This blog discusses the movie Dirty Dancing, which was released in 1987 and starred Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze. The articles discuss:
* literary aspects, such as characterization, motivation, interactions;
* the music and dances;
* the production of the movie;
* critical reactions.
This article is not about the movie Dirty Dancing, but I hope it will interest people who read my blog.
The Starz cable-television channel has been broadcasting a trilogy of historical movies based on novels written by Philippa Gregory.
Philippa Gregory
The trilogy's first part was The White Queen, which Starz broadcast in 2013. The second part was The White Princess, broadcast in 2017. Now Starz is about to broadcast the third part, The Spanish Princess, in May 2019. Each part of the trilogy is about ten hours long.
I watched The White Queen and The White Princess, and I judge them to be the best shows I ever have watched on television. Therefore I am looking forward to watching The Spanish Princess.
The White Queen and The White Princess have not been available on-demand for a long time, but because of the imminent broadcast of The Spanish Princess, Starz has made those first two parts available on-demand again. I intend to binge-watch those first two parts again, before The Spanish Princess begins.
Basically, this trilogy is about the end of Britain's Plantagenet Dynasty and the beginning of the Tudor Dynasty. The trilogy takes place from 1464 to about 1515. This period is covered also by a series of plays written by William Shakespeare. Gregory's trilogy focuses on the women in this history.
* The White Queen is Elizabeth Woodville, who became the wife of King Edward IV.
* The White Princess is Elizabeth of York, who became the wife of King Henry VII.
* The Spanish Princess is Catherine of Aragon, who became the first wife of King Henry VIII.
The color White refers to The Wars of the Roses, which was fought between the White Roses and the Red Roses.
If you have Starz available on your cable television, then start watching The White Queen on demand. You will not be able to stop watching the entire trilogy.
The book The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture, published in 2013, edited by Yannis Tzioumakis and Siân Lincoln, is a collection of scholarly essays about the movie.
The cover of the book
"The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture"
I already have published 14 blog articles about the book and its articles:
Now I will review another of the book's articles -- "A Dance Film with Legs: The Dirty Dancing Franchise", written by Amanda Howell.
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Amanda Howell
The book identifies Amanda Howell as follows:
Amanda Howell is a senior lecturer in screen studies at Griffith University. Her current research focuses on popular music and film, and her book, Making Spectacles of Themselves: Popular Music in Action Films and the Performance of Masculinity is forthcoming from Routledge.
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Howell's article lists various commercial projects that have been developed on the basis of the movie Dirty Dancing.
* Soundtrack albums
* Videos for home viewing
* A concert tour
* A television series
* Sequel movies
* The stage musical
* Miscellaneous -- clothing, games, festivals, etc.
For each such project, the article provides basic information and evaluates the project's success. The article also provides some historical context, comparing it to other movies, such as Star Wars and Saturday Night Fever, that earned much extra money from similar by-products.
The article is informative and interesting. The article made me want to learn more about the subject.
I did not find the article on the Internet. As far as I know, the article is available to read only in the book.
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Since the book was published in 2013, it does not discuss the ABC re-make that was broadcast in 2017.
The book does not mention Eleanor Bergstein's 1995 movie, Let It Be Me, which I consider to be a quasi-sequel.
The book does not discuss cable television, where the movie is broadcast frequently.
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I hope that Howell or someone else eventually will use this article as a foundation to write a more informative dissertation or book about the movie's business history.
The most fundamental information that still is not publicly available (as far as I know) is the ownership of the movie and of its franchising rights. In the early years, how was this ownership shared between Vestron, Linda Gottlieb, and others? What happened to Vestron's ownership after Vestron ceased to exist?
Howell's article talks about franchise projects but does not specify exactly who the franchiser was. Who made the franchising decisions? Who received the money -- and how much? Were any franchising proposals rejected? Why?
I don't criticize Howell for the lack of such business details in her article, which is only about 14 pages. She is not a business expert or reporter. I myself do not know where to obtain such business information.
Writing such a dissertation or book should be done, I think, by someone who is more interested, educated and experienced in business history than in cultural, cinema history.
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Howell uses the word franchise in her article's title and uses it occasionally in the article's text. However, her use of that word is rather loose. I think that she does not really know or even care whether any of her discussed projects actually were legal franchises. For example, were the soundtrack albums based on franchises -- or were the albums made directly by the movie's producers?
If the franchising rights are owned by some specific people or businesses, then it would be interesting to see a list of all the franchising proposals and contracts.
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I suppose that many small businesses earn money from Dirty Dancing activities without any franchise. For example, I doubt that is legal franchise contract for the following business.
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I suppose that the vast majority of Dirty Dancing projects have no more than a trivial commercial basis. There are countless amateur performances, wedding dances, videos, festivals, handicrafts, t-shirts, trinkets, fan fictions and other creative and merchandise products that take advantage of the movie's popularity.
Although the legal owners of the movie rights do not earn money directly from such non-commercial projects, the movie's perpetual popularity is reinforced by such non-commercial projects -- and by the many commercial small projects that have not obtained legal franchise rights.
