Dirty Dancing

Jennifer Grey knew the part of Frances “Baby” Houseman was perfect for her. There was just one problem: Patrick Swayze. The stars of 1987’s ‘Dirty Dancing’ had history, and it wasn’t good. In this episode Chris and Lizzie dive into the low budget film that became a smash success despite production woes, a brand new studio backing it, and two stars who just couldn’t see eye to eye. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a surprisingly layered look at class differences by way of the celebration of dance. As always, I am Chris Winterbauer, and I am joined this week by Lizzie Bassett, who is not entirely back from maternity leave, but through the power of time travel, namely, recording ahead of time, we get her this week. Lizzie, how you doing tonight?

• 2:30Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm doing, Chris, excuse me, I am having the time of my life.

• 2:34Chris Winterbauer?

  There you go.

• 2:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Thank you. Took me a while to get there. We are covering, honestly, what I think I didn't realize is maybe one of my favorite movies, which is Dirty Dancing.

• 2:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 2:44Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know. I love it. I love it so much. And a lot more struck me about this movie this time around versus the, you know, many, many times that I watched this as a kid and as a teenager. I am assuming, Chris, that you have seen this before. What's your memory of it and what was your reaction this time?

• 3:02Chris Winterbauer?

  I had seen it a number of times in high school. It was always a film, if you had to kind of a coed friend group, I feel like it was the film that like the girls had on when you went to the girls' house. And so I saw it in the background in the same way that when they came over, like, you know, Die Hard was on TNT or something.

• 3:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Weirdly, that was not my experience at our coed movie nights, but they always put on Pulp Fiction or the Rules of Attraction. So.

• 3:24Chris Winterbauer?

  You had a more interesting friend group than I did. But then, yeah, I hadn't seen it since high school. And I similarly, I liked it fine in high school. I didn't think a ton of it. I really enjoyed it. I thought it was really fun. I thought Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze are extremely appealing. It seems like a film that kind of perfectly suits their strengths, but also limitations as performers. And I agree, there's a lot more going on.

• 3:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 3:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Class structures, the dual class society that is America, you know, upstate New York, old Jewish money versus the local goyim brought in to entertain the mothers, so to speak, in this world. And obviously, marvelous Mrs. Maisel touches on a similar theme. If you've watched that show.

• 4:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 4:06Chris Winterbauer?

  And I believe it's second season. But yeah, I'm excited to talk about the film because it's, not only was it more entertaining than I remembered it, it's very funny, but it had a little depth that didn't feel forced that I appreciated.

• 4:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. I mean, as we're gonna get to in this episode, if any of you have not seen this, a main part arguably sort of the linchpin of the movie that everything hinges around is an illegal abortion, which kind of, I mean, it goes over your head a little bit when you're watching this at, you know, 14 and 15, but we're definitely gonna talk about it because it was, it was a bone of contention in this movie. So let's get through the basic info. It was released August 21st, 1987, written by Eleanor Bergstein, directed by Emile Ardalino, starring Jennifer Grey, Patrick Swayze, Jerry Orbach, who I love. When Jerry Orbach cries, I cry every time. Can't control myself. Cynthia Rhodes, Kelly Bishop, Wayne Knight,

• 5:01Lizzie Bassett?

  and allegedly Matthew Broderick in a cameo as one of the talent show attendees, but I cannot find him. I watched it so many times. I don't know. Apparently he's there.

• 5:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Weren't he and Jennifer Grey kind of dating at this point?

• 5:13Lizzie Bassett?

  They were very much dating at this point, which we're also gonna talk about. As always, the IMDb logline is, spending the summer at a Catskills resort with her family, Frances "Baby" Hausmann falls in love with the camp's dance instructor, Johnny Castle. A logline that conveniently leaves out the illegal abortion entirely.

• 5:31Chris Winterbauer?

  It's important, but it is a subplot.

• 5:34Lizzie Bassett?

  I thought you were gonna say it's implied.

• 5:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, it is also implied. They never explicitly say the word abortion, I don't think.

• 5:41Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I don't think so.

• 5:42Chris Winterbauer?

  But it is technically a subplot, so I think it's fine to leave it out of the logline. Like, the logline's your A story, not your Plan B story. Sorry, had to, had to do it.

• 5:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow. All right.

• 5:53Chris Winterbauer?

  All right.

• 5:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, so I want to start with a little bit of context about what resorts like Kellerman's, which we see in Dirty Dancing, were, because I think honestly, a lot of the culturally Jewish elements of this movie were really lost on me as a younger viewer, and they're very important and extremely present in this movie. We actually get a little bit of this historical context at the very end from Max Kellerman, who runs the resort. But also, even though Judaism never brought up directly in this film, they really went to great pains to make sure that it was culturally accurate in a way that I had no idea, watching this as a 14-year-old, including little details like "milk and meat are never served in the same meal," indicating

• 6:36Lizzie Bassett?

  that the guests keep kosher. There's a ton of stuff like that. So here's what these resorts were and where they came from. Around the turn of the 20th century, tons of Eastern European immigrants were coming to America, many of them through New York, obviously, Ellis Island. Some programs were set up to encourage those immigrants to take up farming, and the Catskills region of New York in particular developed a very strong Jewish farming community. But unfortunately, they figured out pretty quickly the land was absolutely terrible. It was fine for dairy, not fine for growing things. So these farmers started taking in boarders during the summer to make ends meet. These basically evolved into boarding houses,

• 7:17Lizzie Bassett?

  then eventually into resorts, creating a network of hotels dubbed the Borscht Belt, also sometimes called the Yiddish Alps, that catered to Jewish vacationers, mostly from New York City. And one of the biggest cultural contributions the Borscht Belt made was comedians. Many comics like Joan Rivers and Jackie Mason got their start touring the hotels, and you see this in the movie with Wayne Knight's character, of course. And he's, I love him. He's so great.

• 7:43Chris Winterbauer?

  The emcee of the hour.

• 7:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 7:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Just getting ready for bar and bat mitzvahs all over the place.

• 7:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Always. So as you see in the movie, these were family resorts, and one little girl whose family vacationed often in the Borscht Belt was Dirty Dancing screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein. Just like Baby Houseman, she was called Baby, growing up. She was born to a successful doctor, although she was not as sheltered as Baby because her family lived in a not-so-great part of Brooklyn. And it was in Brooklyn that she fell in love with R&B, and of course... Dirty Dancing. She was a teenage mambo queen, winning all kinds of dirty dancing competitions. Her signature move was to sling her leg up around her partner's neck. Very flexible Eleanor was.

• 8:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Very. Bendy, as Phoebe would say.

• 8:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Bendy, yes. So in 1958, she graduated from UPenn, went on to marry her husband, Michael Paul Goldman, in 1965, who was a Princeton professor, and she became a novelist before eventually turning to screenwriting. In 1980, she wrote It's My Turn, which was her first screenplay. It became a comedy starring Michael Douglas, Charles Grodin, and Jill Claiberg. But what stuck with her from this movie is that her script and the original edit had contained an erotic dance scene that the studio cut completely. They just cut straight to the sex.

• 8:59Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm really hoping it was between Charles Grodin and Michael Douglas.

• 9:02Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I wish.

• 9:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Because that would be great.

• 9:06Lizzie Bassett?

  I wish. Sadly, it was Michael Douglas and Jill Claiberg.

• 9:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Ah, boo.

• 9:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Boo. Honestly, Charles Grodin and anybody. Could have been Charles Grodin and Jill Claiberg.

• 9:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Anybody. Charles Grodin doing anything.

• 9:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Absolutely.

• 9:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Just give it to me.

• 9:20Lizzie Bassett?

  So Bergstein told the Philadelphia Inquirer that a few years later, she ran into someone from the crew on that film. And he said, "I remember when you taught us all how to dirty dance." And that sort of clicked on a light bulb for her. She wanted to write something where the one thing that they could not cut out was dancing. Also, if it seems like this movie is driven by the soundtrack, it very much was because she literally started by compiling classic songs that she knew she would want in the movie, like before she had a plot, before she really had anything. She was basically pulling together a mixtape. And most of the classic songs she had are what wind up in the film, which we'll talk about a little bit later. Also, Chris, I know that you like to listen to music while you write. Do you ever kind of

• 10:04Lizzie Bassett?

  try to program songs in, or is that just too risky?

