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| The cover of the book "The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture" |
Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular CultureNow I will review another of the book's articles -- "Vestron Video and Dirty Dancing", written by Frederick Wasser.
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
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| Frederick Wasser |
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.See also my blog's article titled Linda Gottlieb's Article About Producing Dirty Dancing.
"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. ....
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Now I am back to summarizing Wasser's article.
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.
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