My Speculations About the Talent Show in the Original Script

In order to convince Patrick Swayze to play the role of Johnny Castle in Dirty Dancing, the producers granted Swayze great authority in changing the script. By 1986, when the movie was filmed, he had played major roles in about a dozen movies. (His first major role was in Skatetown USA in 1979). He also had taken acting lessons for many years and had seriously thought about all of his movies and roles.

Although Patrick's wife Lisa never became a star, she too studied acting, and she helped Patrick analyze all his roles. Patrick and Lisa deserve much more credit than they have received for improving the script of Dirty Dancing.

In his autobiography The Time of My Life, he describes (page 130) the original script as follows:

I read the script for Dirty Dancing one evening in our new house. Right away it filled me with emotion -- but not the kind it was supposed to. I didn't like it. It seemed fluffy -- nothing more than a summer-camp movie. Lisa read it, too, and she felt the same way.

Further, he tells (pages 136-137) how he rewrote the last scene.

Lisa and I stayed up the entire night before filming the final scene, where Johnny [Castle] grabs the microphone in front of everyone at the resort, so we could rewrite the big speech. Sometimes we'd be working on new dialogue right up to shooting -- and then continue fixing it between takes. We never stopped trying to make it better.

I felt all along that Johnny should ultimately end up with Penny [Johnson], as they were so much alike and a more realistic couple than Johnny and Baby [Houseman]. That change got overruled, which was probably for the best. ...

We [Patrick and Lisa] did a lot of rewriting of the big final scene, but one line that I absolutely hated ended up staying in. I could hardly even bring myself to say, "Nobody puts Baby in a corner" in front of the cameras, it just sounded so corny. But later, seeing the finished film, I had to admit it worked. ...

The more we added and revised, the stronger the characters got.

The reason why Patrick and Lisa Swayze stay up all night "rewriting" Johnny's speech is that (I speculate) Eleanor Bergstein's original script did not have any such speech at all.

Swayze's book suggests that Bergstein's original script did include Johnny's statement Nobody puts Baby is the corner. However, I speculate that the statement was added during a last-day argument about the drastic change of the final scene. The argument was settled with a compromise that the scene would include the speech written by Patrick and Lisa during the preceding night on the condition that the scene include also the corner statement that likewise was added during the last-day argument.

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The song that originally accompanied Baby's and Johnny's triumphant dance was not The Time of My Life. Rather, the song was an unidentified song composed by Lionel Richie. In a previous article, I argued that the song was Richie's Dancing on the Ceiling.

The fact that the song was changed was revealed in an interview of Frank Previte, who wrote The Time of My Life.

When I [Previte] met Patrick at the Oscars [in 1988], he told me:

"You have no idea what this song ["The Time of My Life"] did for this movie. We filmed the movie out of sequence so the last scene was the first one filmed. We listened to 149 songs and hated them. We rehearsed every day to a Lionel Richie track. Good song but it wasn’t our song. We all felt the ending wasn’t happening and the movie was going to bomb."

"Then your cassette with you and Rachele Cappelli singing 'Time of My Life' came in. We filmed to that, and at the end of the day we all looked at each other and said "Wow, what just happened? This ending is awesome! Let’s go make this movie!"

It changed everything for them for the better. The camaraderie that wasn’t there was now there. 

The above quote indicates to me the following considerations:

* As written in the screenplay, the final scene caused much dissatisfaction and dissension among top people making the movie.

* The final filming of that scene was postponed for a considerable time while various decisions and changes were made.

* After the scene was changed, the top people shared a consensus that the scene was dramatically better.

I am sure that Eleanor Bergstein herself agreed happily that the change improved her movie. She deserves praise for going along with her collaborators' constructive criticism. The result is that her movie is brilliant.

Nobody should think that I am trying to tarnish Bergstein's glory. Rather, I am trying merely to deduce the final scene that had existed before the collaborative improvements to which she agreed.