• 10:07Chris Winterbauer?

  I have, on a couple of things. Didn't end up, one did not end up in the film. And then I have a, there's a TV project that we're taking out that has a very specific song for the opening and end of the, so Barry did something similar at the TV show. I can't remember the exact name of the song and I'm trying to rip that off. And so we will see if it happens. But yes, it's very risky, it's risky for a whole bunch of reasons. Like unless you, again, can choreograph the scene or the movement specifically around the song, we discussed this briefly, Jocelyn Pooks, Backward Priests and Eyes Wide Shut became the score of the scene because they'd choreographed to the song. You can either paint yourself into a corner with rights issues, the budget of the film

• 10:51Chris Winterbauer?

  might not be able to accommodate certain songs that you're like, yeah, The Stones, great, let's throw them in. So it is risky.

• 11:00Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know that the songs she was pulling here were cheap. You've got, you know, Otis Redding, but we'll, we'll get to that in a little bit. So Bergstein started shopping around her script, but despite the success of movies like Saturday Night Fever, Flashdance and Footloose, she kept getting rejected over and over again. Now, this is potentially due to the state of the industry at the time. The boom of the early eighties was tapering off into what looked like a bust. And also, this is sort of decidedly a girly movie written by a woman and as we'll see in a moment, produced by a woman as well. So I think that probably had a lot to do with them not being interested or this not appearing like a blockbuster.

• 11:41Lizzie Bassett?

  So Eleanor got lunch with a producer named Linda Gottlieb, who was working at MGM at the time. They were acquaintances, they had double dated a few times with the same guys, so they knew each other, but they were not close. And apparently it was over this lunch that Eleanor told Linda she wanted to make a dance movie about two sisters that involved the Catskills Resort and Tango in the early 60s. She also dropped the bomb that she used to do Dirty Dancing, but she said that didn't have anything to do with this movie. And Linda was like, what? She said rethink that because quote, Dirty Dancing as a title is worth a million dollars. So I do think Linda Gottlieb really came in and started shaping this very early on.

• 12:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Clearly knew how to sell it in a way that other people who read the script did not.

• 12:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. I don't even know if there was totally a script at this point. I think a lot of it was generated between the two of them. So Linda eventually brought Dirty Dancing to MGM and Frank Yablons, who we talked about in our mommy dearest episode. He absolutely loved it. He read it. He was in. The movie, Chris, was going to be made by MGM. And then the next day, there was a regime change and he was fired.

• 12:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Great. The minute you sell something and they say it's going to get made, you should know that person's getting canned the next day.

• 12:59Lizzie Bassett?

  100%.

• 13:00Chris Winterbauer?

  And they may have just been green lighting things, knowing that they were going to get canned the next day. I'm just kidding.

• 13:06Lizzie Bassett?

  That's possible because I think this was MGM being bought out and he was very high up. So he may have known. He may have been like, yeah.

• 13:13Chris Winterbauer?

  You get a green light. You get a green light. Yeah.

• 13:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. So the rights to Dirty Dancing reverted back to Linda as the producer at this point, but she only had one year to get the movie made on her own before I guess they would then bounce back to MGM, who would likely shelve it. So she shopped it around to every major studio. They all passed, but she didn't stop. She left MGM and she read in the New York Times that a Connecticut based home video company called Vestron Video was planning on producing its own movies.

• 13:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Vestron.

• 13:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Vestron. They'd been founded in 1981 by the former HBO executive VP of programming. And the company was actually really successful right away because they recognized the market for distributing home video that was not porn. Like, most people weren't doing that.

• 14:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 14:05Lizzie Bassett?

  It was porn or nothing. And this, they did this years before Blockbuster even showed up. Their meteoric rise, however, was starting to slow down because the studios themselves were seeing the potential in home video. And they were like, why are we farming this out to Vestron? We should be distributing this ourselves. So Vestron, in kind of a proto Netflix move, decided to open up their own production arm, Vestron Pictures, where they would make their own movies to sell to people's homes.

• 14:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Let's all vertically integrate in various directions.

• 14:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, let's keep going.

• 14:39Lizzie Bassett?

  But Vestron, to their credit, were immediately on board with Dirty Dancing. However, only if Gottlieb confirmed she could bring it in for under $5 million.

• 14:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Not a lot of money.

• 14:49Lizzie Bassett?

  It's less than half of what she'd estimated it should cost if they shot on location in New York. She said yes.

• 14:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course.

• 14:57Lizzie Bassett?

  But we'll get to the budget later. So Gottlieb got to work building the creative team for the film, including hiring director Emil Ardalino. He was an Academy Award winning director, Chris. However, he was not an obvious choice because up to this point, he had almost exclusively directed dance programs for PBS. And the documentary that won him the Oscar was He Makes Me Feel Like Dancing. He'd never directed a feature film.

• 15:21Chris Winterbauer?

  He would go on to direct several very good ones, even after this.

• 15:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, he would.

• 15:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, well, you'll probably get to this, so I'll, I, there are a couple of fun facts. He's a really interesting director. I really like him quite a bit.

• 15:33Lizzie Bassett?

  We can talk about him. He directed a few, not many after this, to be honest. He

• 15:38Chris Winterbauer?

  He passed away fairly young.

• 15:40Lizzie Bassett?

  He did. He probably most famously after this did direct Sister Act in 1993. And then very sadly, he did pass away from AIDS in 1993.

• 15:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he was one of the, I mean, probably one of the only openly gay directors working at the time, I believe. And he did also Three Men and a Little Lady, the sequel to Three Men and a Little Baby. And I think what's cool about him is if you kind of look at his films, and he didn't do a ton, like you said, but they all thematically kind of coalesce around a rebelliousness around societal norms and, you know, how to behave and how to act.

• 16:14Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true.

• 16:14Chris Winterbauer?

  It's like three men embracing their maternal instincts to raise a little girl together. You've got a lounge singer on the run, hiding in a convent, showing these nuns how to cut loose. And then in the case of Dirty Dancing, obviously, a

• 16:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Sheltered Jewish American princess crossing class divides and embracing her love of dance, you know, there's a quiet rebellion in his films, even though they're blockbusters.

• 16:42Lizzie Bassett?

  I think he's a really good director, which we're gonna talk about in this episode. And by the way, this is not to diminish the work that he had done before this. He was a very accomplished director of dance programs. Like, he knew how to capture it. And he'd moved to LA a few years before because he wanted to start directing features. So far, though, nobody was letting him in. But Linda had seen He Makes Me Feel Like Dancing and loved it, so he immediately came to mind for Dirty Dancing. This makes a lot of sense. He knows how to capture movement, which I just think the dancing in this movie is incredible, and it is captured so, so well. But apparently, when Linda brought him in front of the Vester on board to pitch his idea for the movie, he had a full-blown panic attack and couldn't

• 17:22Lizzie Bassett?

  speak, just stared at them, didn't say a word, but he still got the job. I think these Vester on executives were like, "An interesting choice, sir, and you're hired."

• 17:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 17:35Lizzie Bassett?

  They don't know what they're doing at all.

• 17:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 17:40Lizzie Bassett?

  He had read the script while on jury duty, loved that it was a period piece, loved that movement and dancing was so integral to the story. And one thing he insisted on from the very beginning was that they were not going to use body doubles. He insisted the actors do all the dancing because he did not want to be cutting away to body parts and have it be all chopped up. He wanted to be able to show the wide, show their faces, show everything, and have it not be an issue. They also brought choreographer Kenny Ortega on. He was quite established at this point. And in addition to having helped choreograph Xanadu, several tours for the likes of Cher and Kiss and Madonna's Material Girl video, he had also worked on Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. He was known as someone who was excellent working with actors versus professional dancers, which makes

• 18:24Lizzie Bassett?

  sense because he started as an actor. And, by the way, Chris, he went on to choreograph High School Musical and direct Newsies and Hocus Pocus.

