Out of the Corner, by Jennifer Grey
Continued from Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10 and Part 11
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Chapter 13, titled "The Time of My Life" tells about events in 1986, when the movie Dirty Dancing was produced and filmed. This is the second in a series of my blog articles about that chapter.
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| Emile Ardolino, Director of the movie Dirty Dancing |
During the two weeks before the filming began at Mountain Lake Lodge in Pembroke, Virginia, the director Emile Ardolino revised the movie's script separately with Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze. Ardolino changed some -- but not all -- of the dialogue that the two actors did not like. Ardolino even changed some of the story.
....while the premise of the movie was appealing, the script was not exactly ready to go. The melodramatic, fairy-tale structure was also riddled with plotlines that didn't track and dialogue that didn't exactly roll off the tongue. The story and language initially read a bit like a bodice ripper.
For two weeks before the start of principal photography, in a cavernous studio in the Mountain Lake Lodge in Pembroke, Virginia, Patrick and I learned the building blocks of mambo for the better part of every day, and in the afternoons we rehearsed key scenes with Emile.
Over lunch when we were alone, Emile and I combed through the script, scene by scene, line by line, trying to make it sound a bit more natural. There were passages of pitch-perfect dialogue in the original script, but there was enough off-pitch stuff to scare me as an actor, afraid I might not be up to the task of selling the melodrama. Lines like, "Me? I'm scared of everything. I'm scared of what I saw, I'm scared of what I did, of who I am, and most of all I'm scared of walking out of this room and never feeling the rest of my whole life, the way I feel when I'm with you."
Patrick had similar issues with his dialogue, and strenuously resisted saying the now-famous line, "Nobody puts Baby in a corner."
Emile took full responsibility for the script changes that we had arrived at together; he never threw me or Patrick under the bus. Each evening, the cast and crew would receive revised script pages.
There was also a long-running contest on set to see who could come up with the movie's new title, because surely Dirty Dancing was never going to last. In the eighties, it sounded too scandalous to be able to reach its mainstream target audience. Censorship officer assumed it was a porn film.
Unfortunately, Grey does not specify what changes Ardolino made in the script -- in particular, what changes Ardolino made at the suggestions of herself or of Swayze.
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My previous articles about the revision of the script:
General Articles
Eleanor Bergstein's Letter About Her Script
Eleanor Bergstein's Research for Dirty Dancing
My Speculations About Eleanor Bergstein's Original Script
My Speculations About Script Changes Made by the Swayzes and by Rhodes
The Re-Writing of Eleanor Bergstein's Script
My Speculation About the Construction of the Story
My Speculations About the Talent Show in the Original Script
The Undertones to Dirty Dancing
Dirty Dancing is the first in a series of Bergstein stories
The 1983 Movie Baby, It's You
Tropes in Dirty Dancing
Previous Scripts
The July 1986 Script -- 1
The July 1986 Script -- 2
The July 1986 Script -- 3
The July 1986 Script -- 4
The July 1986 Script -- 5
The July 1986 Script -- 6
The July 1986 Script -- 7
The July 1986 Script -- 8
The July 1986 Script -- 9
The July 1986 Script -- 10
The July 1986 Script -- 11
The July 1986 Script -- 12
The July 1986 Script -- 13
The July 1986 Script -- 14
The July 1986 Script -- 15
The July 1986 Script -- 16
The July 1986 Script vs. The Movie -- The Songs (1)
The September 1985 Script
See my comprehensive list of my first 1,500 blog articles.
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Continued in Part 13
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