The Origin of "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights"

Peter Sagal, now the host of the National Public Radio (NPR) weekly show Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me!, was a screenwriter n 1998. In that year he was commissioned by movie producer Lawrence Bender to write a screenplay based on the true-life experiences of an American young woman, Joann Jansen, who was living in Cuba when the Cuban Revolution took place at the end of the 1950s. Sagal's screenplay, called Cuba Mine, was a story mainly about Jansen's perspective on Cuban politics and did not involve any music or dancing.

Bender, the movie producer who had commissioned Sagal's screenplay, later went to work for the Miramax movie company, which was trying to develop a sequel to the movie Dirty Dancing. Although more than a decade had passed since the release of Dirty Dancing, all efforts to produce a sequel had failed.

Since Bender had paid for Sagal's screenplay, which apparently never would be made into a movie, Bender decided to make some money on his investment belatedly by turning the Cuba Mine screenplay into the Dirty Dancing sequel that Miramax wanted.

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Bender's movie Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights was released on February 27, 2004. Sagal tells in the following five-minute radio interview (broadcast  on NPR's show "Talk of the Nation" on March 3, 2004) how his 1998 political screenplay was turned by Bender into the newly released 2004 dance movie.


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Joann Jansen, the young American teenager who had lived in Cuba, eventually grew up to become a professional dancer and movie producer. She was hired by Bender to work as a choreographer on his movie. In a New York Times article about Bender's movie, journalist Valerie Gladstone wrote the following about Jansen:

Ms. Jansen, whose choreographic credits include Along Came Polly and Pirates of the Caribbean and who was the associate producer of Fresh and White Man's Burden, has a lot invested in this film. She is not only its choreographer and co-producer; she also inspired the story. "It's about my first love,'' she said. ''We got to know each other through dancing together. And that's what this love story is also about."

The plot closely follows Ms. Jansen's teenage experience, which she chronicles in a book that she has nearly completed. In 1958, shortly before the Cuban Revolution she and her parents moved from St. Louis to Havana, where her father managed a plant for Reynolds Aluminum. Though initially unhappy about leaving her old high school, she soon fell for a Cuban boy who worked at the hotel where her family stayed. Like the lovers in the original Dirty Dancing, they hid their affection from her parents because of their class differences.

But the Havana of that time was far more volatile than the Catskill resort in 1963 where the previous film was set, and Ms. Jansen's romance was interrupted by a revolution, not just the end of a summer vacation. ...

Though she had studied at the School of American Ballet and had run her own modern dance company in New York for several years, she said that creating choreography for film required her to think like a director. ...

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I have watched Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights once, several years ago. I thought it was a moderately good movie, with some similarities to Dirty Dancing. Until now, though, I never knew how the productions of the two movies were related to each other.

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Patrick Swayze was paid $5 million to play a cameo role in Havana Nights -- compared to the mere $200,000 he had been paid to star in Dirty Dancing. The following two clips show Swayze's cameo role.

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For this blog, I have looked at a lot of fan fiction about Dirty Dancing. While doing so, I have found that perhaps more fan fiction has been written about the Havana Nights movie.