Definition: A franchise is the license to make or sell a product under certain conditions granted by the owner of these rights. In other words, a franchise is the right to produce a licensed product by the owner of the license. In this contact, the franchisee pays the franchiser for the right to use the licensed material.
Example
We often think of restaurants like McDonalds, Subway, and Burger King when we hear the term franchise, but these companies aren’t actually franchises themselves. The way it works is the McDonalds Corporation owns the licensing rights to its product names, processes, and distribution network. No other company can call its sandwich the Big Mac without permission from McDonalds. That is where the concept of franchises comes into play.
In an effort to grow their global business McDonalds found out it would be too costly to actually build buildings and run thousands of restaurants. Instead, they decided to sell the rights to use the name McDonalds along with the products and processes. This way the corporation doesn’t have to invest in new fixed assets, but it can make a profit while expanding the reach of its brand.
A franchise McDonalds store is typically privately owned and must pay the greater corporation an amount each year to maintain its franchise. It must also adhere to specific production and quality requirements. Have you ever wondered why every McDonalds franchise is exactly the same? Well, that’s because each franchise is required to make their burgers, shakes, and fries exactly how the corporation tells them to.
Vestron enjoyed its biggest success with Dirty Dancing -- a family drama, with music and dancing, featuring and a romance with a handsome boyfriend -- which appealed mainly to young women.
Instead of making more movies like that, however, Vestron squandered its Dirty Dancing earnings by making horror movies and action movies that appealed mainly to boys and young men.
Here are the final movies that Vestron co-produced before it ran completely out of money.
Reclusive vampires lounge in a lonely American town. They wear sun cream to protect themselves. A descendant of Van Helsing arrives with hilarious consequences.
The movie cost $3 million dollars to make. The movie did not play in theaters; it went directly to video.
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Enid Is Sleeping (later renamed Over Her Dead Body) -- January 29, 1992
Enid's husband and younger sister are having an affair. When Enid walks in on them, a fight develops and Enid is hit over the head with a heavy object. One disaster after another ensues, as they attempt to make Enid's death look like an accident.
I did not find cost or earnings information.
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Spies, Inc. (later renamed Code Name: Chaos) -- July 29, 1992
Spies from different nationalities stationed in a small Asian island work out a plot to create an international incident taking profit from it. Defrauding CIA through fake reports and running a front company using operating funds, they control the island.
I did not find cost or earnings information. The movie went straight to video.
Vestron was not involved in producing the 1988 movie Earth Girls Are Easy. After the movie was finished, Vestron took over the distribution because the previously planned distributor had backed out.
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The book A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980-1989, written mostly by Stephen Prince, includes some discussion of Vestron. In particular, the book includes an article, titled "Independents, Packaging and Inflationary Pressure in 1980s Hollywood", written by Justin Wyatt, which includes the following passages:
.... [Vestron] founder Austin O. Furst began purchasing home video rights to films in 1981, starting the Vestron library with the Time-Life feature film collection. This preemptive move helped Vestron establish a secure foothold in the video market. In addition to the Time-Life films, Vestron was able to purchase the home video rights to recent films before the studios realized the potential of starting their own video companies. Video sales for Vestron grew to the $200 million mark within a short four-year period.
A 1982 deal with Orion Pictures that assigned Vestron video rights to several Orion films for $10 million was crucial to the early success of Vestron. As the majors began to form their own video arms, Vestron’s activities broadened to production and distribution, aided by a stock offering in October 1985. At that time, financial analysis warned that Vestron Pictures was working within an incredibly fragile market niche, vulnerable due to the studios’ formation of their own video companies and an overvaluation of the Vestron team’s talent ....
Soon after the stock offering, Vestron’s reputation as scrappy independent influenced one of its potentially most profitable deals, the video release of the Academy Award winner for best picture, Platoon (1986). With the rights pre-sold to Vestron in 1985 for the modest sum of $2.6 million, producer Hemdale Films, feeling that the deal undervalued the hit film, failed to deliver the negative to Vestron, prompting Vestron to withhold all payment. In the interim, Herndale negotiated a $11 million deal for the video release with HBO Video. Analysts estimated that the confusion further dampened Vestron’s stock, which dropped from the initial price of $13 to $4.5 [a share] by August 1987. Within the press, journalists cited as reasons for the disagreement both the disadvantageous terms for Hemdale and Vestron’s reputation for peddling exploitation fare.
Furst’s response to the falling stock price was audacious: he vowed to expand into film production to ensure a steady flow of product for the video arm of the company With another pubic stock offering to fund the diversification, Furst hired William Quigley, vice president of Walter Reade Theatres, to run Vestron Pictures. .... With the budgets kept low and the number of releases high Vestron followed a route ... [if] mixing exploitation fare with art house product. ...
Despite a large number of commercial failures, Vestron managed to achieve one breakthrough hit with Dirty Dancing in 1987. Grossing over $60 million in a six-month span ...