• 18:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Big Newsies fans on this podcast.

• 18:35Lizzie Bassett?

  I do genuinely love Newsies.

• 18:38Chris Winterbauer?

  I genuinely like Newsies quite a bit. My dad really liked it and showed it to us when we were kids and we all were really into Newsies. We were a weird Newsies family. I didn't know that other families didn't also watch Newsies all the time.

• 18:50Lizzie Bassett?

  No one watches Newsies.

• 18:51Chris Winterbauer?

  No one watches. Have you guys seen this Newsies? And everyone says, what the hell are you talking about?

• 18:56Lizzie Bassett?

  I only know about it because my summer camp, every single year, when it rained, they would do a Newsies movie night. And again, I don't know why. It was just an annual tradition. I hope it still happens. I thought everyone knew Newsies and Christian Bale's incredible Brooklyn accent. Chris, I don't know if you're familiar with him singing, "Santa Fe, are you there? Can you keep a candle burning?" If you don't believe me, listeners, go watch it. That is what he sounds like and I love him.

• 19:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Go watch it.

• 19:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Anyway, it's a trip. Newsies.

• 19:32Chris Winterbauer?

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• 21:39Lizzie Bassett?

  So, Chris, if you had to guess, what do you think the most expensive part of this movie was? We've already talked about it a little bit.

• 21:46Chris Winterbauer?

  The most, uh, the music?

• 21:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 21:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Was that the most?

• 21:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 21:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, yeah, that, which makes sense. It's a great set of needle drops that they have in this movie.

• 21:54Lizzie Bassett?

  It's an amazing soundtrack. They knew from the beginning that they had to hold most of the budget to cover the songs that Bernstein desperately wanted and had written this movie around, so they were not going to be able to afford A-list actors. The time came to start casting, and though it sounds like a couple of other people were considered for the role of Frances "Baby" Housman, including Sarah Jessica Parker, by the way.

• 22:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Ooh.

• 22:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, who Vestron, I think, maybe wanted more than Jennifer Grey.

• 22:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Interesting, Matthew Broderick, six degrees of...

• 22:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, very true. But Jennifer Grey was the creative team's top choice from the beginning, so let's talk about her.

• 22:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Jennifer Grey was cast before Patrick Swayze?

• 22:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. I don't know that she was officially signed on the dotted line.

• 22:36Chris Winterbauer?

  But they had her in mind.

• 22:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. I think they were always casting the Johnny opposite her, even though it sounds like Vestron may have had some other people in mind. So, just like Baby Houseman, Jennifer Grey was born in New York City on March 20th, 1960, into a successful and famous family. Her father was soon to be Tony and Academy Award-winning actor Joel Grey, who you probably best know as the emcee from Cabaret. And her grandfather was comedian Mickey Katz. And yes, Mickey did at one point tour the Borscht Belt. Now, what I'm about to mention, I'm saying because I think it's important to keep in mind when we discuss some of her experiences on both Dirty Dancing and Red Dawn. According to her memoir, Out of the Corner, at 14 years old, she was molested by her grandparents' building superintendent.

• 23:23Lizzie Bassett?

  When she told her grandparents, they didn't believe her. When she told her father what had happened and that it had occurred, after she was coming home from a date, he said, quote, "Well, what did you expect? You were probably all juicy from your date." So, not a great formative experience and was immediately blamed and shamed. She went straight into acting school after high school at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where she had a string of relationships with older men. And in 1984, she had two big films release. Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club, which I know we keep saying this, but we will be covering in detail on this show because it is a disaster the likes of which I'm not sure we've seen yet. It's also worth noting that very much unlike his treatment of the sex scenes in The Godfather,

• 24:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Grey says that Coppola was not great to work with on this one, insisting that she strip naked for her sex scene with Nicolas Cage and also kept a full crew on the set for the shoot, which even back then, I don't think was standard.

• 24:21Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 24:21Lizzie Bassett?

  The other film to come out in 1984 was John Millius's Red Dawn.

• 24:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, which answers the question, if a foreign country invaded, could your high school football team kick their asses?

• 24:36Chris Winterbauer?

  And the answer is yes.

• 24:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 24:39Chris Winterbauer?

  It's it's

• 24:40Lizzie Bassett?

  It's insane.

• 24:42Chris Winterbauer?

  It's great. It's one of the ultimate high school fantasy movies that really begs that question of who could we as high schoolers defeat? And the answer was everyone. Also, Lizzie, the first movie officially rated PG 13. I believe you shared that during our Gremlins episode.

• 24:57Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that is correct. Yeah, it's very violent. And she starred opposite Charlie Sheen, Leah Thompson, and of course, Patrick Swayze. However, Patrick did not make a good impression on Jennifer during this shoot. So the movie, as we mentioned, is incredibly violent. And one of the few scenes where she felt she was going to be able to flex some more tender acting chops was their sex scene together. Unfortunately, day of, Patrick Swayze showed up absolutely hammered and forgot his lines so frequently that John Milias gave up and said, I will shoot it later, which they never did. Then, the night before Grey was to have her other big moment, her death scene. Swayze and some other guys set off firecrackers outside her hotel room, keeping her up all night because they were

• 25:42Lizzie Bassett?

  in a sketchy part of New Mexico, and they thought it would be funny to make her think that they were gunshots. She didn't love it. She felt like her performance suffered because of it. Not only was she exhausted, but she was really furious with him, which made it really hard to act opposite him in that scene. And she never forgot about it. In 1986, she got arguably her biggest break yet in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which I love her in. She is, of course, Ferris's sort of arch nemesis sister.

• 26:15Chris Winterbauer?

  She's yeah, she's doing kind of, I'm not gonna say like Aubrey Plaza before Aubrey Plaza, but there's like a

• 26:22Lizzie Bassett?

  No, kind of.

• 26:23Chris Winterbauer?

  There yeah, there's a wonderful sullenness to her that I think Winona Ryder has did something similar, obviously, in Beetlejuice and Heather's a little bit. There's I don't think Jennifer Grey ever got to quite do that again. And I think she's so good at it in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

• 26:37Lizzie Bassett?

  She's amazing. She's very funny. And at least this time, she had a better time with her co star, considering she started a serious relationship with Matthew Broderick while filming.

• 26:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Incest.

• 26:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's a little brother love.

• 26:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Just, you know, 30 years ahead of Mike White and the White Lotus.

• 26:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Sometime in late 1985 or early 1986, she read the breakdown for the part of Baby, and she immediately felt like she was perfect for it. Of course, minus the fact that Baby is 17 and Gray is 26. Who cares? Age means absolutely nothing in this movie.

• 27:05Chris Winterbauer?

  She looks, she, she, in my opinion, convincingly plays 17.

• 27:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Have you seen a 17-year-old girl? I don't think so.

• 27:13Chris Winterbauer?

  No, no, no. 1980s, 17. Like, go back and look at, you know.

• 27:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, you're right. They, they read as more 35.

• 27:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Timothy Chalamet is 50 years old, and he looks like he's 12. Okay? I just watched the pilot episode of Seinfeld, and Jason Alexander is like 26, and he looks like my dad. It's, the time is meaningless at this point. But I think for the 80s, I think she's convincingly 17, 18, and Patrick Swayze is 40.

• 27:41Lizzie Bassett?

  He's in his mid-30s, for sure. So like Baby, she considered her father her hero and idolized him. She also came from, as we said, an upper-middle-class Jewish family, who were highly educated liberals, passionate about social justice. And I want to read an excerpt from her memoir about her connection to the character. Quote, "The character of Frances Baby Hausmann was decidedly more interesting-looking than traditionally pretty. It was actually a plot point. Not only was Baby Jewish, but she had to look Jewish. See, nobody the sedanist of a sexy gorgeous dance teacher would ordinarily ever look at twice. At the same time, she was the female lead of the movie. It was her story. So she'd have to be at least somewhat attractive for the movie to work, right? My girl Baby and I were like two peas in a pod." Now, worth noting, Jennifer Grey is absolutely stunning,

• 28:26Lizzie Bassett?

  and quite a bit more than somewhat attractive. It does make me sad that that's kind of how she felt reading this and connected to it, but this is, I think, rare to see in a breakdown, like, even now.

