I had to do it.

Wow.

All right.

All right.

Okay, so I want to start with a little bit of context about what resorts like Kellerman's, which we see in Dirty Dancing, were, because I think, honestly, a lot of the culturally Jewish elements of this movie were really lost on me as a younger viewer, and they're very important and extremely present in this movie.

We actually get a little bit of this historical context at the very end from Max Kellerman, who runs the resort.

But also, even though Judaism never brought up directly in this film, they really went to great pains to make sure that it was culturally accurate in a way that I had no idea watching this as a 14-year-old, including little details like milk and meat are never served in the same meal, indicating that the guests keep kosher.

There's a ton of stuff like that.

So here is what these resorts were and where they came from.

Around the turn of the 20th century, tons of Eastern European immigrants were coming to America, many of them through New York, obviously Ellis Island.

Some programs were set up to encourage those immigrants to take up farming, and the Catskills region of New York, in particular, developed a very strong Jewish farming community.

But unfortunately, they figured out pretty quickly the land was absolutely terrible.

It was fine for dairy, not fine for growing things.

So these farmers started taking in boarders during the summer to make ends meet.

These basically evolved into boarding houses, then eventually into resorts, creating a network of hotels dubbed the Borscht Belt, also sometimes called the Yiddish Alps, that catered to Jewish vacationers mostly from New York City.

And one of the biggest cultural contributions the Borscht Belt made was comedians.

Many comics like Joan Rivers and Jackie Mason got their start touring the hotels.

And you see this in the movie with Wayne Knight's character, of course.

And he's, I love him.

He's so great.

The MC of the hour.

Yes.

Just getting ready for bar and bot mitzvahs all over the place.

Always.

So as you see in the movie, these were family resorts.

And one little girl whose family vacationed often in the Borscht Belt was dirty dancing screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein.

Just like Baby Hausman, she was called Baby growing up.

She was born to a successful doctor, although she was not as sheltered as baby because her family lived in a not-so-great part of Brooklyn.

And it was in Brooklyn that she fell in love with RB and, of course, dirty dancing.

She was a teenage Mambo queen, winning all kinds of dirty dancing competitions.

Her signature move was to sling her leg up around her partner's neck.

Very flexible, Eleanor was.

Very bendy, as Phoebe would say.

Bendy, yes.

So in 1958, she graduated from UPenn, went on to marry her husband, Michael Paul Goldman, in 1965, who was a Princeton professor.

And she became a novelist before eventually turning to screenwriting.

In 1980, she wrote It's My Turn, which was her first screenplay.

It became a comedy starring Michael Douglas, Charles Groden, and Jill Clayberg.

But what stuck with her from this movie is that her script and the original edit had contained an erotic dance scene that the studio cut completely.

They just cut straight to the sex.

I'm really hoping it was between Charles Grodin and Michael Douglas.

No, I wish.

Because that would be great.

I wish.

Sadly, it was Michael Douglas and Jill Klayberg.

Ah, boo.

Boo.

Honestly, Charles Grodin and anybody could have been Charles Grodin and Jill Klayberg.

Anybody.

Charles Groden doing anything.

Absolutely.

Just give it to me.

So Bergstein told the Philadelphia Inquirer that a few years later, she ran into someone from the crew on that film.

And he said, I remember when you taught us all how to dirty dance.

And that sort of clicked on a light bulb for her.

She wanted to write something where the one thing that they could not cut out was dancing.

Also, if it seems like this movie is driven by the soundtrack, It very much was because she literally started by compiling classic songs that she knew she would want in the movie, like before she had a plot, before she really had anything.

She was basically pulling together a mixtape.

And most of the classic songs she had are what wind up in the film, which we'll talk about a little bit later.

Also, Chris, I know that you like to listen to music while you write.

Do you ever kind of try to program songs in or is that just too risky?

I have on a couple things.

Didn't end up, one did not end up in the film.

And then I have a, there's a TV project that we're taking out that has a very very specific song for the opening and end of the, so Barry did something similar at the TV show.

I can't remember the exact name of the song.

And I'm trying to rip that off.

And so we will see if it happens.

But yes, it's very risky.

It's risky for a whole bunch of reasons.

Like unless you, again, can choreograph the scene or the movement specifically around the song.

We discussed this briefly.

Jocelyn Pook's Backward Priests and Eyes Wide Shut became the score of the scene because they'd choreographed to the song.

You can either paint yourself into a corner with rights issues, the budget of the film might not be able to accommodate certain songs that you're like, yeah, the stones, great, let's throw them in.

So it is risky.

I don't know that the songs she was pulling here were cheap.

You've got, you know, Otis Redding, but we'll get to that in a little bit.

So Bergstein started shopping around her script, but despite the success of movies like Saturday Night Fever, Flash Dance, and Footloose, she kept getting rejected over and over again.

Now, this is potentially due to the state of the industry at the time.

The boom of the early 80s was tapering off into what looked like a bust.

And also, this is sort of decidedly a girly movie written by a woman and as we'll see in a moment, produced by a woman as well.

So I think that probably had a lot to do with them not being interested or this not appearing like a blockbuster.

So Eleanor got lunch with a producer named Linda Gottlieb, who was working at MGM at the time.

They were acquaintances.

They had double-dated a few times with the same guys, so they knew each other, but they were not close.

And apparently it was over this lunch that Eleanor told Linda she wanted to make a dance movie about two sisters that involved a Catskills resort and tango in the early 60s.

She also dropped the bomb that she used to do dirty dancing, but she said that didn't have anything to do with this movie.

And Linda was like, what?

She said, rethink that because, quote, dirty dancing as a title is worth a million dollars.

So I do think Linda Gottlieb really came in and started shaping this very early on.

Clearly, he knew how to sell it in a way that other people who read the script did not.

Yes.

I don't even know if there was totally a script at this point.

I think a lot of it was generated between the two of them.

So, Linda eventually brought Dirty Dancing to MGM and Frank Yablanz, who we talked about in our Mommy Dearest episode.

He absolutely loved it.

He read it.

He was in.

The movie, Chris, was going to be made by MGM.

And then the next day, there was a regime change and he was fired.

Yeah,

great.

The minute you sell something and they say it's going to get made, you should know that person's getting canned the next day.

100%.

And they may have just been green lighting things knowing that they were going to get canned the next day.

I'm just kidding.

That's possible because I think this was MGM being bought out and he was very high up.

So he may have known.

He may have been like, Yeah,

you get a green light.

You get a green light.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the Rights to Dirty Dancing reverted back to Linda as the producer at this point, but she only had one year to get the movie made on her own before, I guess, they would then bounce back to MGM, who would likely shelve it.

So she shopped it around to every major studio.

They all passed, but she didn't stop.

She left MGM and she read in the New York Times that a Connecticut-based home video company called Vestron Video was planning on producing its own movies.

Vestron.

Vestron.

They'd been founded in 1981 by the former HBO executive VP of programming.

And the company was actually really successful right away because they recognized the market for distributing home video that was not porn.

Like most people weren't doing that.

Yeah.

It was porn or nothing.

And this, they did this years before Blockbuster even showed up.

Their meteoric rise, however, was starting to slow down because the studios themselves were seeing the potential in home video.

And they were like, why are we farming this out to Vestron?

We should be distributing this ourselves.

So Vestron, in kind of a proto-Netflix move, decided to open up their own production arm, Vestron Pictures, where they would make their own movies to sell to people's homes.

Let's all vertically integrate in various directions.

Yeah, let's keep going.

But Vestron, to their credit, were immediately on board with Dirty Dancing.

However, only if Gottlieb confirmed she could bring it in for under $5 million.

Not a lot of money.

It's less than half of what she'd estimated it should cost if they shot on location in New York.

She said yes.

Of course.

But we'll get to the budget later.

So Gottlieb got to work building the creative team for the film, including hiring director Emile Ardolino.

He was an Academy Award-winning director, Chris.

However, he was not an obvious choice because up to this point, he had almost exclusively directed dance programs for PBS.