Within a two-year period, though, Vestron shut down its production arm after an overly ambitious slate of movies failed to yield an even middling success. Cash flow problems at the end of 1988 led Security Pacific National Back to cancel a $100 million loan for the company. After the bank withdrew the loan, Vestron Pictures was dismantled.
In a move that illustrates the convoluted world of the Independents, in 1990, Live Entertainment ... purchased Vestron, primarily for the Vestron library of twelve hundred films and the remains of Vestron’s video infrastructure. Several Vestron films waiting for theatrical release, such as the thriller Paint It Black (1989), debuted on home video ... owing to the company’s demise.
I summarize Wyatt's article as saying that it was very expensive and risky to try to make and market feature movies that could compete against the major studios' movies. Attempting to do so was practical only for a few years in the late 1980s.
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Here are five more movies that Vestron co-produced. (The date after a movie's title indicates the movie's release date.)
A Miami hotel owner finds danger when he becomes romantically involved with the wife of a deposed general from the Dominican Republic where he fought many years back.
The movie cost about $6 million to make. The movie did not play in theaters; it went straight to video.
A serial killer covers his victims in modeling clay, and a local sculptor is accused of the crimes.
I did not find any cost or earnings information. The movie went straight to video.
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Catchfire (later renamed Backtrack) -- April 3, 1990
A witness to a mob assassination flees for her life from town to town, switching identities, but cannot seem to elude Milo, the chief killer out to get her.
The movie cost $10 million to make and earned $5 million at the box office.
Psychic Cayce Bridges helps police solve murders by mentally linking with the murderer. Then she discovers a murderer with the same talent - who wants to share the fear of his victims with her.
I did not find cost or earnings information. The movie went straight to video.
Vestron used some of its Dirty Dancing earnings to develop a television series, which was canceled after must 12 episodes. I suppose that Vestron lost money on this project. See my previous blog articles.
Unfortunately, the Russian-dubbed videos have been removed from YouTube. However, some of the links in my third article still lead to watchable videos.
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Below are some more movies that Vestron spent its Dirty Dancing earnings to co-produce.
The date after the movie's title is the movie's release date.
A hunchback is found living in the bell tower of UCLA. He is put on trial and made to go through tests. One of the research doctors falls for him, and he falls for her in the end.
I did not find any information about the movie's cost or earnings.
Set during the final years of England's Victorian era, Ursula Brangwen is the eldest of several children of a wealthy Derbyshire farmer. She has a fascination with rainbows, and so after one rainstorm, she runs off with a suitcase hoping to look for a pot of gold at the end of it.
I did not find the movie's cost. The movie earned $440,000 at the box office.
Delusional and spoiled Maureen and her eccentric brother Howdy decide to track down and meet their estranged mother, all while the drama of dysfunctional relationships, disastrous weather conditions and a dark family secret ensue.
I did not find cost information. The movie earned $33,000 at the box office.
A boy who befriends a real-life "monster under the bed" and discovers a secret world of monsters who sneak into children's bedrooms at night to pull pranks on them.
The movie cost $7 million to make and earned $790,000 at the box office.
Fries Entertainment was an independent movie company that existed during approximately the same years as Vestron and that likewise went bankrupt. The bankruptcy of Fries Entertainment is told in an article written by John Lippman and published by The Los Angeles Times in late 1991.The article includes the following passages.
.... Escalating salaries, perks and nepotism flourished despite mounting financial losses, making Fries Entertainment resemble a family business more than a public company, critics say.
"They ran it like a private company and took huge, huge salaries," says Doug Lowell, an analyst who specializes in following independent production companies ....
The story of Fries Entertainment in many ways exemplifies the plight of small production companies in Hollywood. Squeezed by a highly competitive marketplace increasingly dominated by well-heeled major studios, independents are unable to corral the resources--financing, talent, influence--needed to launch and sustain new TV shows and movies.
Small Hollywood studios were also popular among Wall Street investors in the early to mid-1980s. Seduced by the potential for big profits, a crop of entrepreneur-driven firms like Fries went public -- among them Vestron, Heritage and DeLaurentis. Many collapsed or were swallowed by larger studios.
[The corporation's chairman Charles "Chuck"] Fries (pronounced "freeze") denies that he mismanaged the company and says he suffered along with the other shareholders. "My family lost $25 million worth of shares," the 63-year-old producer says. "So I'm just as unhappy as everyone else is here." ....
Fries lives like a mogul: He drives a Rolls Royce, is renovating a $5.6-million, 15-room Beverly Hills mansion, belongs to the swank Bel Air Country Club and was even the subject of a puffy profile on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. ....
But the firm's performance has been anything but stellar. It has lost money four of the past five years. Its stock price has plunged 98% from its peak in 1986. Upon going public, a string of misfired ventures put Fries Entertainment on a financially treacherous path. ...
During the past seven years, Fries Entertainment has burned up the original $7.7 million in equity it raised from its public offering, $30 million in convertible bonds and a $26.5-million bank loan. Additionally, it owes at least $4.1 million to a British film financing company, according to company financial reports. ....
