The 1983 Movie "Staying Alive"

The movie Dirty Dancing was released in 987. The movie Staying Alive was released in 1983.

Staying Alive depicts the lives of professional dancers trying to make a living in New York City. Thus the movie provides insights into the lives of the characters Johnny Castle and Penny Johnson when they were not working at Kellerman's Mountain Home.

Staying Alive stars John Travolta as male professional dancer Tony Manero and stars Cynthia Rhodes as female professional dancer Jackie (last name not mentioned).

The actress Rhodes played also the character Penny Johnson in Dirty Dancing.

In the trailer for Staying Alive, seen below, Rhodes is the actress with blonde, rather short hair.

The following videoclips show Tony and Jackie (Rhodes) interacting with each other.

Rhodes dances and sings a lot in the movie. I provided videoclips in a previous article.

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The 1983 movie Staying Alive is a sequel to the 1977 movie Saturday Night Live, which was a huge hit.

Staying Alive received mostly unfavorable reviews, but it filled the movie theaters and was profitable. One reason for the reviewers' criticism is that the movie ends with a very long, extravagant dance performance.

I enjoyed watching the movie. The movie depicts ordinary professional dancers as living in poor, difficult, unsettled, desperate conditions. I imagined Johnny Castle and Penny Johnson living so badly when they were not working at Kellerman's. Only the star dancers live well.

The Staying Alive character Tony is sexually promiscuous. Jackie is his most regular girlfriend, but they do not live together. Tony cheats on Jackie all the time, and she knows it. She keeps breaking up with him and then getting back together with him.

The plot is summarized on Wikipedia and IMDb webpages. I will not summarize the plots further here.

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Staying Alive has two main female characters. One is Tony's girlfriend Jackie, played by Rhodes. The other is a star dancer, Laura, played by Finola Hughes. Here I am interested only in Rhodes.

Rhodes (born in 1956) was about 26 years old when Staying Alive was filmed and about 30 years old when Dirty Dancing was filmed. In the first movie she still has a lot of baby-fat in her face that she lost by the time she made the second movie.

Rhodes played her Staying Alive role well. She acted, danced and sang. She looked pretty. She was likable.

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When the Dirty Dancing producers were recruiting Patrick Swayze to play the role of Johnny Castle, they were not able to pay his going rate. To sweeten their offer, they offered him control of the script and also the inclusion of his song "She's Like the Wind".

Swayze also wanted his wife Lisa Niemi to play the role of Penny Johnson, but the producers resisted that condition and insisted that Cynthia Rhodes play Penny Johnson.

Niemi was an excellent actress and dancer, but she did not get the role. I have speculated that perhaps she had developed a bad reputation as troublesome in her previous movie roles.

Now, however, I think that the better explanation for the producers' insistence on Rhodes for the role is that Rhodes had developed a fan base in her Staying Alive role. Rhodes had starred in a major movie, and her name would help attract people into the theaters to watch Dirty Dancing.

In retrospect, the Dirty Dancing did not need Rhodes' second-rate stardom to attract people into movie theaters, but that was not obvious when the producers were casting the movie in 1985 and 1986. Niemi had no stardom at all, and so the producers felt they should insist on Rhodes.

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Staying Alive has a few moments in which Tony lifts his female dance partner high into the air -- similarly to Johnny's lift of Baby in Dirty Dancing. I am sure that Dirty Dancing screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein watched Staying Alive in 1983 when she was developing the story for Dirty Dancing. I wonder if the Staying Alive lifts gave Bergstein the idea for the Dirty Dancing lift.

One such Staying Alive lift is at 4:00 in the following video.

A couple other such lifts are at 3:15 and 4:40 in the following video.