• 28:36Chris Winterbauer?

  But I would say, compared to what was a traditional Hollywood-leading woman in the, like, mid-1980s.

• 28:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 28:43Chris Winterbauer?

  She is, by those standards, unusual-looking. Obviously, you've put her into a room with, you know, me and nine other normal-looking people, she's gonna stand out. But I, and I love, for example, her nose, and I know, maybe we'll touch on the, you know, plastic surgery she had later. But I think there was a very waspy standard of beauty, you know, that that remains true somewhat through today that she does not fall in line with.

• 29:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. So I do think this immediately was something that she recognized as a pretty different opportunity. She had also been dancing since she was about five years old. And while she wasn't a professional dancer, she was pretty good. She nailed her audition, which included a freestyle dance routine. And she went on to do a series of screen tests opposite potential Johnny Castles. So some other people who tested included Val Kilmer. Interesting. Benicio del Toro.

• 29:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Connecticut.

• 29:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I can't. That one I can't see. And then this one, Billy Zane, he made it kind of far in this process, but he apparently, quote, danced like someone who looked like he had learned to dance wonderfully for his bar mitzvah, according to Bernstein.

• 29:55Chris Winterbauer?

  He danced like me. That's who he danced like.

• 29:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 29:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 29:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Which brings up the main issue with pretty much everyone who auditioned for Johnny. None of them were professional dancers and they kind of had to be in order for this to work. So they needed a super hot professional dancer who was also a great actor who was either straight or could believably play straight.

• 30:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 30:16Lizzie Bassett?

  And turns out that was pretty hard to come by.

• 30:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Really, really hard. And isn't, isn't like Bob Fosse's age, you know what I mean? Something like that.

• 30:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 30:25Chris Winterbauer?

  So it's like, not going to be too creepy that he's, you know, into this 17, 18 year old.

• 30:30Lizzie Bassett?

  No. And there was really only one person who checked every box. And unfortunately for Jennifer Grey, it was her Red Dawn co-star and firecracker terrorist.

• 30:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly.

• 30:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Patrick Swayze.

• 30:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Comes in drunk, hits firecrackers. Let's put baby in a corner.

• 30:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. So Patrick Swayze was born August 18, 1952, in Houston, Texas. I think you talked about this in our Point Break episode. So go back and listen to that if you want more Swayze, which I always do. His mother was a dancer and his father was a boxer. And he grew up dancing, taking lessons from his mom at her dance studio from the time he was very young. And by the way, she wasn't just like, you know, Cindy's mom who runs a dance studio behind the local Ralphs. She was like, one of the biggest dance instructors in Texas. She was a big deal.

• 31:16Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, well, a little rude to Cindy's mom, but we get it.

• 31:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, it's worth noting that his wife revealed in the recent documentary, I Am Patrick Swayze, that his mother was extremely focused on him and very hard on him. It sounds like to the point of abuse. Rob Lowe said of their relationship that his mom, quote, "had all of her energy fixated on Patrick for better or for worse." Their relationship did improve later in life, and he adored her, but people around him clearly had concern about it, including the rest of his family, and also how driven it had made him. In high school, he was a football star, hoping to receive a football scholarship until a major knee injury ended his career in his senior year. He was tackled too hard and it snapped his knee joint, which makes me feel sick. But you can't keep a Patrick Swayze down, Chris, so he went on to study at the Harkness

• 32:03Lizzie Bassett?

  and Joffrey Ballet Schools in New York City, which are like some of the best. And unfortunately, that knee injury reared its head again, and he was eventually taken out of commission. I believe at that point, he was actually dancing in a professional company. In 1977, he booked the role of Danny Zuko in the Broadway production of Grease. After that, he and his wife Lisa, who was also a dancer, moved to LA to try out Hollywood at the invitation of an agent. And they were almost completely out of money when Swayze booked Skate Town USA, which you can see, you could watch all of it, you could watch clips of it, it's pretty funny. Came out in 1979, he played a, quote, "hot shot bad boy skater in tight leather pants", and he got to display his dancing and skating skills, and definitely made an impression.

• 32:45Lizzie Bassett?

  A particularly good review in the LA Times said, "Not since John Travolta took the disco floor in Saturday Night Fever has there been such a confident display of male sexuality as when a lithe newcomer to films, Patrick Swayze, hit the rink."

• 32:59Chris Winterbauer?

  That is a nice review.

• 33:00Lizzie Bassett?

  It is. Also, he is just a beautiful mover. He really is. So from here on out, he started getting offered a lot of dancing movies, and he turned them down because he was very afraid of being typecast. He does a few TV roles. Finally gets a bigger break with 1983 is The Outsiders. In 1984, of course, he's in Red Dawn, opposite Jennifer Grey. But he still had not gotten a leading role that would really catapult him into stardom. Neither had she, by the way. So when he saw the breakdown for Dirty Dancing, he was hesitant. In many ways, it was the kind of role that he had been avoiding for years at this point. In fact, his resume actually said, no dancing. So even though Bergstein and Gottlieb loved his look, they didn't originally go after him.

• 33:42Lizzie Bassett?

  It wasn't until Emile Ardalino explained he's actually an extremely trained professional ballet dancer. And he had taken that off of his resume because he was focusing on acting, that they realized, okay, we have to bring this guy in. Also, turns out, he'd taken it off of his resume because of that pesky knee injury, but we'll come back to that.

• 34:01Chris Winterbauer?

  I was gonna say, snapping your quote, knee joint could be any number of ligaments in there. Not great for any type of movement.

• 34:10Lizzie Bassett?

  No, and he's not super careful with his body, so.

• 34:14Chris Winterbauer?

  As we learned when he was jumping out of planes uninsured on point break.

• 34:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Patrick Swayze does what Patrick Swayze wants. But he talked it over with his wife and they decided to go for it. He was excited about a lead dancing role and also they had house payments. So he was like, the time is now. Now, when his name came up as a potential Johnny Castle, everyone in the casting process was extremely excited, except for Jennifer Grey.

• 34:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Grey pushed back vocally, saying, anybody else, please? They told her he used to be a professional ballet dancer and she's like, yeah, I know. I think he wouldn't shut up about it. It was director Emile Ardalino who pointed out that as a ballet dancer, he's uniquely trained to be a great partner. That's kind of all they do. And Grey had no experience doing ballroom or Latin dancing, so this actually was a really good point. She did need a strong partner for this to work. Still, she pushed back again, told them about her experience with him on Red Dawn, and they did not care. So they set up a screen test with the two of them together.

• 35:21Chris Winterbauer?

  And I don't blame them because it was extremely rude and unprofessional to be drunk during his partner's scenes and also to light off firecrackers. But they're not such bad transgressions that you would say no to, you know what I mean? Casting him in the next movie, in my opinion.

• 35:36Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 35:37Chris Winterbauer?

  So I think you, you have to go for it. They're, it's, they're hitting such a narrow target. There's, there's no one else.

• 35:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 35:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 35:45Lizzie Bassett?

  There's literally one person who can do this. And also she's not a big enough star to like be able to throw her weight around, unfortunately, at that point. So when he showed up to the screen test, he said hi to everyone, then he asked to have a minute alone with Jennifer. He congratulated her on the role and then went on to acknowledge that he knew he had been kind of a dickhead to her in the past. He started crying and according to Gray said, I know you're probably thinking, oh no, not this idiot again. You know, I've always loved you and I've been really working on getting my shit together. So if I get the chance, I swear I'm going to make it up to you. You will not be sorry.

• 36:19Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 36:19Lizzie Bassett?

  She's a little sorry, but she actually started crying too. But it was more so because she figured he was probably going to get it because to your point, like he is kind of perfect for this. And he really wasn't who she had pictured starring opposite in her first huge leading role. So they went back into the room and Chris, I want to play you a little bit of their screen test.

• 36:43Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, Chris, you've seen the screen test. What's your reaction as the people in the room?