And the documentary that won him the Oscar was He Makes Makes Me Feel Like Dancing.

He'd never directed a feature film.

He would go on to direct several very good ones, even after this.

Yes, he would.

Yeah, well, you'll probably get to this.

So I'll, I, there are a couple fun facts.

He's a really interesting director.

I really like him quite a bit.

We can talk about him.

He directed a few, not many after this, to be honest.

He passed away.

fairly young.

He did.

He probably most famously after this did direct Sister Act in 1993.

And then very sadly, he did pass away from AIDS in in 1993.

Yeah, he was one of the, I would probably one of the only openly gay directors working at the time, I believe.

And he did also Three Men and a Little Lady, the sequel to Three Men and a Little Baby.

And I think what's cool about him is if you kind of look at his films, and he didn't do a ton, like you said, but they all thematically kind of coalesce around a rebelliousness around societal norms and, you know, how to behave and how to act.

That's true.

It's like three men embracing their maternal instincts to raise a little girl together.

You've got a lounge singer on the run hiding at a convent, showing these nuns how to cut loose.

And then in the case of Jerry Dancing, obviously, a

sheltered Jewish-American princess crossing class divides and embracing her love of dance.

You know, there's a quiet rebellion in his films, even though they're blockbusters.

I think he's a really good director, which we're going to talk about in this episode.

And by the way, this is not to diminish the work that he had done before this.

He was a very accomplished director of dance programs.

Like he knew how to capture it.

And he'd moved to LA a few years before because he wanted to start directing features.

So far, though, nobody was letting him in.

But Linda had seen He Makes Me Feel Like Dancing and loved it.

So he immediately came to mind for Dirty Dancing.

This makes a lot of sense.

He knows how to capture movement, which...

I just think the dancing in this movie is incredible and it is captured so, so well.

But apparently when Linda brought him in front of the Vestaon board to pitch his idea for the movie, he had a full-blown panic attack and couldn't speak, just stared at them, didn't say a word, but he still got the job.

I think these Vesta executives were like, an interesting choice, sir.

And you're hired.

Yeah.

Because they don't know what they're doing at all.

Yeah.

He had read the script while on jury duty, loved that it was a period piece, loved that movement and dancing was so integral to the story.

And one thing he insisted on from the very beginning was that they were not going to use body doubles.

He insisted the actors do all the dancing because he did not want to be cutting away to body parts and have it be all chopped up.

He wanted to be able to show the wide, show their faces, show everything, and have it not be an issue.

They also brought choreographer Kenny Ortega on.

He was quite established at this point, and in addition to having helped choreograph Xanadu, several tours for the likes of Share and Kiss and Madonna's Material Girl video, he had also worked on Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

He was known as someone who was excellent working with actors versus professional dancers, which makes sense because he started as an actor.

And by the way, Chris, he went on to choreograph high school musical and direct newsies and hocus pocus.

Big newsies fans on this podcast.

I do genuinely love newsies.

I genuinely like newsies quite a bit.

My dad really liked it and showed it to us when we were kids and we all were really into newsies.

We were a weird newsies family.

I didn't know that other families didn't also watch newsies all the time.

No one watches newsies.

No one watches newsies.

Have you guys seen this newsies?

And everyone says, what the hell are you talking about?

I only know about it because my summer camp, every single year when it rained, they would do a newsies movie night.

And again, I don't know why.

It was just an annual tradition.

I hope it still happens.

I thought everyone knew newsies and Christian Bale's incredible Brooklyn accent.

Chris, I don't know if you're familiar with him singing, Stand Off, Faith.

Are you there?

Can you keep a candle burning?

If you don't believe me, listeners, go watch it.

That is what he sounds like.

And I love him.

Go watch it.

Anyway, it's a trip.

Newsies.

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So, Chris, if you had to guess, what do you think the most expensive part of this movie was?

We've already talked about it a little bit.

The most ex uh the music?

Yes.

Was that the most?

Yep.

Okay, yeah.

That which makes sense.

It's a great set of needle drops that they have in this movie.

It's an amazing soundtrack.

They knew from the beginning that they had to hold most of the budget to cover the songs that Bergstein desperately wanted and had written this movie around, so they were not going to be able to afford A-list actors.

The time came to start casting, and though it sounds like a couple of other people were considered for the role of Francis Baby Hausman, including Sarah Jessica Parker, by the way.

Ooh.

Yeah, who Vestron, I think, maybe wanted more than Jennifer Gray.

Interesting.

Matthew Broderick, six degrees of...

Yes, very true.

But Jennifer Gray was the creative team's top choice from the beginning.

So let's talk about her.

Jennifer Gay was cast before Patrick Swayze.

Yes.

I don't know that she was like officially signed on the dotted line.

But they had her in mind.

Yes.

I think they were always kind of casting the Johnny opposite her, even though it sounds like Vestron may have had some other people in mind.

So, just like baby Hausman, Jennifer Gray was born in New York City on March 20th, 1960, into a successful and famous family.

Her father was soon to be Tony and Academy Award-winning actor Joel Gray, who you probably best know as the MC from Cabaret.

And her grandfather was comedian Mickey Katz.

And yes, Mickey did at one point tour the Borscht Belt.

Now, what I'm about to mention, I'm saying because I think it's important to keep in mind when we discuss some of her experiences on both Dirty Dancing and Red Dawn.

According to her memoir Out of the Corner at 14 years old, she was molested by her grandparents' building superintendent.

When she told her grandparents, they didn't believe her.

When she told her father what had happened and that it had occurred after she was coming home from a date, he said, quote, well, what did you expect?

You were probably all juicy from your date.

So, not a great formative experience, and was immediately blamed and shamed.

She went straight into acting school after high school at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where she had a string of relationships with older men.

And in 1984, she had two big films release.

Francis Forb Coppola's The Cotton Club, which I know we keep saying this, but we will be covering in detail on this show because it is a disaster, the likes of which I'm not sure we've seen yet.

It's also worth noting that very much unlike his treatment of the sex scenes in The Godfather, Gray says that Coppola was not great to work with on this one, insisting that she stripped naked for her sex scene with Nicholas Cage and also kept a full crew on the set for the shoot, which, even back then, I don't think was standard.

No.

The other film to come out in 1984 was John Millius's Red Dawn,

which answers the question: if a foreign country invaded, could your high school football team kick their asses?

And the answer is yes.

Yes.

It's insane.

It's great.

It's one of the ultimate high school fantasy movies that really begs that question of who could we as high schoolers defeat?

And the answer was everyone.

Also, Lizzie, the first movie officially rated PG-13.

I believe you shared that during our Gremlins episode.

I think that is correct.

Yeah.

It's very violent.

And she starred opposite Charlie Sheen, Leah Thompson, and of course, Patrick Swayze.

However, Patrick did not make a good impression on Jennifer during this shoot.

So the movie, as we mentioned, is incredibly violent.

And one of the few scenes where she felt she was going to be able to flex some more tender acting chops was their sex scene together.

Unfortunately, day of, Patrick Swayze showed up absolutely hammered and forgot his line so frequently that John Milius gave up and said, ah, we'll shoot it later, which they never did.

Then the night before Gray was to have her other big moment, her death scene, Swayze and some other guys set off firecrackers outside her hotel room, keeping her up all night because they were in a sketchy part of New Mexico and they thought it would be funny to make her think that they were gunshots.

She didn't love it.

She felt like her performance suffered because of it.

Not only was she exhausted, but she was really furious with him, which made it really hard to act opposite him in that scene.

And she never forgot about it.

In 1986, she got arguably her biggest break yet in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which I love her in.

She is, of course,

sort of arch nemesis sister.

She's, yeah, she's doing kind of.

I'm not going to say like Aubrey Plaza before Aubrey Plaza, but there's like a.

No, kind of.

Yeah, there's a wonderful sullenness to her that I think Winona Ryder has did something similar, obviously, in Betelgeuse and Heather's a little bit.