Fries went into the movie business in 1985 and launched a home video operation in 1987. He concentrated on low- to medium-budget action films that were designed to play well in the overseas and home video markets. The company became known for punching out films with appeal to teens, such as Thrashin', billed as a "skateboard romance," and Phantom of the Mall. ....
During the past several years, Fries's second wife, Ava Ostern Fries, has had a highly visible presence at the company. Fries made a series of lucrative deals with her production company, Avanti Productions. Since 1988, Fries Entertainment has paid Avanti $192,500 in fees for developing movies and TV shows, according to the company's proxy statements. Ava Fries, a onetime commercial and TV actress, is also provided an office and secretary.
Charles Fries says the production fees collected by Avanti were to pay for his wife's development executive and secretary. ... The only show Avanti developed for Fries Entertainment that got on the air was Born Famous, a series of 1987 specials hosted by Meredith MacRae about celebrity parents and their kids. Separately, in 1989, Fries Entertainment paid Avanti $370,500 for his wife's "personal life story" and for other production services, according to company proxy reports. ...
Even as Fries Entertainment's financial problems mounted, the company continued to employ family members on generous terms.
Fries' eldest son, Charles W. (Butch) Fries, who until recently was executive vice president, earned a salary that rose to $359,459 last year from $79,835 in 1983. His pay was rolled back, however, by one-third to a base of $250,000 as part of a new three-year contract as a producer and administrative executive. Two other sons were on the payroll in lower executive positions, although one recently left as part of staff cutbacks.
Fries defends hiring family members and says nepotism has been commonplace at major studios since Hollywood's earliest days. Although he concedes that the practice "generates attitudes" among critics, Fries insists that his family members are "capable" and have "pulled their weight."
As for Fries himself, his salary grew to $935,994 in 1991 from $356,260 in 1983, helped along by automatic annual $50,000 raises, according to proxy statements. ....
Yet, despite the worsening financial situation, Fries did not have his perks cut back. According to proxy reports, his firm is paying $122,000 to install and equip a private screening room, security system and phone system at his new Beverly Hills home. .... The company also provides him with a life insurance policy and helps pays for a limousine and "another prestige car" every other year. These "additional benefits" cost $88,000 in 1991 and $83,400 in 1990. ....
In her 1984 lawsuit, Carol Fries alleged that the public offering documents did not fully disclose the company's operations. For example, she said Fries Entertainment owned a Haagen-Dazs ice cream franchise in Westlake Village, an enterprise that she maintained had no other value than to employ their daughter and son-in-law. ...
I do not know whether Vestron had similar problems with nepotism and extravagance -- which are common temptations.
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Below are five more movies that Vestron co-produced on its way to bankruptcy. (The date after the movie's title is the movie's release date.)
A group of adventurers sneak into Cuba to try to recover $1 million in cash that when hidden when Fidel Castro took over in 1959. They find themselves trying to avoid detection by Cuban authorities while also battling modern-day pirates who are also after the treasure.
The movie cost $5 million to make and earned $1.3 at the box office.
An American diplomat's 12-year-old son befriends a mysterious baron while staying at an Austrian spa during the 1920s. Soon the baron begins to flirt with the boy's mother. The boy's jealousy becomes uncontrollable.
I did not find the movie's cost. Vestron would earn money only from the US box office, but the movie was released only in Germany, where it earned $172,000 at the box office.
In Part 1 of this series, I guesstimated that Vestron earned about $25 million from Dirty Dancing during the years 1987-1992. Now that I have thought about this some more, I suppose that Vestron got only half ($12.5 million?) of those 1987-1992 earnings.
Linda Gottlieb got the other half. By 2019, her net worth has grown to $248 million -- a quarter of a billion dollars! Gottlieb got fabulously rich from the movie.
A group of young gunmen, led by Billy the Kid, become deputies to avenge the murder of the rancher who became their benefactor. But when Billy takes their authority too far, they become the hunted.
The movie cost about $13 million to make and earned about $46 million in US theaters. Vestron received money only from foreign theaters and from video cassettes.
When an archeologist uncovers a strange skull in foreign land, the residents of a nearby town begin to disappear, leading to further unexplainable occurrences.
The movie cost about $2.5 million to make and earned about $1.2 million at the box office.
Many fans of Dirty Dancing are disappointed -- after they have watched the movie and then pondered it -- that Baby Houseman and Johnny Johnny Castle apparently will not stay together as a couple. The movie's perspective is that Baby is looking back from 1987 (when the movie was released) to 1963 (when the movie takes place). She thinks of that summer in 1963 as an age of innocence, which was followed by a social upheaval that began with the assassination of President Kennedy and then with the arrival of the Beatles.
During that summer in that age of innocence, 17-year-old, intellectual and ambitious Baby experienced a brief romance with a much older, physical and artistic Johnny. The romance could not continue into the future. After Baby and Johnny parted, she would continue into a future with more sensible, practical relationships. After they parted, Baby would depart from that age of innocence.
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From that perspective on Dirty Dancing, I recommend that you watch the following video -- which was done by Margarita Georgitseas. She Georgitseas analyzes two movies -- Age of Innocence and La La Land. These two movies -- like Dirty Dancing -- that express nostalgia for a past period and that end with the two lovers parting forever.