• 36:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Green light it.

• 36:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 36:51Chris Winterbauer?

  He's kind of just like, he's the perfect fantasy figure. You know what I mean? He's, he's the right size. He's bigger than her, but because he like Swayze has such a narrow waist and obviously like dancer's legs, that he doesn't dwarf her in a way that feels uncomfortable, yet he's obviously ridiculously strong. So he can just swing her around like a rag doll effectively.

• 37:11Lizzie Bassett?

  She's like 90 pounds, but yes.

• 37:14Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, she's tiny, yes. And there's also his features, he has such a square jaw, right? And like pronounced brow and nose. And so as a result, her kind of more oval shaped face and aquiline nose. There's a great contrast, I think, between the two of them, just visually in general. They look great together.

• 37:33Lizzie Bassett?

  What's funny is, so I watched Netflix's Movies That Made Us on this, which is a great episode. Definitely recommend checking it out. You could also in that see some clips of Billy Zane with her. It is night and day. It's not that he's a bad dancer, but like to Artelino's point, he is not a strong partner. And watching the screen test, that's the biggest thing. Listeners, go watch it. You can find it on YouTube. You will see immediately what I'm talking about. Like, she doesn't have to do that much. I mean, she's doing great, but like, he is completely in control. He so clearly knows what he's doing, and he just moves beautifully. So despite other actors having tested for the role, as we said, he is the only one they ever offered it to. Then they round out the rest of the

• 38:16Lizzie Bassett?

  cast with some other dancers that Kenny Ortega had worked with before, like Cynthia Rhodes, who played Penny, and Tony Award-winning Broadway actor, who you may know better as TV procedural star Jerry Orbach, as Baby's father, among many others. All right. So remember that super low budget of less than $5 million that Linda Gottlieb had agreed to? Well, it meant that shooting was insanely tight. They had 44 days, to be exact, between September 5, 1986, and October 19, 1986. It also meant that there was no way they could shoot in New York, because they would have had to use union crews. So they end up shooting in Virginia and North Carolina, both of which were right-to-work states with non-union crews. They shot the main exteriors, like Baby's cabin, the gazebo,

• 39:01Lizzie Bassett?

  the resort and dining room scenes at the Mountain Lake Lodge in Virginia, but they could only afford 14 days there. So they shot pretty much everything else at a boys' camp in North Carolina. That's like the staff cabins, some interior lodge stuff where they do the talent show. Now, obviously, the resort and camp couldn't have filmed crews traipsing around in the height of their busy season, so Dirty Dancing had to film in the off-season. Specifically, the fall. Now, the weather proved to be a problem pretty much right away. First of all, the poor set decorators had to frantically run around and spray paint all the leaves green. I can also tell you from firsthand experience of growing up in Virginia that the fall weather is extremely unpredictable. And sure enough, they dealt with multiple

• 39:42Lizzie Bassett?

  heatwaves, cold snaps, and classic friend of the pod, torrential downpours.

• 39:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Gotta love a torrential downpour.

• 39:50Lizzie Bassett?

  When it wasn't raining, the mosquitoes came out and ate Jennifer Grey alive. She was so covered in bug bites that the makeup artist had to cover up new red welts between every take, particularly on the ones where she's not wearing very much clothes. And Chris, there was another problem with the location. While the Borscht Belt was known for its vibrant Jewish community, Appalachia.

• 40:08Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 40:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Not so much.

• 40:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I was gonna ask, Lizzie, did you have a lot of Jewish friends growing up?

• 40:17Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't want to answer that question.

• 40:18Chris Winterbauer?

  The answer's no. You're married to a Jewish man now.

• 40:21Lizzie Bassett?

  I am.

• 40:22Chris Winterbauer?

  It's fine. Whereas I grew up in the Borscht Belt of the Seattle area. Mercer Island is an extremely Jewish community. I went to more bar and bat mitzvahs, I feel like, than most of my Jewish friends I met in California. And ironically, that's where I learned about grinding, was at a bar and bat mitzvahs.

• 40:39Lizzie Bassett?

  There you go.

• 40:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 40:40Lizzie Bassett?

  There you go. The tradition carries on.

• 40:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Dirty dancing.

• 40:43Lizzie Bassett?

  So here's Jennifer Grey on the subject. For the movie to capture the authenticity of the Borscht Belt, the extras in the movie needed to look identifiably Jewish. And there wasn't exactly a surplus of Jews in the Appalachian South. I can confirm, there really, there's not. So, the super tight schedule also meant that there was no room for error or rescheduling for more minor characters. Something the original actress playing Baby's mother, Lynn Lipton, learned the very hard way. She got sick on the second day of shooting, and because they were up against the clock, they just replaced her. Kelly Bishop had been slated for a smaller role as a resort guest, and they were like, you, you're Marjorie Houseman now.

• 41:23Chris Winterbauer?

  I just assumed Kelly Bishop must have been a decent name. Obviously, her turn on Gilmore Girls would come 10 years later.

• 41:30Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I think this was like, the moment she got pulled out from the crowd. And fortunately, she's great.

• 41:35Chris Winterbauer?

  That's incredible.

• 41:37Lizzie Bassett?

  But poor Lynn Lipton. There were also plenty of injuries, broken toes, fractured wrists, falls from tall ladders, a 90-year-old actress fainted from heat stroke, and unfortunately, one of the biggest injuries during the shoot belonged to... Patrick Swayze.

• 41:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 41:51Lizzie Bassett?

  So the scene where they're dancing on the log is the only one in the film that Jennifer Grey used a stunt double for, which was smart. However, Patrick Swayze was pissed off that she used a stunt double for it, so he insisted on doing it himself. And Chris, can you guess what happened?

• 42:07Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm guessing he fell off the log.

• 42:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Bingo. And remember that high school knee injury? Well, he reinjured the exact same spot when he fell into the ravine on many rocks. So for the rest of the shoot, he'd have to take time out to have his knee drained of fluid because apparently it would blow up like a grapefruit.

• 42:27Lizzie Bassett?

  And at the end of the day, this little stunt cost the entire cast and crew time and money. And also, he was doing a lot of the dancing in this movie on a super fucked up knee, including that jump off the stage at the end. He was in a lot of pain doing that.

• 42:49Speaker 02

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• 43:25Lizzie Bassett?

  On top of everything else, Grey was pretty stressed out about the initial wardrobe that she was presented with. They obviously had very limited budget, but it sounds like a lot of what she was offered didn't have the ability to transition into something sexier as the movie went on. It was a lot of like nerd alert clothes.

• 43:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, she's very buttoned up, little boat peep, you know, at the beginning, sweaters and I'm daddy's girl, right? Is what she's trying to evoke at the beginning of the movie.

• 43:47Lizzie Bassett?

  So she contributed a few pieces of her own, including the cutoff jeans, some vintage jeans, Keds, red and white striped top and worked with designers to pull items like the white button down shirt that could be converted into into sexy town by tying it up.

• 44:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Or getting it wet or, you know, and they do that transition nicely during the montage as she's learning to dance and her wardrobe begins to change.

• 44:07Lizzie Bassett?

  She also lost her trusted makeup artist very early on. They had to leave for personal reasons. So she did her own makeup for two weeks of the shoot. That might not sound that bad if you've never worked on something or been on camera, but it is really bad.

• 44:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's a different, different type of makeup when you're doing it for film lights and being projected onto a screen over a hundred feet across, so the audience can see every pore.

• 44:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I can't imagine having to do my own makeup. Also, it's not like you can YouTube tutorials in 1986 for how to do this.

• 44:40Chris Winterbauer?

  And now we're gonna contour.

• 44:42Lizzie Bassett?

  On top of all of this, she was a vegetarian and in 1986 North Carolina, that does not leave you with very many food options. I can confirm it leaves you with none. So she had like nothing to eat. She was mentally exhausted, physically exhausted, getting no protein. And the main thing she found herself eating night after night was a Caesar salad.

• 45:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Which isn't even vegetarian.

• 45:03Lizzie Bassett?

  It's vegetarian.