There's, and I don't think Jennifer Gray ever got to quite do that again.

And I think she's so good at it in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

She's amazing.

She's very funny.

And at least this time she had a better time with her co-star, considering she started a serious relationship with Matthew Broderick while filming.

Incest.

Yeah.

It's a little old brother love.

Just, you know, 30 years ahead of Mike White and the White Lotus.

Sometime in late 1985 or early 1986, she read the breakdown for the part of Baby and she immediately felt like she was perfect for it.

Of course, minus the fact that Baby is 17 and Gray is 26.

Who cares?

Age means absolutely nothing in this movie.

She looks, she, she, in my opinion, convincingly plays 17.

Have you seen a 17-year-old girl?

I don't think so.

No, no, no.

1980s, 17.

Like, go back and look at, you know.

Okay, you're right.

They, they read as more 35.

Timothy Chalamet is 50 years old, and he looks like he's 12.

Okay.

I just watched the pilot episode of Seinfeld, and Jason Alexander is like 26, and he looks like my dad.

It's that time is meaningless at this point, but I think for the 80s, I think she's convincingly 17, 18, and Patrick Swayze is 40.

Yeah, he's in his mid-30s for sure.

So like baby, she considered her father her hero and idolized him.

She also came from, as we said, an upper middle class Jewish family who were highly educated liberals, passionate about social justice.

And I want to read an excerpt from her memoir about her connection to the character.

Quote, the character of Frances Baby Hausman was decidedly more interesting looking than traditionally pretty.

It was actually a plot point.

Not only was Baby Jewish, but she had to look Jewish.

See, nobody, this adonis of a sexy, gorgeous dance teacher teacher would ordinarily ever look at twice.

At the same time, she was the female lead of the movie.

It was her story.

So she'd have to be at least somewhat attractive for the movie to work, right?

My girl baby and I were like two peas in a pod.

Now, worth noting, Jennifer Gray is absolutely stunning and quite a bit more than somewhat attractive.

It does make me sad that that's kind of how she felt reading this and connected to it, but...

This is, I think, rare to see in a breakdown, like even now.

But I would say, compared to what was a traditional Hollywood-leading woman in the like mid-1980s, she is by those standards unusual looking.

Obviously, you've put her into a room with, you know, me and nine other normal looking people.

She's going to stand out.

But I, and I love, for example, her nose.

And I know maybe we'll touch on the, you know, plastic surgery she had later.

But I think there was a very waspy standard of beauty, you know, that remains true somewhat through today that she does not fall in line with.

Yeah.

So I do think this this immediately was something that she recognized as a pretty different opportunity.

She had also been dancing since she was about five years old.

And while she wasn't a professional dancer, she was pretty good.

She nailed her audition, which included a freestyle dance routine, and she went on to do a series of screen tests opposite potential Johnny Castles.

So some other people who tested included Val Kilmer.

Interesting.

Benicio Del Toro.

Come here, baby.

Yeah, I can't.

That one I can't see.

And then this one, oh, Billy Zane, he made it kind of far in this process, but he apparently, quote, danced like someone who looked like he learned to dance wonderfully for his bar mitzvah, according to Bergstein.

He danced like me.

That's who he danced like.

Yeah.

Yep.

Which brings up the main issue with pretty much everyone who auditioned for Johnny.

None of them were professional dancers, and they kind of had to be in order for this to work.

So they needed a super hot, professional dancer who was also a great actor, who was either straight or could believably play straight.

And turns out that was pretty hard to come by.

Really, really hard.

And isn't like Bob Fosse's age

or something like that.

Yeah.

So it's like not going to be too creepy that he's, you know, into this 17, 18-year-old.

No.

And there was really only one person who checked every box.

And unfortunately for Jennifer Gray, it was her Red Dawn co-star and firecracker terrorist.

Exactly.

Patrick Swayze.

Comes in drunk with firecrackers.

Let's put baby in a corner.

Yes.

So Patrick Swayze was born August 18th, 1952 in Houston, Texas.

I think you talked about this in our point break episode.

So go back and listen to that if you want more Swayze, which I always do.

His mother was a dancer and his father was a boxer.

And he grew up dancing, taking lessons from his mom at her dance studio from the time he was very young.

And by the way, she wasn't just like, you know, Cindy's mom who runs a dance studio behind the local Ralphs.

She was like one of the biggest dance instructors in Texas.

She was a big deal.

All right.

Well, a little rude to Cindy's mom, but we get it.

Now, it's worth noting that his wife revealed in the recent documentary, I Am Patrick Swayze, that his mother was extremely focused on him and very hard on him.

It sounds like to the point of abuse.

Rob Lowe said of their relationship that his mom, quote, had all of her energy fixated on Patrick for better or for worse.

Their relationship did improve later in life and he adored her, but people around him him clearly had concern about it, including the rest of his family, and also how driven it had made him.

In high school, he was a football star, hoping to receive a football scholarship until a major knee injury ended his career in his senior year.

He was tackled too hard and it snapped his knee joint, which makes me feel sick.

But you can't keep a Patrick Swayze down, Chris.

So he went on to study at the Harkness and Joffrey Ballet Schools in New York City, which are like some of the best.

And unfortunately, that knee injury reared its head again, and he was eventually taken out of commission.

I believe believe at that point, he was actually dancing in a professional company.

In 1977, he booked the role of Danny Zucco in the Broadway production of Greece.

After that, he and his wife, Lisa, who was also a dancer, moved to LA to try out Hollywood at the invitation of an agent.

And they were almost completely out of money when Swayze booked Skate Town USA.

which you can see, you could watch all of it.

You could watch clips of it.

It's pretty funny.

Came out in 1979.

He played a, quote, hot shot bad boy skater in tight leather pants.

And he got to display his dancing and skating skills and definitely made an impression.

A particularly good review in the LA Times said, not since John Travolta took the disco floor in Saturday Night Fever, has there been such a confident display of male sexuality as when a lithe newcomer to films, Patrick Swayze, hit the rink.

That is a nice review.

It is.

Also, he is just a beautiful mover.

He really is.

So from here on out, he started getting offered a lot of dancing movies, and he turned them down because he was very afraid of being typecast.

He does a few TV roles, finally gets a bigger break with 1983's The Outsiders.

In 1984 of course he's in Red Dawn opposite Jennifer Gray, but he still had not gotten a leading role that would really catapult him into stardom.

Neither had she, by the way.

So when he saw the breakdown for dirty dancing, he was hesitant.

In many ways it was the kind of role that he had been avoiding for years at this point.

In fact, his resume actually said no dancing.

So even though Bergstein and Gottlieb love his look, they didn't originally go after him.

It wasn't until Emil Ardolino explained he's actually an extremely trained professional ballet dancer, and he had taken that off of his resume because he was focusing on acting that they realized, okay, we have to bring this guy in.

Also, turns out, he'd taken it off of his resume because of that pesky knee injury, but we'll come back to that.

I was going to say, snapping your, quote, knee joint could be any number of ligaments in there, not great for any type of movement.

No.

And he's not super careful with his body.

So as we learned when he was jumping out of planes uninsured on point break.

Patrick Swayze does what Patrick Swayze wants.

But he talked it over with his wife and they decided to go for it.

He was excited about a lead dancing role and also they had house payments.

So he was like, the time is now.

Now, when his name came up as a potential Johnny Castle, everyone in the casting process was extremely excited except for Jennifer Gray.

Gray pushed back vocally saying, anybody else, please.

They told her he used to be a professional ballet dancer and she's like, yeah, I know.

But like he wouldn't shut up about it.

It was director Emil Ardolino who pointed out that as a ballet dancer, he's uniquely trained to be a great partner.

That's kind of all they do.

And Gray had no experience doing ballroom or Latin dancing.

So this actually was a really good point.

She did need a strong partner for this to work.

Still, she pushed back again, told them about her experience with him on Red Dawn, and they did not care.

So they set up a screen test with the two of them together.