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In the above excerpt from Swayze's autobiography, the paragraph saying that Johnny should ultimately end up with Penny is sandwiched between 1) a paragraph saying that the Swayzes rewrote the big speech and 2) a paragraph about the Baby in the corner statement. This context indicates to me that Swayze argued that the final scene should include a revelation that Johnny would end up with Penny.

Swayze's argument about the Johnny-and-Penny ending surely boggles the minds of the movie's fans. However, when Swayze was making that argument, the story's ending was less about Baby's love for Johnny and more about Baby's rivalry with her sister Lisa.

As long as Baby outperformed Lisa in the talent show, Baby should be satisfied to relinquish Johnny to Penny, who was his better match. That was the essence of Swayze's argument, which was reasonable when the story still was mostly about the Baby-Lisa rivalry.

Keep in mind that Bergstein's original script had been rejected by all the major producers. It was rejected not because all the producers were stupid, but rather because the script "seemed fluffy" -- was different from the later, rewritten, final script.

Think about that before you scoff at me for speculating that the original story was mostly about the rivalry between Baby and Lisa. The movie ended with Baby outperforming Lisa in the talent show.

Baby triumphed over Lisa by sexually seducing professional-dancer Johnny so that he would help her organize a spectacular performance in the talent show.

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Based on my speculation, I hypothesize this story.

The movie begins with the Baby-Lisa rivalry. Baby reads economics textbooks and wants to pursue a career. Lisa reads women's magazines, frets about her personal appearance and wants to marry a medical student.

On the Houseman family's first day at the resort, while they still are unloading their car, Billy Kostecki appears and offers Baby a job. She can earn some money by working secretly as the magician's stooge. Baby agrees. Because she will be a focus of attention during the magic show, she wants to look sexy, so she tightens her bra straps to lift her breasts.

Billy has told Baby to go to the resort's main building at the time when the Entertainment Staff will arrive. There she will meet the magician, who will instruct her how to act as his stooge in his magic tricks. When Baby arrives at the main building's back door, she sees Max Kellerman lecturing his waiters about flattering the guests' teenage daughters, and she sees the Entertainment Staff arrive, led by Johnny.

Baby learns from the magician how to help do the magic tricks, and subsequently she acts as the stooge in the magic show later that evening.

Later, when Baby wanted $250 for Penny's abortion, she perhaps tried to get the money from the magician and/or Neil Kellerman. These conversations might have introduced the idea of Baby participating in a spectacular magic show on the last night. Maybe the show's best performance would win a $250 prize.

While Baby is learning to dance with Johnny for the Sheldrake performance, she starts to think how she could incorporate her new dance skills into the last-night magic show. Baby's dance performance at the talent show will be far better than Lisa's dopey singing of the song I'm So Pretty.

However, Baby foresees that Johnny will have little interest in herself after Penny recovers from her abortion.

Therefore, Baby schemes to seduce Johnny right after the Sheldrake performance. Baby threatens Lisa to prevent Lisa from informing their parents about Baby's absent all night. On the drive to and from the Sheldrake, Baby bares her breasts to Johnny in the car. Finally, Baby does to Johnny's cabin and accomplishes her seduction.

To continue enjoying sex with Baby, Johnny continues to spend time with her and helps her practice and perform her talent-show dance. Together, Baby and Johnny begin to develop the talent-show performance. Scenes of their practice sessions are accompanied partially by Swayze's song "She's Like the Wind", because Baby flies through the air in her fearful, clumsy attempts to master the lift movement.

The planned performance gradually takes shape. Baby will be sawed in half by the magician. Then there will be some magic trick involving the ceiling. Then Johnny will come onto the stage and will rejoin the magician's sawed-in-half box. Then Baby will emerge with her whole body from the box, and she and Johnny will perform their dance.

Baby's and Johnny's practice sessions are shown in the movie. Also shown are Johnny's teaching the hotel staff Cuban-soul dances. There are lots of dance scenes.