• 45:05Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 45:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, there's eggs.

• 45:06Chris Winterbauer?

  The Caesar dressing has the anchovy fish sauce in it and there's eggs. Yeah.

• 45:10Lizzie Bassett?

  It's funny you should mention that because unfortunately, one batch of the salad must have used a bad egg in the dressing because she got violently ill from food poisoning and she had a late call the next morning. She was trying to sleep in, but at the absolute ass crack of dawn, choreographer Kenny Ortega called her and said they wanted to shoot some montage footage with the second unit team. Can you explain what a second unit team does, Chris?

• 45:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, so you have your first unit, which is your director and cinematographer, director of photography, and their camera team, and they will shoot the primary action of the day. And then second unit photography, or a splinter unit, can go out with a separate second unit director. It could be somebody fulfilling a different role on the production. In this instance, Lizzie, it sounds like Kenny Ortega was leading it as the choreographer.

• 45:54Lizzie Bassett?

  He did some of it, yeah.

• 45:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. Like, a famous example from more recent years, Andy Serkis was a second unit director under Peter Jackson on The Hobbit trilogy. And they will go out and film insert shots, crowd shots, reaction shots. Oh, the editor needs another shot of Baby doing a twirl to complete this sequence. Great, we can go get that with the second unit. We don't need to bog the first unit down who's shooting dialogue, right, and requiring directing of the actors with that request.

• 46:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. And also, to your point, Kenny wanted to be a director himself, which I think she knew. So she did drag herself out of bed. They shot the sequence on the stairs, where she's going up and down, practicing her steps. And she apparently spent the entire shoot trying not to vomit. And when you see her have a little tantrum, that is completely real. She had absolutely had it at that point, because they'd done it over and over again. She couldn't get it right, and she was just trying not to have the barfs.

• 46:47Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, barfs actually would have been really funny in that sequence, and not inappropriate from a story perspective.

• 46:53Lizzie Bassett?

  It'd been a little weird.

• 46:55Chris Winterbauer?

  She's trying so hard.

• 46:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Sure. Not as hot. It sounds like Jennifer Grey was an extremely good sport with one exception. Just like Baby, she was terrified of the lift. Swayze had been trying to get her to distrust him and do it since day one of rehearsals. After all, he'd lifted a million ballerinas in the air, and Jennifer Grey, you know, looks like a piece of paper, so this was not going to be hard for him. But rehearsal after rehearsal, she refused. And it's worth remembering, she didn't have a ton of reasons to trust Patrick Swayze at this point either.

• 47:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So he threw firecrackers at her feet, so she had to jump in his arms and then he got her.

• 47:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 47:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Funny also, Lizzie, how lifts are very much in the news. I guess we've moved past this by the time we released this episode, but much of the Justin Baldoni Blake Lively feud seems to stem around allegations of fat shaming or misinterpreted requests for body weight in order to prep a bad back for a lift in their film, It Ends With Us.

• 47:56Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true.

• 47:57Chris Winterbauer?

  That story has metastasized in ways I never could have imagined. If you guys are unawares, Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively co-starred and he directed It Ends With Us, a very successful movie about domestic violence, and they are now suing not only each other, but also the New York Times to hell and back over everything.

• 48:18Lizzie Bassett?

  It is crazy. We are recording this in advance because I'm gonna, I guess, have a baby when this episode comes out, which is crazy. So we will have to see how that story continues to develop. But yeah, it's been nuts. It didn't help that when they went to shoot, the scene where they rehearsed the lift in the water, it was absolutely freezing, to the point where the crews who set up the underwater platform that Swayze and Gray were standing on were in full-blown wetsuits, like cold weather wetsuits. And they had to have medics standing by because Swayze and Gray were at genuine risk of hypothermia just from being in the water for that long.

• 48:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, not a lot of like excess body fat to keep them warm with either of those two.

• 48:53Lizzie Bassett?

  None. So she had a really hard time trusting him and also trusting herself to do it. And so the take of her doing the lift in the finale is the first and only time she got it.

• 49:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 49:04Lizzie Bassett?

  That's it.

• 49:05Chris Winterbauer?

  One and done.

• 49:06Lizzie Bassett?

  One and done. Which is also very sweet because when you watch it, they're clearly so thrilled that she actually got it. And that's why she's laughing. On top of everything else, the script did need a little bit of work. Gray, Swayze, and Artelino all did minor rewrites, most of which was pushing back on some of the more melodramatic lines in the movie. Swayze famously hated "nobody puts baby in a corner." He, quote, strenuously resisted it, according to Gray. And Swayze himself said he could hardly bring himself to say it because it sounded so corny. I feel like you can tell when you watch it.

• 49:36Chris Winterbauer?

  I know it's the most iconic line of the film. It's not, I don't personally love the line. I think the movie's better than that line.

• 49:43Lizzie Bassett?

  It's also not in a corner.

• 49:45Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 49:46Lizzie Bassett?

  She's flat against a wall.

• 49:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Nobody puts baby in this part of the room. You know, it really calls to mind Gladiator. I remember when we were covering that film, there was the line that Russell Crowe absolutely hated.

• 49:59Speaker 03

  And I will have my vengeance in this life or the next.

• 50:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Which of course would go on to become the most famous line of the film that he would be arguably most remembered for, aside from strength and honor.

• 50:12Lizzie Bassett?

  And it's so funny because they just like, you can tell it's like, nobody puts baby in a corner. And then that's, and that's the line that everybody loved. So despite things going better than they did on Red Dawn, they were not exactly perfect between Swayze and Gray on the set of Dirty Dancing. She was constantly frustrated with him because he was chronically late to set every day, all day for every scene, according to Gray. And by the way, his wife corroborates that. She's, she's like, yeah, he could never be on time. According to Swayze, referring to Jennifer Grey, she seemed particularly emotional, sometimes bursting into tears if someone criticized her. Other times she slipped into silly moods, forcing us to do scenes over and over again when she'd start laughing. And he was endlessly frustrated with her because of her lack of dancing skills.

• 50:56Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm going to side with Jennifer Grey on this one, as she was not a professional dancer and was not supposed to be. But this was a huge issue between the two of them because basically Gray would be learning the choreography with choreographer Kenny Ortega. And by the way, his frequent collaborator Miranda Garrison, who assisted on the film and played the ultra glam Vivian Pressman in it. And remember, Kenny was well known for his ability to work with actors who could move well, but weren't necessarily trained dancers. So he was very forgiving and so was Miranda Garrison. Meanwhile, Patrick had only ever danced with professionals, including his wife, who he'd been dancing with for 15 years. So it sounds like he had really unrealistic expectations of Jennifer Grey.

• 51:39Chris Winterbauer?

  I will just say, the fact that they don't like each other works so well in the first half of the film.

• 51:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it does.

• 51:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Like, it's much more convincing than them like, they do a good job selling that they like each other eventually, but man, it really feels like they don't like each other at first. It's really good. It's real, and it works. It's great.

• 52:00Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that's one of the smartest things that Emile Ardalino did is he didn't really try to avoid that.

• 52:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he lets Swayze get frustrated with her while they're dancing.

• 52:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, he does.

• 52:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is great.

• 52:10Lizzie Bassett?

  And he just kept cameras rolling. Also worth pointing out, if Patrick Swayze grew up with a mother who was constantly pushing him, the way it sounds like he did, it does make sense that his expectations of himself were so high that he also had sort of unrealistic expectations of his partner. Now, I think for obvious reasons at this point, Gray had a lot of anxiety about the sex scene in Dirty Dancing. On top of all the prior bad experiences she'd had, there was also no guarantee that the movie would be getting a PG-13 rating. So she had no clue what she was in for with this. Also, earlier in the shoot, when they were just filming the two of them in bed, she tried to keep her underwear on because you couldn't really see it, but the cinematographer caught a flash of it in a shot and requested that she stripped fully naked, which she didn't love. However, it sounds like she made a conscious

• 52:52Lizzie Bassett?

  decision to really take control of the sex scene and ask for what she needed. And it went great. I think Swayze and Andalino really let her do that. She said it went well enough that afterwards, Swayze allegedly said, "Will you marry me?"

