The Dirty Dancing ... was about the way those things came together at a particular moment in time for a particular audience ....That is a whiny opinion shared by many professional critics and ordinary people. Leave Dirty Dancing alone!
That kind of lightning in a bottle can’t be recreated ...
.... no young person in 2017 wants to hear another word about the 1960s. And the moviegoers who loved Dirty Dancing in the Reagan administration will recognize this new version for the sterile imitation that it is. ...
Leave Dirty Dancing ALONE !
Leave it A-L-O-O-O-O-O-N-E !!!
RIGHT NOW !!!!
WAAAAH !!!!!
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My all-embracing and forward-looking opinion is that the Dirty Dancing story should and will be retold many times and forever. The story has become part of our culture.
Let a thousand Dirty Dancings bloom!
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| "Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom" by Mei Xian Qiu |
The website IMDb lists 48 Tarzan movies, from 1918 through 2005. Imagine that our society had decided that the 1918 movie was a movie just for a particular moment in time for a particular audience -- lightning in a bottle that cannot be recreated.
After the Weissmuller movies ended, the Tarzan movies and television series and cartoon continued to be made until the present. The following video shows the trailer for the 2016 movie The Legend of Tarzan.
Tarzan movies will continue to be made forever.
The same goes for Dirty Dancing movies
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Here in this article I will propose a movie concept -- The Castle-Pressman Trilogy -- which any movie producer reading this can steal and use for himself. Just send me an e-mail at MikeSylwester@gmail.com to give me a heads-up.
The trilogy would comprise the following three movies:
1) Dirty Instructing
Johnny Castle, a high-school dropout in Texas, is wandering from job to job, trying to find a purpose for his life. He plays pool a lot and thinks he might try to become a professional pool player.
One day, a friend comes into the pool room and talks about working as a dancing instructor at an Arthur Murray Dance Studio. Johnny likes to dance and would like to improve his skill and even earn money as a dancer, but he is just a self-taught amateur. The friend says that the studio will teach him how to do ballroom dancing and will teach him how to teach other people.
Johnny goes to the studio and is hired and becomes an instructor. A series of scenes shows him improving as a dancer and as an instructor. There are lots of funny moments showing clumsy, struggling dance students.
Johnny has a girlfriend who dumps him because of his low earnings and because of her jealousy that he dances with other women.
Now single, Johnny becomes the target of the affections of a older, wealthy woman, Vivian Pressman, who is taking lessons from Johnny at the studio.
Johnny now dreams of going into business for himself with his own dance studio. His dream is impossible, because he does not have enough money for such an enterprise. Vivian learns of his dream and offers to finance his business as a co-owner. Johnny accepts the offer.
Johnny tells his boss that he is quitting, and the boss reminds Johnny about the non-compete contract that Johnny has signed. He cannot work as a dance instructor in the same region for two years.
Johnny and Vivian cannot simply move far away, because Johnny is taking care of his dying mother, and Vivian is taking care of her dying husband. Those situations also have given Johnny an excuse to avoid Vivian's sexual advances up to this time.
At about the same time, Johnny's mother and Vivian's husband die of their illnesses. In their mutual grief, Johnny and Vivian find consolation, and both move toward a sexual relationship.
Then, however, just as they are about to consummate their relationship, Johnny received a phone call from the owner of the Kellerman resort hotel in the Catskill Mountains, offering an immediate job as a dance instructor for the hotel's 1963 summer season. However, a condition of the job is that Johnny must fly immediately, that very night, to start working on the very next day.
So, this movie has a cliff-hanger ending in regard to the sexual relationship between Johnny and Vivian.
2) Dirty Recruitment Dancing
Johnny arrives at the Kellerman hotel and on that very day begins working as a dance instructor. He meets and works with another instructor, Penny Johnson, who is having a romance with a medical student, Robbie Gould, who is working as a summer waiter at the hotel.
Soon, he begins to see possibilities for using this summer work to recruit rich potential clients for the non-summer months in a dance studio in New York City. Johnny calls Vivian in Texas and tells her about his business idea. Vivian expresses interest and says that she too will fly from her Texas home to the Kellerman hotel in New York so that she herself can study the business possibilities on the site.
Johnny picks Vivian up at an airport near the hotel. He explains to her that this hotel summer job likewise has a non-compete contract. Therefore they must stay secretive about their intention to use the hotel as a base for recruiting instructors and clients for their own dance studio. Vivian will rent a room at the hotel, but she and Johnny will pretend that the do not know each other while she is there. They both will sound out the hotel's dance instructors and guests to become their own future studio's instructors and clients.
The rest of the movie will develop along the story line of the 1987 movie, but will not be mainly from the perspective of Baby Houseman -- but rather from the perspectives of Johnny and Vivian.
3) Dirty Owning
Johnny and Vivian follow their plan and open a (not Arthur Murray) dance studio in New York City. They struggle to make a profit.
Johnny and Vivian become sexually involved, but every summer he must work at the Kellerman hotel in order to find more instructors and clients. Meanwhile, she spends every summer in New York City, managing the dance studio. Gradually arguments about business decisions and about infidelity suspicions cause the couple to break up. They continue to co-own the studio, but the financial struggles and the arguing have ruined their sexual relationship. Neither of them becomes sexually involved with anyone else.
In 1975, twelve years after that 1963 summer, Baby Houseman shows up at the dance studio to take dance lessons to practice with her fiance for their upcoming wedding.
The rest of the story will develop along the story line of Eleanor Bergstein's 1995 movie Let It Be Me. The only major difference is that the role of the rich, old female character will be adjusted to the character of Vivian Pressman. She as the co-owner (not as a student) will fall in love and will happily marry a dance instructor of her own age.
The movie will end with Johnny alone. Baby will marry her fiance as planned and will move on. Vivian will buy Johnny's share of the business, and so Johnny will move on.
Johnny will have to find work and love elsewhere.
Johnny auditions for a dancing role on a Broadway musical play. At one audition, he runs into Penny Johnson, who recently has divorced. Johnny has not seen her for 12 years. The producers who are conducting the audition and who think that Johnny and Penny do not know each other, test their dance skills by dancing together impromptu. Johnny and Penny dance the same ballroom mambo dance they did at the beginning of Dirty Dancing. The producers are amazed at their dancing ability and hire them to dance in the musical.
So, this movie has a cliff-hanger ending in regard to the sexual relationship between Johnny and Penny.
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Johnny Weissmuller did 12 Tarzan movies. My proposed Dirty Dancing series of movies should aim for a goal of 12 movies too.
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