And I don't blame them because it was extremely rude and unprofessional to be drunk during his partner scenes and also to light off firecrackers.

But they're not such bad transgressions that you would say no to, you know what I mean, casting him in the next movie, in my opinion.

I agree.

So I think you have to go for it.

They're hitting such such a narrow target.

There's, there's no one else.

Yes.

Yeah.

There's literally one person who can do this.

And also, she's not a big enough star to like be able to throw her weight around, unfortunately, at that point.

So when he showed up to the screen test, he said hi to everyone.

Then he asked to have a minute alone with Jennifer.

He congratulated her on the role and then went on to acknowledge that he knew he had been kind of a dickhead to her in the past.

He started crying and according to Gray, said, I know you're probably thinking, oh no, not this idiot again.

You know, I've always loved you, and I've been really working on getting my shit together.

So if I get the chance, I swear I'm going to make it up to you.

You will not be sorry.

Oh.

She's a little sorry, but she actually started crying too.

But it was more so because she figured he was probably going to get it.

Because to your point, like he is kind of perfect for this.

And he really wasn't who she had pictured starring opposite in her first huge leading role.

So they went back into the room.

And Chris, I want to play you a little bit of their screen test.

All right, Chris, you've seen the screen test.

What's your reaction as the people in the room green light it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's kind of just like, he's the perfect fantasy figure.

You know what I mean?

He's, he's the right size.

He's bigger than her, but because he like Swayze has such a narrow waist and obviously like dancers' legs that he doesn't dwarf her in a way that feels uncomfortable.

Yet he's obviously ridiculously strong.

So he can just swing her around like a rag doll effectively.

She's like 90 pounds, but yes.

Yeah.

Oh, I know.

She's tiny.

Yes.

And there's also his features.

He has such a square jaw, right?

And like pronounced brow and nose.

And so as a result, her kind of more oval-shaped face and aquiline nose.

There's a great contrast, I think, between the two of them, just visually in general.

They look great together.

What's funny is, so I watched Netflix's movies that made us on this, which is a great episode.

Definitely recommend checking it out.

You can also in that see some clips of Billie Zayn with her.

It is night and day.

It's not that he's a bad dancer, but like to Ardolino's point, he is not a strong partner.

And watching the screen test, that's the biggest thing.

Listeners, go watch it.

You can find it on YouTube.

You will see immediately what I'm talking about.

Like she doesn't have to do that much.

I mean, she's doing great, but like he is completely in control.

He so clearly knows what he's doing and he just moves beautifully.

So despite other actors having tested for the role, as we said, he is the only one they ever offered it to.

Then they round up the rest of the cast with some other dancers that Kenny Ortega had worked with before, like Cynthia Rhodes, who played Penny, and Tony Award-winning Broadway actor, who you may know better as TV procedural star Jerry Orbach, as baby's father, among many others.

All right, so remember that super low budget of less than $5 million that Linda Gottlieb had agreed to?

Well, it meant that shooting was insanely tight.

They had 44 days, to be exact, between September 5th, 1986, and October 19th, 1986.

It also meant that there was no way they could shoot in New York because they would have had to use Union crews.

So they end up shooting in Virginia and North Carolina, both of which were right-to-work states with non-union crews.

They shot the main exteriors like Baby's Cabin, the gazebo, the resort and dining room scenes at the Mountain Lake Lodge in Virginia, but they could only afford 14 days there.

So they shot pretty much everything else at a boys' camp in North Carolina.

That's like the staff cabins, some interior lodge stuff where they do the talent show.

Now, obviously, the resort and camp couldn't have filmed grooves traipsing around in the height of their busy season, so Dirty Dancing had to film in the offseason.

Specifically, the fall.

Now, the weather proved to be a problem pretty much right away.

First of all, the poor set decorators had to frantically run around and spray paint all the leaves green.

I can also tell you from first-hand experience of growing up in Virginia that the fall weather is extremely unpredictable.

And sure enough, they dealt with multiple heat waves, cold snaps, and classic friend of the pod, torrential downpours.

Gotta love a torrential downpour.

When it wasn't raining, the mosquitoes came out and ate Jennifer Gray alive.

She was so covered in bug bites that the makeup artists had to cover up new red welts between every take, particularly on the ones where she's not wearing very much clothes.

And Chris, there was another problem with the location.

While the Borscht Belt was known for its vibrant Jewish community, Appalachia,

not so much.

I was going to ask, Lizzie, did you have a lot of Jewish friends growing up?

I don't want to answer that question.

The answer is no.

You're married to a Jewish man now.

I am.

It's fine.

Whereas I grew up in the Borsch Belt of the Seattle area, Mercer Island is an extremely Jewish community.

I went to more bar and bought mitzvahs, I feel like, than most of my Jewish friends I met in California.

And ironically, that's where I learned about grinding was at bar and bought mitzvahs.

There you go.

Yeah.

There you go.

The tradition carries on.

Dirty dancing.

So here's Jennifer Gray on the subject.

For the movie to capture the authenticity of the Borsch belt, the extras in the movie needed to look identifiably Jewish, and there wasn't exactly a surplus of Jews in the Appalachian South.

I can confirm, there really, there's not.

So the super tight schedule also meant that there was no room for error or rescheduling for more minor characters.

Something the original actress playing baby's mother, Lynn Lipton, learned the very hard way.

She got sick on the second day of shooting, and because they were up against the clock, they just replaced her.

Kelly Bishop had been slated for a smaller role as a resort guest, and they were like, you, you're Marjorie Hausman now.

I just assumed Kelly Bishop must have been a decent name.

Obviously, her turn on Gilmore Girls would come 10 years later.

No, I think this was like the moment she got pulled out from the crowd.

And fortunately, she's great.

That's incredible.

But poor Lynn Lipton.

There were also plenty of injuries, broken toes, fractured wrists, falls from tall ladders.

A 90-year-old actress fainted from heat stroke.

And unfortunately, one of the biggest injuries during the shoot belonged to Patrick Swayze.

Yeah.

So the scene where they're dancing on the log is the only one in the film that Jennifer Gray used a stunt double for, which was smart.

However, Patrick Swayze was pissed off that she used a stunt double for it.

So he insisted on doing it himself.

And Chris, can you guess what happened?

I'm guessing he fell off the log.

Bingo, and remember that high school knee injury?

Well, he re-injured the exact same spot when he fell into the ravine on many rocks.

So for the rest of the shoot, he'd have to take time out to have his knee drained of fluid because apparently it would blow up like a grapefruit.

And at the end of the day, this little stunt cost the entire casting crew time and money.

And also he was doing a lot of the dancing in this movie on a super fucked up knee, including that jump off the stage at the end.

He was in a lot of pain doing that.

On top of everything else, Gray was pretty stressed out about the initial wardrobe that she was presented with.

They obviously had very limited budget, but it sounds like a lot of what she was offered didn't have the ability to transition into something sexier as the movie went on.

It was a lot of like nerd alert clothes.

Yeah, she's very buttoned up, little boat peep, you know, at the beginning, sweaters, and I'm daddy's girl, right?

Is what she's trying to evoke at the beginning of the movie.

So she contributed a few pieces of her own, including the cutoff jeans, some vintage jeans, keds, red and white striped top, and worked with designers to pull items like the white button-down shirt that could be converted into into sexy town by tying it up.

Or getting it wet, or, you know, and they do that transition nicely during the montage as she's learning to dance and her wardrobe begins to change.

She also lost her trusted makeup artist very early on.

They had to leave for personal reasons.

So she did her own makeup for two weeks of the shoot.

That might not sound that bad if you've never worked on something or been on camera, but it is really bad.

Yeah, it's a different type of makeup when you're doing it for film lights and being projected onto a screen over 100 feet across so the audience can see every pore.

Yeah, I can't imagine having to do my own makeup.

Also, it's not like you can YouTube tutorials in 1986 for how to do this.

And now we're going to contour.

On top of all of this, she was a vegetarian.