That video is brilliant!
I would beg Georgitseas to analyze Dirty Dancing, but I do not know how to contact her.
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Here are some more videos that Georgitseas has done.
Frederick Wasser, in his article Vestron Video and Dirty Dancing, tells how the company collapsed just a couple years after the movie became a huge hit.
Despite the hit and despite the [Dirty Dancing] earnings, Vestron had reached its limit and was now in an irreversible downward spiral. ….. no film company had survived with only one hit ….. The tide was turning even faster against small, one-hit operations in the mid-1980s, because the major movie companies had upped the ante and were increasingly financed by bigger media conglomerates. It was ironic that increases in marketing budgets for films (averages were now $6.9 million, which was higher than the production cost of Dirty Dancing) came about because of the very success that Vestron and others had had in creating the video market.
The immediate problem for Vestron was to find more successes, and here is where it became obvious that Dirty Dancing had not broken down barriers. The movie did not lead to a franchise, and no one at Vestron could figure out how to reassemble the audience that came together for this film.
The company’s main step toward exploiting Dirty Dancing was a spin-off television show under the same title. Produced by Vestron Television … and aired on the CBS network, the series failed to match the success of the film and proved short-lived. …. Premiering in late October1988, the show was canceled ten episodes later in January 1989. …
Vestron Video lost money in 1987, its first year of losses. In 1988, on the strength of Dirty Dancing, it returned to profits, and [Vestron’s owner] Austin Furst capitalized on this to negotiate a $100 million line of credit with Security Pacific. Nonetheless, time was running out. It was not just the cost of producing seven or eight movies per year (below their stated target but still a hefty number) but also the higher and higher cost of doing business in the video market. … The market was turning against obscure films that had not had the exposure of a theatrical run. Therefore they continued to seek out films that might receive some critical notice, such as John Huston’s last picture, The Dead (1987), and to pay top dollar for Hollywood ensemble films such as Young Guns (1988).
Vestron’s return to profits was short-lived, and Security Pacific got cold feet (not just with Vestron but also with other mini-majors). The bank refused to honor its commitment to give the credit line, and Furst shut down production and declared bankruptcy. There was no re-organization. Most executives jumped ship, and Vestron went out of business in 1990. Furst pursued a lawsuit against Security Pacific (which was soon bought and bought again). By the time Furst won his lawsuit, it was against Bank of America, and he personally gained as much from the lawsuit as from his half a dozen years of building Vestron.
Vestron became the poster boy for all the mini-majors and independent distributors that were going out of business. DeLaurentiis, Cannon, Carolco, the Samuel Goldwyn Company, Hemdale, and even Orion were all fading out or going bankrupt by 1992.
Miramax was the only rising independent in the early 1990s, and a large part of its success was that it could buy films from the bankrupting companies. ….
One way of looking at the demise of Vestron treats Dirty Dancing as an irrelevant fluke. Vestron had taken advantage of a small window of opportunity: It snapped up available rights and built the video market. When the market hit a critical mass, video rights reverted to those studios that had the power to make films and market them — the major studios. Vestron could then only find less desirable rights and products and would either fade away or go out of business. …. Instead, Vestron Pictures pursued various genre productions from horror to oddball.
Below are a five more movies that Vestron co-produced. (The date after the movie’s title is the movie’s release date.)
This movie follows two high school acquaintances, Hancock, a basketball star, and Danny, a geek turned drifter, after they graduate. Hancock and his cheerleader girlfriend Mary wander into middle-class mediocrity, which is out of reach for Danny and his psychotic wife Bev.
I did not find the movie's cost. The movie earned about $316,000 at the box office.
A female convict, Robin Shea, marries a charming carpenter, Billy Moran. She escapes from prison and then seduces a politician, James Tiernan, who is running for state governor.
The movie cost about $5 million to make and earned about $720,000 at the box office.
A French woman gets off a train by mistake at a remote location. She tries to ask the pointsman for help, but the two do not understand each other's languages. She eventually moves in with the man at the station. Without being able to speak, the two begin to develop a relationship over the next few months.
I did not find cost or earnings information about the movie.
Anna, a young and energetic journalist, receives an obscene call from an unknown caller whom she mistakes for her boyfriend. As a result of this mistake she agrees to meet with the caller at a local bar. When her boyfriend doesn't show she inadvertently witnesses a murder in the women's bathroom.
I did not find the movie's cost. The movie earned about $250,000 at the box office.
Vestron earned tens of millions of dollars from Dirty Dancing after the movie was released in August 1987. In 1992, Vestron declared bankruptcy and sold all its assets to another company, LIVE Entertainment.
What happened to those tens of millions of dollars.
Vestron used some of that money to make other movies. In Part 1, I listed five of those movies. Here are five more. (The date after the movie's title is the movie's release date.)
Carla is devastated when her friend is kidnapped by a Mexican cartel. After going to her father, a U.S. Senator, she gets her friends, and arms, to cross the border for a rescue mission.