However, during the final days before the talent show, Johnny squabbles with Neil and is falsely accused of stealing money from Moe Pressman, and so Johnny is fired. As Johnny says goodbye to Baby, he jokes, Maybe they'll saw you in seven pieces now in order to fill all the time in her truncated talent-show performance.

Baby is disappointed, because all her efforts for the talent show have turned out to be inconsequential. By default, Lisa will shine as the family's star performer with her "I'm So Pretty".

However, instead of driving home to New York City, Johnny drives just 20 minutes to the Sheldrake Hotel, where he gets hired immediately for the next season. Now financially secure, Johnny drives back to Kellerman's just as the talent show is about to end.

The planned magic tricks have been abandoned (the movie audience already has seen the tricks being practiced), so Johnny just grabs Baby from her table and leads her up onto the stage. Tito Suarez's orchestra begins to play Lionel Richie's song "Dancing on the Ceiling", and Baby and Johnny perform their dance. This time Baby leaps up into the lift fearlessly and flawlessly.

After that dance, the movie's denouement happens essentially the same way it happens in the current movie.

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Swayze argued that the denouement should include a moment revealing that Johnny would get together with Penny. After all, Baby was going away to college and career, so the movie audience should be happy to see Johnny and Penny get together.

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In the current movie, the final scene begins with Billy Kostecki putting a single record onto a record player and playing the song "The Time of My Life". During the denouement, however, the movie audience sees that Tito Suarez is conducting his orchestra, which is playing the song. At that moment, Max Kellerman asks Tito:

Do you have sheet music on this stuff?

Indeed, in the original story Suarez and his orchestra did have the sheet music, because Baby and Johnny had planned and practiced their performance and so had provided the sheet music to Suarez's orchestra.

Since all the practice for the talent-show dance has been removed from the movie, however, the final scene has to begin with Billy Kostecki putting the record onto the record player. Now the dance seems to be spontaneous, and the orchestra's sheet music is mysterious.

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This article follows up four previous articles.

1) The Re-Writing of Eleanor Bergstein's Script

2) My Speculations About Eleanor Bergstein's Original Script

3) My Speculations About Script Changes Made by the Swayzes and by Rhodes

4) My Speculation About the Construction of the Story

ASJ Blog Analyzes Opening Sequence

ASJFoundationPortfolio, a blog written by Amie Wood, Samantha Tait and Jessica Daley in Hartlepool, UK, includes an interesting anaylysis of Dirty Dancing's opening sequence, the slow-motion dance with the title and main credits. Their article:

In the opening sequence of the film the director uses medium close ups to show the intimacy of the dancers, this is significant as the film is called Dirty Dancing. The camera focuses on the characters by using extreme close-ups so the audience can see their facial expressions. The camera then follows different characters; the camera movement is very steady.

The opening sequence gives the audience an idea of a later enigma, as the closeness of the dancers later relate to the intimacy of the two main characters in the film. The opening sequence is also a montage of the full film.

The costume design, hair and make up are all symbolic as it represents the period that the film is set in, which is the 1960’s. The female’s costumes are very revealing, which reflects the sexual relationship that the characters have.

The edits during this sequence are rather slow which refers to the pace of the song, which creates the impression that music is an important convention involved in this genre of film.

The use of black and white also gives the pink text more effect as it makes it stand out and look visually appealing. The style of the writing is very feminine suggesting that this film shows the life of a young girl.

The Borscht Belt

Every time I have watched Dirty Dancing, I have enjoyed its depiction of a subculture that has practically disappeared. In the Catskill Mountains, in the counties north of New York City, there was a large number of vacation resorts that were visited regularly by the city’s citizens. Some of these resorts attracted particular ethnic groups.

In particular, there was a group of resorts, called The Borscht Belt, that attracted Jewish Americans who lived in New York City. This Jewish clientele also called this area The Jewish Alps and Solomon County (a comic mispronunciation of Sullivan County).