• 53:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 53:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 53:09Chris Winterbauer?

  And also, to be clear, in terms of the PG-13 rating and not knowing, I'm sure too, this was right at the birth of PG-13.

• 53:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly.

• 53:17Chris Winterbauer?

  And so, they didn't know exactly what the guidelines were. What's gonna separate us between PG and R, right?

• 53:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Or if they were going for a PG-13 rating. This is being released by a totally different, a brand-new company who mostly worked in home video, so it would be very hard to know.

• 53:33Chris Winterbauer?

  A distribution network dominated by pornography.

• 53:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly, with a title like Dirty Dancing.

• 53:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. Yeah. Vestron's like, "What are they gonna get to the porn?"

• 53:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Swayze did also manage to make her laugh in some unconventional ways, Chris. According to Gray in her memoir, for the scene in the car when they're driving to the lake and she laughs and says, "You're wild," she was having a really hard time generating a genuine laugh. So...

• 54:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Did he fart?

• 54:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Nope.

• 54:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 54:05Lizzie Bassett?

  For one of the takes, Patrick Swayze looked at her and indicated with his eyes that she should look down. And when she did, she saw that he had just taken his dick out of his pants.

• 54:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Hey, you know what? It worked. It did make her laugh really hard. And I'm pretty sure that's the take you see in the film.

• 54:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Nothing like a little good old fashioned workplace sexual harassment to get the team through the day.

• 54:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, not recommended.

• 54:34Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 54:35Lizzie Bassett?

  It does seem like she enjoyed it.

• 54:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, look, if she found it funny and he can find the humor in his own penis, God bless, I suppose.

• 54:44Lizzie Bassett?

  I suppose. So they wrap up production and move very quickly into post-production. And one of the smartest things Ardelino did was to bring in dance editor Girish Bargava just for the dance sequences. He was known as one of, if not the best dance editor in the business at this point, had worked with the likes of Twyla Tharp and Jerome Robbins. And Ardelino had met Bargava early on in his career as a dance director, so he knew exactly who to call. Also, Chris, you mentioned this. Remember how Ardelino kept the cameras rolling and really captured the intensity and frustrations of their rehearsals? That came in handy. And you can see it all over the film, but particularly, one moment he captured was where Baby keeps laughing when Johnny is tickling her by trying to run his

• 55:29Lizzie Bassett?

  arm down basically her armpit in a sexy way. That is real. That was a very late night take where I guess she was really losing it. And apparently she kept just asking for a full cheese plate. And they were like, we're in the woods of North Carolina. You're not getting a cheese plate.

• 55:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Also, it's gonna be like the sweatiest cheese within five minutes.

• 55:50Lizzie Bassett?

  So poor Jennifer Grey's probably like, I've only been eating lettuce for weeks. Can I have cheese? And so she was just super loopy and kept laughing. And you can see how pissed Patrick Swayze is.

• 56:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 56:03Lizzie Bassett?

  That was something that editor Peter C. Frank and his team found, and they ended up dropping it in.

• 56:08Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a very honest moment, like it's a great honest moment in the film.

• 56:11Lizzie Bassett?

  There's a couple. There's a couple that I think may be real.

• 56:13Chris Winterbauer?

  I think when she's crawling towards him on the floor and they're lip syncing in that one sequence, I'm like fairly sure that might be improvised in some way. It just feels very much like they're goofing off together on set.

• 56:27Lizzie Bassett?

  That I don't know because I know they wanted that song, I think.

• 56:30Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I know, I know. I'm just saying that that iteration of it, the way that they're performing, you know what I mean? That moment feels like cutting loose between takes to me when I watch it.

• 56:39Lizzie Bassett?

  I also wonder about the sequence where you see their feet and she's stepping on his feet, or he's like spinning her and she smacks him in the head. I kind of think that may be real as well, based on his reactions. Also because the head smack looks real. I don't know how they faked that. One little whoopsie that the editor, not the dance editor, but the regular editor may have done though. Apparently he wondered aloud during the first Dirty Dancing sequence about a shot of one of the dancers who throws her leg over her partner's neck, saying, "How can you have respect for a girl who dances this way?"

• 57:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Uh oh.

• 57:09Lizzie Bassett?

  That was followed by a very awkward silence because everyone in the room, including Eleanor Bernstein, knew that that was Eleanor's signature step. Oopsies. Also, I watched that scene a bunch of times. I couldn't find the shot, so I do wonder if they did cut it, which would be a bummer.

• 57:25Chris Winterbauer?

  I couldn't tell whose legs were who when we went into that room, Lizzie. I was scandalized.

• 57:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, speaking of being scandalized, there was some concern about the title Dirty Dancing, so some alternate titles were floated and also used on dailies that they were shipping around. One of them was "I Was a Teenage Mambo Queen."

• 57:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Sounds actually dirtier.

• 57:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it does. That caused some problems for the production when their dailies were held up at the Canadian border because they thought it was porn.

• 57:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it sounds like that kind of euphemistic, not super creative porn title.

• 57:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 57:58Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm surprised they didn't go with like smutty salsa or something like that.

• 58:02Lizzie Bassett?

  So we've talked about this a lot, but Bernstein, Ardelino and Gottlieb fought very hard for the classic songs that Eleanor had built so much of the story around, but they didn't have them on lock. And in fact, the studio initially told them they were too expensive and needed to be replaced with sound alikes. They played Bernstein 10 master tracks and told her if she could distinguish at least six between the sound alikes they were presenting and the originals, they would go with the original songs. Obviously, she got all 10. I don't know who they were thinking they were gonna fool with that.

• 58:32Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know.

• 58:33Chris Winterbauer?

  We're going to play you this other band called The Smeetles. And I would like you to tell us if Here Comes the Fun sounds good enough for you. Yeah, it's just, it's insane.

• 58:43Lizzie Bassett?

  It did not work. They had huge problems clearing the songs, though. They actually had to fire their first music supervisor because he couldn't get any of them. And they almost had to shoot some of the major dance numbers to click tracks because they were so scared that they couldn't get any of the songs in time.

• 58:58Chris Winterbauer?

  I thought you were gonna say they almost had to shoot music supervisor.

• 59:02Lizzie Bassett?

  He's fine.

• 59:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Got it. So, Lizzie, you mentioned potentially using a click track, which I'm guessing they may have done in certain instances.

• 59:10Lizzie Bassett?

  I bet they did, because I don't know that they had all this music in place.

• 59:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Even without it, you want clean sound without the music in the background, but you want the right BPM, the right beats per minute. And the way that you can do that and still get clean sound is through a device called a thumper, at least according to my sound professor at USC, which releases a thump at the BPM of the song.

• 59:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Is this Dune?

• 59:30Chris Winterbauer?

  It's basically like the Dune sandworms, right? So it can be recorded, your dancers can feel it and they can hear it. But your microphone, you can make sure you cut it off at the right frequency. So you're getting usable dialogue and you're not capturing the lower end thump that's playing underneath. There's actually a behind the scenes shot of the club scene in Social Network, where David Fincher does the big tracking shot across the dance floor up to Mark and Justin Timberlake. Anyway, that is a good example of that. You can hear a thumper in the background in that, I believe.

• 59:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Interesting. Cool. Well, Chris, obviously, in addition to the classic songs that are in this movie, they make an interesting, potentially incongruous, but I think kind of brilliant choice to fill in the rest of the songs with a lot of original, very 80s numbers, even though the movie is set in 1963. I love it.

• 1:00:22Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, but like, I kept being like, wait, it's 60s. No, it's the 80s. No, it's 60s. Like-

• 1:00:27Lizzie Bassett?

  The hair is also confusing.

• 1:00:29Chris Winterbauer?

  It is. And even, there's the moment where she and Penny are, they're clearly salsa dancing, but they're for no reason in like, full-length nylons and like, 80s-cut half-thongs. I was like, wait, hold on a second. What's going on?

• 1:00:45Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm completely fine with it.

• 1:00:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, visually, I was completely fine with it, but I was definitely taken out of the moment of hair.