And in 1986, North Carolina, that does not leave you with very many food options.

I can confirm it leaves you with none.

So she had like nothing to eat.

She was mentally exhausted, physically exhausted, getting no protein.

And the main thing she found herself eating night after night was a Caesar salad.

Which isn't even vegetarian.

It's vegetarian.

No.

Oh, there's eggs.

The Caesar dressing has the anchovy fish sauce in it and there's eggs.

Yeah.

It's funny you should mention that because unfortunately one batch of the salad must have used a bad egg in the dressing because she got violently ill from food poisoning.

And she had a late call the next morning.

She was trying to sleep in, but at the absolute ass crack of dawn, choreographer Kenny Ortega called her and said they wanted to shoot some montage footage with the second unit team.

Can you explain what a second unit team does, Chris?

Yeah, so you have your first unit, which is your director and cinematographer, director of photography, and their camera team, and they will shoot the primary action of the day.

And then second unit photography or a splinter unit can go out with with a separate second unit director.

It could be somebody fulfilling a different role on the production.

In this instance, Lizzie, it sounds like Kenny Ortega was leading it as the choreographer.

He did some of it, yeah.

Right.

Like a famous example from more recent years, Andy Serkis was a second unit director under Peter Jackson on the Hobbit trilogy.

And they will go out and film insert shots, crowd shots, reaction shots.

Oh, the editor needs another shot of baby doing a twirl to complete this sequence.

Great.

We can go get that with the second unit.

We don't need to bog bog the first unit down who's shooting dialogue, right, and requiring directing of the actors with that request.

Right.

And also, to your point, Kenny wanted to be a director himself, which I think she knew.

So she did drag herself out of bed.

They shot the sequence on the stairs where she's going up and down practicing her steps.

And she apparently spent the entire shoot trying not to vomit.

And when you see her have a little tantrum, that is completely real.

She had absolutely had it at that point because they'd done it over and over again.

She couldn't get it right.

And she was just trying not to have the barfs.

I mean, barfs actually would have been really funny in that sequence and not inappropriate from a story perspective.

I'd been a little weird.

She's trying so hard.

Yeah.

Sure.

Not as hot.

It sounds like Jennifer Gray was an extremely good sport with one exception.

Just like baby, she was terrified of the lift.

Swayze had been trying to get her to just trust him and do it since day one of rehearsals.

After all, he'd lifted a million ballerinas in the air.

And Jennifer Gray, you know, looks like a piece of paper, so this was not going to be hard for him.

But rehearsal after rehearsal, she refused.

And it's worth remembering, she didn't have a ton of reasons to trust Patrick Swayze at this point either.

Yeah, so he threw firecrackers at her feet, so she had to jump in his arms, and then he got her.

Yeah.

Funny also, Lizzie, how lifts are very much in the news.

I guess we've moved past this by the time we release this episode, but much of the Justin Baldoni Blake Lively feud seems to stem around allegations of fat shaming or misinterpreted requests for body weight in order to prep a bad back for a lift in their film, It Ends With Us.

That's true.

That story has metastasized in ways I never could have imagined.

And if you guys are unawares, Justin Beldoni and Blake Lively co-starred, and he directed It Ends With Us, a very successful movie about domestic violence, and they are now suing not only each other, but also the New York Times to hell and back over

everything.

It is crazy.

We are recording this in advance because I'm going to, I guess, have a baby when this episode comes out, which is crazy.

So we will have to see how that story continues to develop.

But yeah, it's been nuts.

It didn't help that when they went to shoot the scene where they rehearsed the lift in the water, it was absolutely freezing to the point where the crews who set up the underwater platform that Swayze and Gray were standing on were in full-blown wetsuits, like cold weather wetsuits.

And they had to have medics standing by because Swayze and Gray were at genuine risk of hypothermia just from being in the water for that long.

Yeah, not a lot of like excess body fat to keep them warm with either of those two.

None.

So she had a really hard time trusting him and also trusting herself to do it.

And so the take of her doing the lift in the finale is the first and only time she got it.

Wow.

That's it.

One and done.

One and done.

Which is also very sweet because when you watch it, they're clearly so thrilled that she actually got it and that's why she's laughing.

On top of everything else, the script did need a little bit of work.

Gray, Swayze, and Artolino all did minor rewrites, most of which was pushing back on some of the more melodramatic lines in the movie.

Swayze famously hated Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner.

He, quote, strenuously resisted it, according to Gray.

And Swayze himself said he could hardly bring himself to say it because it sounded so corny.

I feel like you can tell when you watch it.

I know it's the most iconic line of the film.

It's not, I don't personally love the line.

I think the movie's better than that line.

She's also not in a corner.

No.

She's flat against a wall.

Nobody puts baby in this part of the room.

You know, it really calls to mind Gladiator.

I remember when we were covering that film, there was the line that Russell Crowe absolutely hated.

And I will have my vengeance in this life or the next.

Which, of course, would go on to become the most famous line of the film that he would be arguably most remembered for, aside from strength and honor.

And it's so funny because they just like, you can tell it's like,

nobody puts baby in a corner.

And then like that's, and that's the line that everybody loved.

So despite things going better than they did on Red Dawn, they were not exactly perfect between Swayze and Gray on the set of Dirty Dancing.

She was constantly frustrated with him because he was chronically late to set every day, all day for every scene, according to Gray.

And by the way, his wife corroborates that.

She's like, yeah, he could never be on time.

According to Swayze, referring to Jennifer Gray, she seemed particularly emotional, sometimes bursting into tears if someone criticized her.

Other times, she slipped into silly moods, forcing us to do scenes over and over again when she'd start laughing.

And he was endlessly frustrated with her because of her lack of dancing skills.

I'm going to side with Jennifer Gray on this one, as she was not a professional dancer and was not supposed to be.

But this was a huge issue between the two of them because basically Gray would be learning the choreography with choreographer Kenny Ortega.

And by the way, his frequent collaborator Miranda Garrison, who assisted on the film and played the ultra-glam Vivian Pressman in it.

And remember, Kenny was well known for his ability to work with actors who could move well but weren't necessarily trained dancers.

So he was very forgiving and so was Miranda Garrison.

Meanwhile, Patrick had only ever danced with professionals, including his wife, who he'd been dancing with for 15 years.

So it sounds like he had really unrealistic expectations of Jennifer Gray.

I will just say, the fact that they don't like each other works so well in the first half of the film.

Yes, it does.

Like, it's much more convincing than them like.

They do a good job selling that they like each other eventually, but man, it really feels like they don't like each other at first.

It's really good.

It's really, and it works.

It's great.

I think that's one of the smartest things that Emil Ardolino did is he didn't really try to avoid that.

Yeah, he lets Swayze get frustrated with her while they're dancing.

Yes, he does.

Which is great.

And he just kept cameras rolling.

Also worth pointing out, if Patrick Swayze grew up with a mother who was constantly pushing him the way it sounds like he did, it does make sense that his expectations of himself were so high that he also had sort of unrealistic expectations of his partner.

Now, I think for obvious reasons at this point, Gray had a lot of anxiety about the sex scene in Dirty Dancing.

On top of all the prior bad experiences she'd had, there was also no guarantee that the movie would be getting a PG-13 rating, so she had no clue what she was in for with this.

Also, earlier in the shoot when they were just filming the two of them in bed, she'd tried to keep her underwear on because you couldn't really see it, but the cinematographer caught caught a flash of it in a shot and requested that she stripped fully naked, which she didn't love.

However, it sounds like she made a conscious decision to really take control of the sex scene and ask for what she needed.

And it went great.

I think Swayze and Andelino really let her do that.

She said it went well enough that afterwards, Swayze allegedly said, Will you marry me?

Okay.

Okay.

And also, to be clear, in terms of the PG-13 rating and not knowing, I'm sure too, this was right at the birth of PG-13.

Exactly.

And so they didn't know exactly what the guidelines were, what's going to separate us between PG and R, right?

Or if they were going for a PG-13 rating.