I could not find any cost or earnings information.
Set in 1980s Manhattan, the plot revolves around the intimate relationship developing between Tony, a teenage boy from Little Italy, and Tye, a teenage girl from Chinatown, while both of their older brothers become engrossed in a heated gang war against each other. It also bears some similarities to the 1957 musical West Side Story, which similarly is an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set among rival ethnic gangs in Manhattan, and also features a male protagonist named Tony.
The movie cost about $1.26 million to make and earned about $1.26 million at the box office.
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Anna -- October 2, 1987
The story of a Czech actress, looking for work in New York City, who sees her protégée shine while she herself struggles.
I did not find the movie's cost. It earned about $1.2 million at the box office.
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Steel Dawn -- November 6, 1987
Nomad (Patrick Swayze), a swordsman, wanders through the desert in a post-World War III world. He searches for his mentor's killer, the assassin Sho. Swayze's wife During his journey, Nomad stays for a while in the home of a widow (played by Swayze's wife Lisa Niemi).
The movie cost $3.5 million to make and earned about $600,000 at the box office.
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Dangerous Curves -- 1988
Chuck, a college graduate is offered a deal of a lifetime - deliver a Porsche for a client and join the company of your dreams in return. When the car gets stolen, he and his friend must go to a beauty pageant run by the thief to get it back.
I did not find the movie's cost. It earned $3.2 million at the box office.
Overall, domestic ticket sales were in excess of $63 million. .... A bigger pleasant surprise was its foreign box office grosses, which BoxOfficeMojo estimates at $150 million.
Grosses represent ticket sales that the distributor splits with the theaters after expenses. There are various formulas to determine how much of the ticket revenue is returned to the distributor, and one can imagine that Vestron got back $25 million from the domestic release. The foreign return is more difficult to estimate, but might be higher than $60 million.
Of course, Vestron had more clout and experience in the video release of the movie. It sold 300,750 units by February 1, 1988.
So how much did Vestron (the distributor) earn from Dirty Dancing in about the first year? I count about $25 million from domestic tickets plus about $60 million from foreign tickets. I'll guess that Vestron earned at least $3 for each video cassette, so that's something like $1 million. That adds up to about $86 million.
For the sake of my discussion here, I will round that sum way down to about $50 million as Vestron's total earnings from Dirty Dancing before Vestron declared bankruptcy in 1992.
To resolve the bankruptcy declaration, Vestron sold all its assets for $27 million. For the sake of my discussion here, I will say that $25 million was Vestron's remaining money earned from Dirty Dancing.
If so, then I am estimating that, during 1987-1992, Vestron earned about $50 million from the movie, spent about half of it, and gave about half of it to the other company, LIVE Entertainment, that bought Vestron out of bankruptcy.
Of course, my estimation here is just my ignorant speculation. However, I still think I am safe to say that a huge amount of money -- I have estimated $25 million -- was dissipated by Vestron during only about five years, 1987-1992. What happened to all that money?
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Vestron used some of its Dirty Dancing earnings to make other movies. The Wikipedia article about Vestron Pictures provides the following list of movies that Vestron distributed. (The date after the movie's title is the movie's "release date".)
The story tells about a group of adults, responsible for a prank gone wrong on April Fool's Day, who are invited to a reunion at their defunct high school, where a masked killer awaits inside.
The movie cost about $2.1 million to make and earned about $90,000 at the box office.
The movie has a release date of "November 1986", but it was not actually released. There is not even a DVD.
Conflict arises between a steelworker and his son. The father wants the boy to have a chance to make more of himself than he did, but the son wants to follow in his father's footsteps and become a steel-worker himself.
The movie cost about $1.5 million to make. I could not find any earnings.
An older couple have two children, a daughter Belli, who wanted to be a teacher until her father pulled her out of school, and the younger son Bub, who is deaf and, although he works like a man, mentally child-like. Part of his work is quarrying stones to build walls. In high summer, Bub becomes frustrated when a power mower stops working and throws it over a cliff. Fleeing his father's anger, he takes to sleeping away from the house while continuing to break rocks. Belli visits him and they sleep together. By winter, the boy is back in the house and Belli is pregnant. Soon their parents must know.
I could not find any cost or earnings information about the movie.
The book The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture, published in 2013, edited by Yannis Tzioumakis and Siân Lincoln, is a collection of scholarly essays about the movie.
The cover of the book
"The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture"
I already have published 13 blog articles about the book and its articles:
Now I will review another of the book's articles -- "Vestron Video and Dirty Dancing", written by Frederick Wasser.
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Frederick Wasser
The book identifies Frederick Wasser as follows:
Frederick Wasser is a professor and the chair of the Department of. Television and Radio at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His scholarly interests are in media industries, contemporary Hollywood and political economy of the culture industries. He wrote an influential book on the video cassette recorder entitled Veni, Vidi, Video (University of Texas Press, 2001). His most recent book is Steven Spielberg’s America (Polity Press, 2011). He comes to scholarly studies after working as a sound editor and other jobs in Hollywood in the 1980s. He helped edit at least one Vestron film in this time period (not Dirty Dancing).
