The "Dirty Dancing" Franchise

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:

Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture

Is Dirty Dancing a Musical?

Straightness and Dirtiness in Dirty Dancing

Generic Hybridity in Dirty Dancing

Dirty Dancing as a Teenage Rite-of-Passage Film

Dirty Dancing as Reagan-era Cinema and "Reaganite Entertainment"

Anachronistic Music in Dirty Dancing

Dressing and Undressing in Dirty Dancing: Consumption, Gender, and Visual Culture in the 1980s

Dirty Dancing: Feminism, Postfeminism and Neo-Feminism

"(I've Had) The Time of My Life": Romantic Nostalgia and the Early 1960s

"There Are a Lot of Things About Me That Aren't What You Thought": The Politics of Dirty Dancing

"It's a Feeling; A Heartbeat": Nostalgia, Music, and Affect in Dirty Dancing

White Enough

"Vestron Video and Dirty Dancing"

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.

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An on-line accounting course defines a franchise as follows:

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.