This is being released by a totally different, a brand new company who mostly worked in home video.

So it would be very hard to know.

A distribution network dominated by pornography.

Exactly.

With a title like Dirty Dancing.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Vestron's like, what are they going to get to the porn?

Swayze did also manage to make her laugh in some unconventional ways, Chris.

According to Gray in her memoir, for the scene in the car when they're driving to the lake and she laughs and says, you're wild, she was having a really hard time generating a genuine laugh.

So.

Did he fart?

Nope.

Okay.

For one of the takes, Patrick Swayze looked at her and indicated with his eyes that she should look down.

And when she did, she saw that he had just taken his dick out of his pants.

Hey, you know what?

It worked.

It did make her laugh really hard.

And I'm pretty sure that's the take you see in the film.

Nothing like a little good old-fashioned workplace sexual harassment to get the team through the day.

Yeah, not recommended.

No.

It does seem like she enjoyed it.

I mean, look, if she found it funny and he can find the humor in his own penis, God bless, I suppose.

I suppose.

So they wrap up production and move very quickly into post-production.

And one of the smartest things Ardolino did was to bring in dance editor Girish Bargava just for the dance sequences.

He was known as one of, if not the best dance editor in the business at this point, had worked with the likes of Twyla Tharp and Jerome Robbins.

And Artolino had met Bargava early on in his career as a dance director, so he knew exactly who to call.

Also, Chris, you mentioned this.

Remember how Artolino kept the cameras rolling and really captured the intensity and frustrations of their rehearsals?

That came in handy.

And you can see it all over the film, but particularly one moment he captured was where Baby keeps laughing when Johnny is tickling her by trying to run his arm down basically her armpit in a sexy way.

That is real.

That was a very late night take where I guess she was really losing it.

And apparently she kept just asking for a full cheese plate.

And they were like, we're in the woods of North Carolina.

You're not getting a cheese plate.

Yeah.

Also, it's going to be like the sweatiest cheese within five minutes.

So poor Jennifer Gray's probably like, I've only been eating lettuce for weeks.

Can I have cheese?

And so she was just super loopy and kept laughing.

And you can see how pissed Patrick Swayze is.

That was something that editor Peter C.

Frank and his team found, and they ended up dropping it in.

It's a very honest moment.

Like it was a great honest moment in the film.

There's a couple.

There's a couple that I think may be real.

I think when she's crawling towards him on the floor and they're lip syncing in that one sequence, I'm like fairly sure that might be improvised in some way.

It just feels very much like they're goofing off together on set.

That I don't know because I know they wanted that song, I think.

No, I know, I know.

I'm just saying that.

iteration of it, the way that they're performing, you know what I mean?

That moment feels like cutting loose between takes to me when I watch it.

I also wonder about the sequence where you see their feet and she's stepping on his feet or he's like spinning her and she smacks him in the head.

I kind of think that may be real as well, based on his reactions.

Also, because the head smack looks real.

I don't know how they faked that.

One little whoopsie that the editor, not the dance editor, but the regular editor may have done though.

Apparently he wondered aloud during the first dirty dancing sequence about a shot of one of the dancers who throws her leg over her partner's neck saying, how can you have respect for a girl who dances this way?

Uh-oh.

That was followed by a very awkward silence because everyone in the room, including Eleanor Bergstein, knew that that was Eleanor's signature step.

Oopsies.

Also, I watched that scene a bunch of times.

I couldn't find the shot, so I do wonder if they did cut it, which would be a bummer.

I couldn't tell whose legs were who when we went into that room, Lizzie.

I was scandalized.

Well, speaking of being scandalized, there was some concern about the title Dirty Dancing.

So some alternate titles were floated and also used on dailies that they were shipping around.

One of them was I Was a Teenage Mambo Queen.

Sounds actually dirtier.

Yes, it does.

That caused some problems for the production when their dailies were held up at the Canadian border because they thought it was porn.

Yeah,

it sounds like

a euphemistic, not super creative porn title.

Yes.

I'm surprised they didn't go with like smutty salsa or something like that.

So we've talked about this a lot, but Bergstein, Artolino, and Gottlieb fought very hard for the classic songs that Eleanor had built so much of the story around, but they didn't have them on lock.

And in fact, the studio initially told them they were too expensive and needed to be replaced with sound alikes.

They played Bergstein 10 master tracks and told her if she could distinguish at least six between the sound alikes they were presenting and the originals, they would go with the original songs.

Obviously, she got all 10.

I don't know who they were thinking they were going to fool with that.

What?

I don't know.

We're going to play you this other band called the Smeatles.

And I would like you to tell us, if Here Comes the Fun, sounds good enough for you.

Yeah, it's just, that's insane.

It did not work.

They had huge problems clearing the songs though they actually had to fire their first music supervisor because he couldn't get any of them and they almost had to shoot some of the major dance numbers to click tracks because they were so scared that they couldn't get any of the songs in time i thought you were going to say they almost had to shoot the next music supervisor

he's fine got it so lizzy you mentioned potentially using a click track which i'm guessing they may have done in certain instances I bet they did because I don't know that they had all this music in place.

Even without it, you want clean sound without the music in the background, but you want the right BPM, the right beats per minute.

And the way that you can do that and still get clean sound is through a device called a thumper, at least according to my sound professor at USC, which releases a thump at the BPM of the song.

Is this Dune?

It's basically like the Dune Sandworms, right?

So it can be recorded.

Your dancers can feel it and they can hear it, but your microphone, you can make sure you cut it off at the right frequency so you're getting usable dialogue and you're not capturing the lower end thump that's playing underneath.

There's actually a behind-the-scenes shot of the club scene in Social Network where David Fincher does the big tracking shot across the dance floor up to Mark and Justin Timberlake.

Anyway, that is a good example of that.

You can hear a thumper in the background in that, I believe.

Interesting.

Cool.

Well, Chris, obviously, in addition to the classic songs that are in this movie, they make an interesting, potentially incongruous, but I think kind of brilliant choice to fill in the rest of the songs with a lot of original, very 80s numbers, even though the movie's set in 1963.

I love it.

I know, but like I kept being like, wait, it's the 60s.

No, it's the 80s.

No, it's the 60s.

Like the hair is also confusing.

It is.

And even there's the moment where she and Penny are clearly, they're clearly salsa dancing, but they're for no reason in like full-length nylons and like 80s cut half thongs.

And I was like, wait, hold on a second.

What's going on?

I'm completely fine with it.

Well, visually, I was completely fine with it, but I was definitely taken out of the moment of hair.

Well, some of the iconic original songs that they sprang for include Hungry Eyes, which actually had been written and recorded a few years earlier by the band Frankie and the Knockouts, but it didn't wind up on their album.

So Eric Carmen re-recorded it specifically for Dirty Dancing.

Might be my favorite song on the soundtrack.

I love that song.

I think that's actually what's playing during the nylon salsa dancing sequence you're talking about.

Yes by Mary Clayton, who you might know as the woman who recorded the famous vocal line in Gimme Shelter.

And of course, She's Like the Wind by our very own Patrick Swayze, which I also love.

He co-wrote this years earlier, hoping to sell it and shopped it around for multiple other soundtracks that did not want it.

So during production, he was like last shot.

And he played the demo to Linda Gottlieb and Emil Ardolino, who loved it.

Of course, ended up being a pretty huge hit for him.

I love that he's like hawking CDs, like a guy on Fifth Avenue, just on his set of his own movie.

Good for him.

And of course, there is the iconic, I've had the time of my life.

Writers Frankie Previtt and John DiNicola were down to their last dollar, and the label that they had been with had shut down.

Fun fact, their band was Frankie and the Knockouts, the same ones who had written Hungry Eyes years earlier.

But Frankie got a call from the old head of the label who said there's an opportunity to write a song for Dirty Dancing, and Frankie's reaction was, ah, poor Jimmy's doing porn.

Fortunately, the ex-label had explained, no, he said what the movie was and told them it would need to be a seven-minute-long song.