In the first half of the 20th Century, there was a lot of discrimination and resistance against Jewish encroachments into WASP society, especially into the upper classes. Fancy hotels and resorts did not welcome Jewish guests and sometimes even refused to rent rooms to people who had obviously Jewish names and accents. Therefore there was a real demand for resorts where Jews felt they were welcomed and treated with dignity.

In addition, the resorts offered entertainment programs in the evenings. A good resort would employ an orchestra that would play live music for ballroom dancing. The Jewish guests enjoyed these entertainment programs all the more if they included the singing of Yiddish songs, the dancing of Jewish dances, and the telling of Jewish jokes. Many Jewish-American singers and comedians performed in these resorts before they became famous. Such comedians include Joey Adams, Woody Allen, Morey Amsterdam, Milton Berle, Shelley Berman, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, George Burns, Red Buttons, Sid Caesar, Bill Dana, Rodney Dangerfield, Phyllis Diller, Totie Fields, George Gobel, Shecky Greene, Buddy Hackett, Danny Kaye, Alan King, Robert Klein, Jerry Lewis, Jackie Mason, Carl Reiner, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, Allan Sherman, Jonathan Winters, and Henny Youngman.

Families would visit the resorts for a couple of weeks every summer for cultured activities. They would learn to play golf and volleyball, to do ballroom dancing and other such activities that socially upwardly mobile people should learn how to do. Dirty Dancing has one interesting scene where female guests learn how to put on cosmetics and style their hair.

During that scene there is an announcement over a loudspeaker, saying that a rabbi will give a lecture about the psychology of insult comedians. This is perhaps the movie's only explicit reference to the Jewish character of the resort hotel's guests.

There was a kind of dress code that included semi-formal clothing for evening activities, which included performances by comedians, singers and other entertainers from New York nightclubs. At the end of the stay, the guests and temporary employees were encouraged to participate in a talent show.

When the children of such families reached college age, many of them got summer jobs in these same resorts that they had visited as guests. They worked as waiters, life guards, activity leaders, and so forth. They were hired because they were familiar with the resort’s relationships and interactions with the guests. One of the key characters in Dirty Dancing is a college student who has been accepted into medical school and who is working as a waiter in the resort’s dining room during his summer vacation.

The adolescent guests commonly became involved in brief romances during these stays. Of course, that was natural and fun for the adolescent guests, but the hotel managements strictly prohibited the staff members, in particular the college-age, temporary workers, from engaging in such romances with the younger, high-school-age guests. This situation is a central element in Dirty Dancing’s plot.

These Catskill resorts blossomed during the years from about 1950 to 1965. Afterwards, they gradually became unprofitable and went out of business. One major reason is explained in the last scene by the resort owner, who owns two such resorts. In a conversation with the resort’s band leader, the owner explains that travel to Europe was becoming so cheap and convenient that more and more families were deciding to spend their summer vacation weeks visiting Europe. The families’ teenage children were becoming bored with the annual visits to the same resorts, and so they begged their parents to go to Europe instead. The parents themselves found that such travel provided a much more educational and cultural experience for their children, and so they agreed. Once a family broke its annual habit of visiting its summer resort, the family usually did not return to its resort in subsequent years.

After the decision to make the movie Dirty Dancing had been made, the producers traveled around in the Catskills Mountains looking for such a resort that they could rent for a summer in order to make the movie. To their dismay, they found that only a couple such resorts -- catering mostly to unassimilated Orthodox Jews -- were still in business. None of those still functional resorts was willing to risk losing its still regular summer clientele forever by renting itself for a movie production. The producers found several former resorts, but the all the buildings and grounds were in bad repair after years of abandonment. Since the film’s production budget was only $5 million, the producers could not afford to do the necessary re-construction, painting and landscaping that would have been necessary to restore one of these abandoned resorts to its former glory.

Another consideration was that the leaves in northern New York beginning turning colors already in the late summer. The producers feared that in some scenes the background trees would be totally green and in other scenes the trees would be turning yellow. Likewise, the grass on the resort lawns would be lush green and then browning.