Pay attention that Wasser is an expert on the history of the video-cassette recorder and has some inside knowledge about the Vestron company.
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Wasser's article mainly tells the history of the Vestron company, which provided the money -- about $6 million -- to make the movie Dirty Dancing. However, the article does not provide details about the interaction between Vestron and the movie's producers. In particular, the article does not explain in detail how Vestron decided to fund the movie or affected the production, filming, editing or marketing.
Despite the lack of information about that interaction, I found this article to be very informative, insightful and interesting. I judge Wasser's article to be one of the best in the book. I hope that Wasser might in the future elaborate this article to provide many more details about that interaction.
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The article's key passage is this:
It [Dirty Dancing] was a story that could only be expressed when the creators found a studio willing and able to produce it. It was a unique road and it made for a unique film that only Vestron managed to make, one time. And then not even Vestron could duplicate it.
In my own words, Vestron's funding of the movie was a fluke. Without Vestron, the movie never would have been made.
Vestron decided to fund the movie in early 1986, and the movie was filmed later in that same year. If the funding for the movie had been requested just a year earlier or later, the funding might not have been provided by Vestron or by any other company.
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A story is often told about Eleanor Bergstein's script being rejected by a series of established move studios before the script was accepted by Verizon. That story is essentially true, but keep in mind that Bergstein's previous movie -- It's My Turn -- was a flop and that the script of Dirty Dancing that was rejected repeatedly during 1985 was quite inferior to the 1987 movie.
The studio managers who rejected the script in 1985 were not stupid. Rather, Vestron enjoyed the dumb luck that the lousy script that it funded was improved -- with little guidance from Vestron -- into a superb movie. (Bergstein herself deserves major credit for the improvements, because she went along with them.)
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I summarize Wasser's article as follows.
During the 1940s, a half-dozen integrated studios -- the so-called "majors" -- dominated the production, distribution and exhibition of movies. In other words, a major made a movie and then distributed it to the major's movie theaters and showed it in those theaters.
During the following decades, these majors increasingly bought movies from other companies that had used their own resources to make the movies. The majors merely distributed and showed such movies in the majors' theaters.
They [the majors] encouraged independent producers to make movies with their own money and then bought the rights to distribute these movies to theaters This kind of deal was known as a "negative pickup". This allowed the [major] studios to produce relatively few films with their own money while maintaining a full distribution schedule. The overall result was that there were fewer major films in the market.
Eventually, the smaller, non-major studios strove to cut out the majors as middleman and to distribute their movies directly to theaters. Thus, during the 1950s and 1960s, the majors lost much of their previous control over the production, distribution and exhibition of movies.
During the 1970s, the majors were able to re-establish their economic positions by concentrating their efforts on the production of so-called "blockbuster" movies. Examples of such movies were The Godfather (1972), The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977).
Whenever a major made a blockbuster, it made a lot of money but also it became able to exert its control over the movie theaters. A major with a blockbuster could dictate to the theaters preferential treatment about when and how the blockbuster movie would be shown in the theaters. A major similarly could dictate terms to so-called "ancillary markets" -- foreign distributors and theaters, soundtrack-album producers, television broadcasters, and merchandisers (toys, clothing, souvenirs, etc.).
Because the majors were so focused on making only blockbusters, "independent" movie studios were able to specialize in making movies that targeted smaller, niche audiences. For example, some independent studios specialized in making horror movies.
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In this situation, in the mid-1970s, the video-cassette recorder appeared and developed as a movie-watching tool. Sony's Betamax VCR became available in stores in 1975. In the following years, small businesses began to rent out movie recordings, and a series of copyright lawsuits eventually established the legality of such businesses. More and more people rented movies to watch at home rather than go to movie theaters.
Therefore during the 1980s, the entire movie business went through huge changes and had to establish new orientations and methods. Business insiders were able to take advantage of new opportunities.
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At the beginning of the 1980s, Austin Furst was working as an executive in the HBO cable-television company. He had been assigned to get rid of an unsatisfactory division of HBO that sold video-cassettes for home viewing, and he decided to buy that division for himself. Furst recognized that there already were and increasingly would be many movies for which he could buy the video-cassette rights.
Furst named his company Vestron and began operations in 1982. He initially had managed to buy the video-cassette rights of various feature movies, including Fort Apache, The Bronx, and The Cannonball Run. Vestron immediately began distributing to the growing number of small businesses that rented out video cassettes. In addition to buying the rights to such feature movies, Vestron bought the rights also to various travel movies, educational movies, and current-events movies (e.g. the Pope's visits to the USA).
In 1983, Vestron collaborated with Showtime and MTV to produce a documentary movie called The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller.
This video cassette turned out to be very profitable for Vestron, The cassette was a popular rental, and 900,000 of the cassettes were purchased outright.
In the following years, Furst cautiously looked for other opportunities to co-produce movies that might be very profitable as video cassettes.