And they were like, Okay, whatever.

There's no way a seven-minute-long song is ever going to be a single.

And they didn't really know what they were writing about.

So they just kind of turned something in and didn't think about it again.

It was recorded with Bill Medley, aka half of the Righteous Brothers, and singer-songwriter Jennifer Warrens.

And you know what?

They were all wrong.

It was an absolutely ginormous hit and took home the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

It is so fantastically 80s.

Just that slap bass line.

Like it, it just, I feel like it doesn't exist in any other decade.

It's amazing.

I love it.

It's like, it's great.

It's great.

Also, you know, the bonker song that Baby's kind of tone-deaf sister sings at the talent show?

Yes.

I love that.

She wrote that.

Great, she's so good at that terrible performance.

It's great.

Her name is Jane Brucker.

She wrote that herself.

She's she's very funny in this movie.

She's very funny.

They couldn't get the rights to Some Enchanted Evening, which is what they had initially had her singing.

And so they were going to cut the sequence of her rehearsing completely unless she could come up with something.

And she was like, Fine, I'll just write my own song.

And she wrote that.

It's, it's so, that really feels accurate to what you would see at one of these camps.

It's like one of my favorite parts in the entire movie.

So funny.

Now, Chris, there was one plot line that the studio and a potential advertiser fought very hard to cut.

What do you think it was?

I'm guessing it's the Shmishmortian.

It's the Shmishmortian.

Shortly before the movie was set to come out, the studio was very excited to find out that they potentially nabbed a national sponsor in the form of a pimple cream.

And they wanted to put the pimple cream on every poster, Chris.

There was just one problem.

What?

Yes.

Wait, hold on.

Nope.

Just go with it.

Yeah, somehow there was going to be like Patrick Swayze, Jennifer Gray, and just a tube of like clearosil or whatever it was on the side.

Great.

I guess that's how they did brand integrations in the 80s.

But they wanted them to lose the entire abortion, which is, again, kind of the catalyst for a lot of the action in the movie.

Kind of.

It's the entire catalyst for her relationship forming with the underclass so to speak of the camp that they're attending the studio and producers really pushed for this because up to this point everyone thought the movie was going to be a huge flop apparently they had thought they could really benefit from a more experienced producer screening the rough cut at some point and so they got a hold of aaron russo who was behind hits like trading places and the rose they sat there They watched him watch the rough cut.

At the end, he turned around, looked past the creative team at their best drawn bosses and told them to burn the negatives and take the insurance.

So when this pimple cream came along and they asked to cut the abortion, they were like, cut it, cut it.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, they.

You can't.

No, no, no, no, but they cut around it in the sense that, and I don't know, I guess my point is, I don't know how it was intended to originally be presented versus how it ended up, but I do think it's very delicately played.

That's intentional.

Yeah.

It's not forced.

It actually feels period appropriate in the sense that it's not openly discussed.

Well, Bergstein was able to explain that it would be literally impossible to remove the abortion plot line since again, the entire movie hinges on it.

She said, quote, my sense is if you're going to put something like this in, you better rhythm it so precisely into the plot that when the day comes, when they ask you to take it out, you can't without the movie falling apart.

Because if it can be taken out, it will be.

And yes, I think the way that she worked it in was very intentional, to your point.

I don't think they cut any of what was in there.

In fact, many people did question why she included the abortion in the movie at all and viewed the treatment of abortion in the film as stigmatizing.

But she was trying to do the exact opposite.

She was reminding people of what the world looked like before abortions were safe and legal.

And at one point, when asked why she felt she needed to do that, she said,

Well, I don't know that we will always have Roe v.

Wade.

Prescient.

Yeah.

I also think, you know, regardless of your stance on abortion, what it does is it very clearly, concisely, and and dramatically establishes the delta between her

and somebody that works at this camp.

Yeah.

Not only in terms of access to medical attention, but access to discrete medical attention and access to easy financing for something necessary.

Because the dirty secret of abortion has always been when made illegal, it becomes inaccessible to middle class and lower middle class people and remains accessible to upper class people.

Right.

And or becomes extremely unsafe for people who are not able to.

That's my point.

A safe abortion becomes inaccessible to anybody without means and it remains just something to be swept under the rug, but something that still happens amongst people with means, of which she is one in this movie.

And I think also she does a really great job of working it into baby's character development in terms of like, she does not understand.

She thinks she's doing the right thing.

She doesn't understand, you know, what the consequences of this are potentially.

She doesn't really understand what it's going to do to her relationship with her father.

I think it's handled really well.

And it shows to, you know, it's a good moment for his character when he's able to perform the role of physician and put his biases aside in order to deal with the patient, which is a good moment, even though he's dismissive of Patrick Swayze, obviously.

Well, I want to step in and say I know that Jerry Roebuck's character in that moment is supposed to be being a jerk, but at the same time, he thinks that this man might be sleeping with his daughter and may have gotten this woman pregnant and gotten her a horrible and dangerous abortion.

So I'm kind of team Jerry Orbach.

Yeah.

And even if it was just that he was sleeping with his daughter, this is a 35-year-old man sleeping with his 17-year-old daughter.

He's supposed to be in his 20s, but yes.

Yes.

This is a 47-year-old man.

This is Jerry Orbach's cousin.

But I do also think one of the reasons that it works so well narratively is obviously that Jennifer Gray, and what I like about it is that it makes her point of entry with this group of people believable because she is approaching another woman dealing with a quote woman's problem.

And she's uniquely able to understand, empathize, and then help her in this situation, which allows, I think I really like that she first at first thinks, obviously, Swayze's a cad, but then we learn that it was Bobby.

Is that his name?

Robbie.

Robbie.

Yes.

Max Cantor, I think is that actor.

Yeah.

Also died tragically young.

Yes.

Anywho, I think it works really well narratively as a catalyst.

Well, Dirty Dancing premiered August 21st, 1987, and critics were...

I think pretty surprisingly lukewarm on it, with Variety calling it, quote, skin deep but inoffensive, and Roger Ebert saying it was a, quote, tired and relentlessly predictable story of love between kids from different backgrounds.

Again, Roger, these kids are 26 and 34.

But it turns out it didn't matter what critics thought because it was was a smash success on again, somewhere around a $5 million budget.

I've seen 4.5, I've seen six, we're going to say five.

It pulled in over $63 million in its initial theatrical run, and it has gone on to make over $214 million through re-releases over the years.

This thing

raked in the cash.

Well, I'm sure it made...

a boatload of money on VHS.

Yes, it was one of the top VHS rentals.

Which was Vestron's bread and butter.

So Dirty Dancing catapulted Patrick Swayze to stardom, leading to a string of roles in films like Roadhouse, Next of Kin, Ghost, Point Break, and more.

As we said, Emile Ardolino went on to direct a few more feature films, including 1993's sister act, but he did tragically pass away from AIDS the same year.

Vestron Video never matched the success of Dirty Dancing, though they produced many more seemingly terrible, low-budget films, and they went bankrupt in 1991.

Lastly, Chris, I want to end by talking about Miss Jennifer Gray.

So on August 5th, 1987, just a few days before Dirty Dancing's big premiere, Jennifer and her then-boyfriend Matthew Broderick were vacationing in Ireland.

Broderick was driving, there had just been a torrential downpour, and at around 3 p.m.

local time, he accidentally swerved into the other lane.

They collided head-on with another car.

breaking Broderick's leg and knocking him unconscious and injuring ligaments in Gray's neck that would eventually require spinal surgery.

Most tragically, in the accident, Broderick had killed a mother and daughter in the other car, Margaret Dougherty and Anne Gallagher.

It was something neither Broderick nor Gray ever fully recovered from mentally, and they would go on to end their relationship a year later.

As the LA Times cruelly put it in their headline on September 9th, 1987, Jennifer Gray got the best reviews of her life for the film Dirty Dancing, a current box office hit.

