An Article Five Days Before the Movie Opened

On August 16, 1987, five days before the movie Dirty Dancing opened in movie theaters, The New York Times published an informative article titled Dirty Dancing Rocks to an Innocent Beat, written by journalist Samuel G. Freedman. His article is based largely on an interview of the screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein.

His article is full of many interesting details and includes the following passages:

Growing up in Brooklyn, she [Bergstein] moved effortlessly from tutoring inner-city students in the afternoon to shimmying in ''dirty dancing'' contests at night. Similarly, she says, the rock-and-roll that subverts the dance floor etiquette at Kellerman's during the film anticipates a whole array of exciting and disquieting things to come later in the 1960's - the antiwar movement, the sexual revolution, the uprisings in cities and on campuses.

"I meant Dirty Dancing to be a celebration of the time of your life when you could believe that a kind of earnest, liberal action could remake the world in your own image," Ms. Bergstein said in a recent interview in her Upper West Side apartment. "The film couldn't have been set a few months earlier or later. The summer of 1963 was the first one after the Cuban missile crisis, which everyone had been following on television. The effect on kids was to make them very scared, and, for the first time, very suspicious of their elders: maybe things wouldn't work out all right.

"But the thing that kept the optimism going was John Kennedy himself -- young and energetic and sexy. So maybe you could have it all. It was the summer of the Peace Corps and the summer of the 'I Have a Dream' speech. It was like the last summer of liberalism. Because two months after the movie is over, JFK. is assassinated. And two months after that the Beatles are on the Ed Sullivan Show. And after that, it's radical action.''

Dirty Dancing had its genesis years ago in a more domestic image that fascinated Ms. Bergstein -- two daughters in the same family, one raised to be beautiful, the other brainy.

Gradually, the writer's notion of the sisters coalesced with her sense of how some people live through dance and popular music. These ideas, in turn, dovetailed with Ms. Bergstein's autobiographical recollections of Catskills summers, ''dirty dancing'' contests and 1960's activism, providing a narrative framework for the screenplay. And by co-producing her own film, Ms. Bergstein retained a rare degree of leverage over its final form. ...

Almost everything about Kellerman's attests to the heyday of New York, Democratic Party liberalism. Ms. Bergstein based her characterization of Kellerman's on memories of childhood summers spent at Grossinger's, the now-defunct Catskills resort. She evokes some of the more familiar elements of the Borscht Belt -- the bad jokes, the misguided matchmaking, the hyperkinetic social directors known as tummlers -- but with the affection of one who had shared in them.

"I didn't want to make it ugly and vulgar," Ms. Bergstein said of Kellerman's. "It was a world of grace and elegance and -- yes -- liberal values. I remember that when my family went to the Catskills, you had busboys who were going to take a semester off from college to go on the Freedom Rides. When the three civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi, there was a candlelight vigil."

[....]

"Jake wanted Baby to go off to Southeast Asia and change the world, not to fall in love with a lower-middle-class dance instructor," Ms. Bergstein said. "Baby has grown up without ever 'living in the physical world,' as Wallace Stevens says. And I think she learns that life isn't as easy as having good thoughts and putting one foot in front of the other. Right and wrong is not so easy."

[....]

"I knew what music I wanted played behind every scene," Ms. Bergstein said. "I also had 60 pages of dance instructions." The selections fall into three basic camps:

* fairly tame Latin music for the Kellerman's dance floor;

* "clean teen" pop (Frankie Valli's "Big Girls Don't Cry") for the Houseman cabin;

* and sensual rock and soul (Otis Redding's "Love Man," the Contours' "Do You Love Me") for the staff quarters. These last songs speak directly to Baby Houseman from "the physical world."

"I tried to choose the harshest music I could find, the music that would be most sexually shocking to a young woman who'd never heard it before," Ms. Bergstein said. "Because I imagine that in Baby's bedroom at home there'd be early Joan Baez, the Weavers, maybe Harry Belafonte."

[....]

"Within a few months of the time the movie ends, Jake would be saying, 'Nothing's ever going to be the same,'" Ms. Bergstein put it. "And in its way, that's not so different than Bob Dylan singing, 'The times they are a-changin'."

When ''Dirty Dancing'' wants to summon up the spirit of summers past, it turns to one of the most familiar voices of New York radio -- Bruce Morrow, better known as "Cousin Brucie." Besides contributing several voice-overs, which he improvised with the film's screenwriter, Eleanor Bergstein, Mr. Morrow makes a brief appearance as a magician.

Bruce Morrow playing the magician

Dirty Dancing marks Mr. Morrow's screen debut, and finding the right part took some doing. Bonnie Timmerman, the casting director, first approached him about playing the social director of Kellerman's, the Catskills resort where the film is set. "But I didn't think I was exactly right for that," Mr. Morrow said, "because I always saw the social director as a portly kid shouting, 'Everyone ready for Simon Says?'" So Ms. Timmerman tried Mr. Morrow -- who is lean, tall and middle-aged -- for small roles as a gynecologist, a dentist and a carpenter before settling on that of the magician.

During the early 1960's, when Dirty Dancing takes place, Mr. Morrow dominated the New York airwaves with his show on WABC-AM. After a hiatus from live radio, he returned to WCBS-FM several years ago, and he broadcasts on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday nights. His autobiography, Cousin: My Life in Rock 'n' Roll Radio, is scheduled to be published in October by Beech Tree Books.