Therefore, the producers looked at similar resorts farther south, in Virginia and North Carolina. In these area too, such resorts were going out of business, but the producers found a couple that still could be used for the movie. A Virginia resort still had a magnificent façade and front lawn and an upkept interior, and a North Carolina resort had a beautiful back side and an authentic area with small cabins for the resort staff. The latter area was important, because much of the movie takes place around and in the cabins inhabited by the hotel’s temporary summer workers – the waiters, dance instructors, etc. The producers therefore rented both resorts and filmed in both locations.

There is a small bridge over a brook that the actors cross several times in the movie. The audience perceives that the actors are walking back and forth between the front and back of the resort, but it would be more accurate to say that they are walking through a space warp that transports them instantaneously between Virginia and North Carolina.

The Virginia resort still had some beautiful white, wood fences from this brook to the resort's main building. Whenever the film crew moved from one location to the other, the crew would take these white fences apart and take them along to the other location, where the fences would be reassembled to give the viewers a false impression that the fences extended from both banks of the brook. On the North Carolina location, the white fences were set up to extend from the brook to the temporary employees' cabins.

When the producers contacted the owners of the North Carolina resort with an rental offer, they found that the owners already had sold the entire property to be subdivided. In fact, bulldozers already had begun to re-arrange the terrain. This bulldozing was stopped in the nick of time, and grass was replanted over bulldozed areas that might appear in the film. In a few such areas, the new grass did not re-grow fast enough, so the film crews spray-painted the dirt green right before the actual filming. After the filming was completed, the subdivision of the property resumed immediately, and all traces of that resort disappeared in the following months.

The Virginia resort has continued to exist to the present, but only because the movie turned out to be such a popular success. The resort still advertises itself as the location where the movie Dirty Dancing was made, and most of its clients come and stay there just for that reason. A stay in the resort includes guided tours of the facility, and the guests can look into the rooms were Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey supposedly lived during the filming. There is an evening entertainment program reminiscent of the program depicted in the movie. A souvenir shop sells books, DVDs and other mementos related to the movie and its stars.

Bit 00 - Opening Credits

Scene Description

The opening credits of Dirty Dancing are accompanied by the Ronettes singing the song "Be My Baby". The movie's heroine will be called by the nickname Baby.

The credits appear in cursive, shocking-pink handwriting. Although the handwriting's color is feminine, its angularity is masculine. The handwriting is a combination of feminine and masculine.

The movie will portray a young woman who suffers inner conflicts about her femininity.

Behind the handwriting, young couples are dancing in an unfocused, jerky black-and-white. The dancers look ordinary -- not beautiful. In particular, the women have faces that are rather plain. Toward the very end of the credits, the audience sees a beautiful pair of breasts, but the woman's face is hardly seen.

Several of the dance movements show the women being bent backwards so far that their torsos are horizontal -- similar to limbo dancing.

We in the audience see only glimpses of couples doing "dirty dancing." The motion is slow and jerky. We see mostly only the couples' heads, not their entire bodies, and the movements are mostly straight up and down.

The credits inform us the movie is titled Dirty Dancing, and these slow-motion, jerky, dully-colored images give us only an initial, slight image of such dancing.

We do not see actual "dirty dancing" yet, because we are supposed to share Baby Houseman's surprise later in the movie when she (with us) sees "dirty dancing" for the first time.

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Be My Baby

The night we met, I knew I needed you so,
And if I had the chance, I'd never let you go.

So, won't you say you love me?
I'll make you so proud of me.
We'll make them turn their heads
Every place we go

So, won't you, please, be my baby?
Be my little baby, my one and only baby.
Say you'll be my darling.
Be my, be my baby.

I'll make you happy, baby,
Just wait and see.
For every kiss you give me,
I'll give you three.

Oh, since the day I saw you,
I have been waiting for you.
You know I will adore you
Until eternity.