However, in a cruel twist of fate, she's getting more news coverage because of a Northern Ireland car accident last month that killed killed two people.

Meanwhile, Swayze was being offered the kinds of roles he'd always dreamed of, but Jennifer Gray swiftly discovered there was still not, quote, a surplus of parts for actresses who looked like her.

She was told explicitly that her nose in particular was, quote, a problem, and apparently prominent plastic surgeons were telling her she should have had a nose job prior to dirty dancing.

Those surgeons are idiots who I think misunderstood the entire appeal of dirty dancing.

And it's worth noting that her nose did not bother her.

It just seemed to bother other people an awful lot.

So she caved and underwent a rhinoplasty and then a second surgery to correct an irregularity in the first one.

But instead of getting all the leading roles she'd been promised, she became the butt of every joke.

Photographers didn't recognize her.

And she told the New York Times, quote, being misunderstood on a global stage was very painful.

Overnight, I lose my identity and my career.

And sadly, that is kind of true.

I mean, she went on to do plenty of other things.

She had some guest starring roles and some prominent sitcoms, but she really never recovered from this.

And I think it's tragic that she felt like she had to change her face for something that didn't bother her.

I agree.

The timing of this,

what year did she get her surgery?

It's not long after this at all.

Everything says 87.

I don't know if it was actually in 1987, but she definitely had the first one like very shortly thereafter.

I think within a year.

Interesting.

Yeah.

What's funny is why I always liked her nose.

She looks different.

We're so used to plastic surgery now that I think it's hard to look back and understand that it felt like a massive difference back then.

I mean, if you look at the evolution of the Kardashians, for example, they look totally different.

Many male stars now, you know, too.

I mean, there have even been recent photos of Tom Cruise that people say he looks, quote, unrecognizable, right?

I think that, though, that with the people that we see now, they tend to do it slowly over a period of time.

So it's a bit easier to adjust to.

I do think this happened so quickly.

I mean, you know, she had two in pretty quick succession.

And also the thing that is so difficult is like she had a very specific look.

And I do think that her nose was a big part of that.

I mean, she's beautiful.

She's still beautiful, obviously.

It's no shame on anybody who wants to get a nose job or plastic surgery.

What makes me sad is it doesn't sound like she wanted it.

And she was doing it because she was being told, this is the way that your career will expand.

You know, your problem is your nose.

And it wasn't.

No.

And, you know, it really reminds me of the conversation around Amy Lou Wood in the White Lotus from this recent season, season three, who plays Chelsea.

And there's been a big conversation around her teeth.

She has very prominent teeth.

Again, very striking, fantastic actress.

Oh my God, she's just so appealing in that show.

And it really kind of brings two thoughts to mind for me.

One, if anybody tells you that you have a flaw, you need to understand that the flip side of that is your flaws are your style.

Right.

And that's true of anything that you make, right?

Your flaws are what actually make what you're doing unique.

Wes Anderson's relial on like center punch framing and the 40 millimeter anamorphic lens could be considered flaws.

Like those are his style.

So her nose is her style.

Now, whether or not that's in style, her agent, for example, I'm sure is one of the people giving her this advice is thinking, I could sell you a lot easier.

if you just had a more normal looking nose, right, in their mind.

You can't, though.

No, they're wrong is my point.

They're, they're thinking about their short-term success, not the long-term success of the individual.

And so I think if you're going into entertainment in any way, if you want to be any type of role, especially above the line, always remember that you're playing a long game and the people who are supposedly representing you and have your best interests at heart are also playing a long game in which you are a short-term player.

Right.

And so as a result, you're going to be very myopically represented by the people around you.

Well, and I think also, you know, she just had this really earth-shattering experience with that car accident, which like that is not something that you're going to get over swiftly, if at all.

No, and we need to talk, we'll talk about that when we cover Matthew Broderick because that's, it's a very unusual incident.

I don't know enough about it to speak intelligently here, but my understanding is he pretty much escaped.

any form of justice in that instance.

He did.

I think he paid like a $175 or pound fine.

It was not a great optic.

It was obviously a horrifying tragedy.

I get the sense, there was a kind of a sense that like...

He wasn't drunk.

It truly was an accident.

No, no, no.

I'm not saying he was.

It was an accident.

But, but yes.

But I'm just saying, I think there was a sense that like the celebrity element had allowed him to escape a little bit.

The consequences did not apply to him.

Right.

And I think she caught some of that as well.

Yeah.

That's that LA Times article was pointing out that like this is what's making the headlines about her, not what was supposed to be her, you know big break and i think she's wonderful and i am sad that we didn't get more jennifer gray and an expansion of jennifer gray beyond this in a way that we could have i agree well that wraps it up chris what went right there are a lot of things that went right with this film for me lizzy i just if you'll allow me a brief detour how it relates to my family so the scene where she walks in right and she sees the dirty dancing happening for the first time.

So growing up, my mom's Puerto Rican and she and her family would always throw a New Year's party, oftentimes at either my aunt's house in Texas or in Seattle.

And it was always like there was my mom's Latin family, their big family, and then it was all just the gringos, like all the of which I was kind of one foot in, one foot out.

And eventually, people would start dancing, right?

And they would play, they would play merengue, they would do, which is like the easiest dance to do if you're white like me.

And then they would do, like, so they would do salsa.

And I can like kind of salsa, but then my mom and her, so it's my mom, her sister, and two brothers, and they would pair off and salsa dance, and and they're like legit good oh wow my mom and her sister did flamenco like and my uncles are legit good dancers and they look like swayzee and penny in dirty dancing and i remember i will remember till the day i die i'm in high school and my friend turns to me he goes dude why is your mom dancing with her brother like that and he was like so

weirded out by the cultural clash of seeing like such an intense from his perspective sexual dance between like like these two siblings.

But I always love in Dirty Dancing.

She thinks he and Penny, right, have this romantic relationship, but it's obviously more of a sibling relationship.

And it always reminds me of my mom.

Anyway, okay.

I will give my what went right

to,

I got to give it to Patrick Swayze.

I know.

He's so good.

He's so good in this movie.

It's kind of the perfect role for him because you kind of need a jack of all.

I know he was obviously a professional dancer, but he is.

He's also a really good actor.

he is a good actor but he's not he's not the best actor you know what i'm saying and he but he and he wasn't the best dancer necessarily in the sense that he was no longer doing professional shows because of his knee but this movie was such he's so good at dancing and then he's definitely qualified for the material dramatically.

And so as a result, he just shines.

And I think he does too in Point Break and Roadhouse movies where he gets to show off his physicality.

I think it's the sincerity.

Yeah, he's very sincere.

Very sincere.

And he doesn't have to play above it all.

He's very genuine.

He's very angsty in certain moments.

And so I'll give it to Patrick Swayze, who I also, I also think we lost.

I know he had a good run in the early 90s, but his career.

No, we lost him way too soon.

And his career never did quite hit the highs that you might expect after Ghost, which was the highest-grossing film of the year at the year that it came out.

I love Ghost.

So I'll give mine to Patrick Swayze, who I quite enjoy in this film.

I'm gonna

give it to the crew who really understood how to capture dance on film.

From Emile Ardolino to Kenny Ortega and Miranda Garrison to Girish Bhargava.

I think they might not have been obvious choices for a blockbuster feature film, but they truly understood how to translate the story via dance and movement.

And Patrick Swayze is wonderful.

Jennifer Gray is wonderful.

I don't think this movie would have been that special without this below-the-line crew that was really able to do this and understood how to capture the dance and the musicality on screen.

So that's my what went right for this one.

But I love Patrick.

I love Jennifer Gray and I love this movie.

I think it's great.

It's a very fun film.

Thank you, Lizzie, for guiding us through the dirty, dirty annals of dirty dancing.

Of course, we have to let you know what's coming up next.

Donnie Darko, the cinematic equivalent of Wells for Boys, an incredible SNL skit if you've never seen it.

A favorite film of mine.

I'm really excited to talk about it.

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What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Editing music by David Bowman.

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