In Vestron's first years, Furst himself had owned the company, but in 1985 he decided to make the company public and thus sell stock shares. As he was going through that process, he came to think that Vestron would be more attractive to stock purchasers if the company were developing more capabilities to produce movies. Therefore Vestron announced in January 1986 that it was establishing a new division that produce feature movies. This was the first time that such a division had been established in any company that mainly distributed video cassettes for home rentals.
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Wasser's article does not tell how Linda Gottlieb brought Eleanor Bergstein's script to Vestron, but I provided that story in my previous blog article, titled How Linda Gottlieb Began Producing Dirty Dancing. My article included the following passage:
.... "Eleanor [Bergstein. the screenwriter] and I were having lunch when she told me she wanted to do a dance story about two sisters," said [producer Linda] Gottlieb, who was then developing projects as an East Coast producer for MGM. "She talked about a Catskills resort and tango dancing in the early '60s.
"Then she said, 'I used to do dirty dancing, but that has nothing to do with this story.' I dropped my fork. I said, Dirty Dancing as a title is worth a million dollars." ...
Gottlieb talked MGM into financing and developing the script, but before it could go into production, there was a change in studio management and the new regime didn't want it. Nobody else did, either. Gottlieb said she shopped Dirty Dancing everywhere she knew, including all of the major studios, only to face quick rejection at each stop.
"They all regarded it as soft, small and old-fashioned," she said. "They never saw the movie in it that I saw."
Gottlieb, who had left MGM to co-write a book (When Smart People Fail) about turning defeat into success, said she took the script to Vestron after reading in The New York Times [in January 1986] that the Stamford, Connecticut-based company planned to begin producing its own movies.
She [Gottlieb] said Vestron quickly agreed to finance Dirty Dancing, but only if she could guarantee bringing it in for $5 million, about half of what she said it would have cost to film with union crews in New York. Gottlieb, who had had 16 years' experience developing and producing educational films, finally hired non-union crews and got the movie done -- for $5.2 million -- in right-to-work states Virginia and North Carolina. ....
Three Vestron executives who headed Vestron's new movie-making division -- William Quigley, Mitchell Cannold and Ruth Vitale -- are named by Wasser as making the decision (approved by Furst) to fund the Dirty Dancing project beginning in February 1986. This was Vestron's first such project.
Vestron's executives liked the fact that Dirty Dancing would feature a lot of songs, especially from the late 1950s and early 1960s. The executives themselves liked those period songs. They figured that such music had contributed to the recent successes of such movies as Grease and Footloose.
Wasser's article discusses at length Vestron's considerations in setting the movie's budget at about $6 million. Vestron copied the experiences of the Orion and Hemdale movie-producing companies, which budgeted their movies at about $6 million.
To meet that budget, the project hired a director -- Emile Ardolino -- and hired actors -- Jennifer Grey, Jerry Orbach, Jack Weston, etc. -- who were not able to demand huge salaries. The most expensive hire was Patrick Swayze, who was paid $200,000.
The movie's producers waited ten months after the filming to release the move in late August 1987. The late summer is a time when there is relatively little competition in the movie theaters.
The movie turned out to be surprisingly successful in the theaters, with box-office sales of $63 million in American theaters 1987. The movie ranked 11th in box-office sales -- and the top ten all had been produced by major studios. In addition, Vestron made a lot of money selling the movie's video cassettes -- more than 300,000 in that year.
Vestron's profit was more than $85 million in that year.
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Despite Vestron's huge profit from its very first project, subsequent projects failed. Vestron tried to turn the movie into a television series, but the series was canceled after only ten episodes. Vestron was not able to convince Swayze and Grey to make a sequel movie. Vestron's movies Earth Girls Are Easy and Dream a Little Dream flopped in the movie theaters.
In general, feature movies were becoming much more expensive to make and market already in the late 1980s. The major studios were re-establishing their dominance of the entire business. Many independent studios were bankrupt by the early 1990s.
You can earn a lot of money by making feature movies, but you also can lose a lot of money.
Vestron focused more and more on making horror movies and movies for middle-aged audiences. Vestron suffered another flop with the 1989 movie Parents.
However, the major studios began making more movies that targeted that same demographic.
In 1991, Vestron had to declare bankruptcy, but it managed to sell its assets for $27 million to the company LIVE Entertainment.
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Still, I wonder what happened with all the money that Vestron earned from Dirty Dancing.
Also, I sure would be interested in seeing a detailed budget for the movie.
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In January 1987, Vestron decided to begin making feature movies, and Gottlieb immediately provided the Dirty Dancing script. Already in February 1987, Vestron agreed to provide $6 to make the movie, which was filmed later that same year. The movie opened in the theaters in August 1987.
Although Vestron earned many millions of dollars from Dirty Dancing, the company fell into financial trouble by the end of the 1980s and declared bankruptcy in 1991.
Vestron in 1986 was perhaps Gottlieb's only opportunity ever to convince any company to fund Dirty Dancing.
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Wasser's article is superb. I can only summarize it here. The article contains much detailed information about the movie business, especially in regard to the video-cassette business.
I could not find Wasser's article on the Intenet. As far as I know, the article is available to read only in the book.