• 1:00:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, some of the iconic original songs that they sprang for include Hungry Eyes, which actually had been written and recorded a few years earlier by the band Frankie and The Knockouts, but it didn't wind up on their album. So Eric Carmen rerecorded it specifically for Dirty Dancing. Might be my favorite song on the soundtrack. I love that song. I think that's actually what's playing during the nylon salsa dancing sequence you're talking about. Yes by Mary Clayton, who you might know as the woman who recorded the famous vocal line in Gimme Shelter. And of course, She's Like the Wind by our very own Patrick Swayze, which I also love. He co-wrote this years earlier, hoping to sell it and shopped it around for multiple other soundtracks that did not want it. So during production,

• 1:01:34Lizzie Bassett?

  he was like, last shot. And he played the demo to Linda Gottlieb and Emile Ardalino, who loved it. Of course, ended up being a pretty huge hit for him.

• 1:01:42Chris Winterbauer?

  I love that he's like Hawk in CDs, like a guy on Fifth Avenue, just on his set of his own movie.

• 1:01:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Good for him. And of course, there is the iconic, I've had the time of my life. Writers Frankie Prevert and John D. Nicola were down to their last dollar and the label that they had been with had shut down. Fun fact, their band was Frankie and The Knockouts, the same ones who had written Hungry Eyes years earlier. But Frankie got a call from the old head of the label who said, there's an opportunity to write a song for Dirty Dancing. And Frankie's reaction was, ah, poor Jimmy's doing porn.

• 1:02:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Fortunately, the X-label had explained, no. He said what the movie was and told them it would need to be a seven-minute-long song. And they were like, OK, whatever. There's no way a seven-minute-long song is ever going to be a single. And they didn't really know what they were writing about. So they just kind of turned something in and didn't think about it again. It was recorded with Bill Medley, AKA Half of the Righteous Brothers, and singer-songwriter Jennifer Warnes. And you know what? They were all wrong. It was an absolutely ginormous hit and took home the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

• 1:02:47Chris Winterbauer?

  It is so fantastically 80s. Just that slap bassline. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like, it just, I feel like it doesn't exist in any other decade. It's amazing.

• 1:03:02Lizzie Bassett?

  I love it.

• 1:03:04Chris Winterbauer?

  It's like, it's great. It's great.

• 1:03:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, you know the bonkers song that Baby's kind of tone-deaf sister sings at the talent show?

• 1:03:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, I love.

• 1:03:14Lizzie Bassett?

  She wrote that.

• 1:03:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Great. She's so good at that terrible performance. It's great.

• 1:03:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Her name is Jane Brucker. She wrote that herself.

• 1:03:23Chris Winterbauer?

  She's, she's very funny in this movie.

• 1:03:25Lizzie Bassett?

  She's very funny. They couldn't get the rights to Some Enchanted Evening, which is what they initially had her singing. And so they were going to cut the sequence of her rehearsing completely unless she could come up with something. And she was like, fine, I'll just write my own song. And she wrote that.

• 1:03:39Chris Winterbauer?

  It's, it's so, that really feels accurate to what you would see at one of these camps.

• 1:03:46Lizzie Bassett?

  It's like one of my favorite parts in the entire movie.

• 1:03:48Chris Winterbauer?

  So funny.

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• 1:04:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, Chris, there was one plotline that the studio and a potential advertiser fought very hard to cut. What do you think it was?

• 1:04:39Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm guessing it's the schmishmorsion.

• 1:04:41Lizzie Bassett?

  It's the schmishmorsion. Shortly before the movie was set to come out, the studio was very excited to find out that they'd potentially nabbed a national sponsor in the form of a pimple cream. And they wanted to put the pimple cream on every poster, Chris. There was just one problem.

• 1:04:55Chris Winterbauer?

  What?

• 1:04:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:04:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Wait, hold on.

• 1:04:58Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:04:58Chris Winterbauer?

  What?

• 1:04:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Just, just go with it. Yeah, somehow there was gonna be like Patrick Swayze, Jennifer Grey, and just a tube of like Clearasil or whatever it was on the side.

• 1:05:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Great.

• 1:05:09Lizzie Bassett?

  I guess that's how they did brand integrations in the 80s. But they wanted them to lose the entire abortion, which is, again, kind of the catalyst for a lot of the action in the movie.

• 1:05:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Kind of. It's the entire catalyst for her relationship forming with the underclass, so to speak, of the camp that they're attending.

• 1:05:27Lizzie Bassett?

  The studio and producers really pushed for this because up to this point, everyone thought the movie was gonna be a huge flop. Apparently, they had thought that they could really benefit from a more experienced producer screening The Rough Cut at some point. And so they got ahold of Aaron Russo, who was behind hits like Trading Places and The Rose. They sat there, they watched him watch The Rough Cut. At the end, he turned around, looked past the creative team, at their Vestron bosses, and told them to burn the negatives and take the insurance. So when this pimple cream came along and they asked to cut the abortion, they were like, cut it, cut it!

• 1:06:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, they-

• 1:06:03Lizzie Bassett?

  You can't.

• 1:06:04Chris Winterbauer?

  No, no, no, no. But they cut around it in the sense that, and I don't know, I guess my point is, I don't know how it was intended to originally be presented versus how it ended up, but I do think it's very delicately played.

• 1:06:15Lizzie Bassett?

  That's intentional.

• 1:06:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. It's not forced. It actually feels period appropriate in the sense that it's not openly discussed.

• 1:06:22Lizzie Bassett?

  While Bergstein was able to explain that it would be literally impossible to remove the abortion plotline, since, again, the entire movie hinges on it, she said, quote, "My sense is if you're gonna put something like this in, you better rhythm it so precisely into the plot that when the day comes, when they ask you to take it out, you can't without the movie falling apart. Because if it can be taken out, it will be." And yes, I think the way that she worked it in was very intentional, to your point. I don't think they cut any of what was in there. In fact, many people did question why she included the abortion in the movie at all and viewed the treatment of abortion in the film as stigmatizing, but she was trying to do the exact opposite. She was reminding people of what the world looked like before abortions were safe and legal. And at one point, when asked why she felt

• 1:07:05Lizzie Bassett?

  she needed to do that, she said, quote, "Well, I don't know that we will always have Roe v. Wade."

• 1:07:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Precious.

• 1:07:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I also think, you know, regardless of your stance on abortion, what it does is it very clearly, concisely, and dramatically establishes the delta between her and somebody that works at this camp.

• 1:07:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Not only in terms of access to medical attention, but access to discreet medical attention and access to easy financing, you know, for something necessary. Because the dirty secret of abortion has always been, when made illegal, it becomes inaccessible to middle-class and lower-middle-class people and remains accessible to upper-class people.

• 1:07:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. And or it becomes extremely unsafe for people who are not able to...

• 1:07:56Chris Winterbauer?

  That's my point. A safe abortion becomes inaccessible to anybody without means, and it remains just something to be swept under the rug, but something that still happens amongst people with means, of which she is one in this movie.

• 1:08:08Lizzie Bassett?

  And I think also, she does a really great job of working it into baby's character development in terms of like, she does not understand, she thinks she's doing the right thing, she doesn't understand, you know, what the consequences of this are potentially, she doesn't really understand what it's going to do to her relationship with her father. I think it's handled really well.

• 1:08:26Chris Winterbauer?

  And it shows too, you know, it's a good moment for his character when he's able to perform the role of physician and put his biases aside in order to deal with the patient, which is a good moment, even though he's dismissive of Patrick Swayze, obviously.

• 1:08:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, I want to step in and say, I know that Jerry Orbach's character in that moment is supposed to be being a jerk, but at the same time, he thinks that this man might be sleeping with his daughter and may have gotten this woman pregnant and gotten her a horrible and dangerous abortion. So I'm kind of team Jerry Orbach.

• 1:08:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And even if it was just that he was sleeping with his daughter, this is a 35-year-old man sleeping with his 17-year-old daughter.

• 1:09:04Lizzie Bassett?

  He's supposed to be in his twenties, but yes, yes.

• 1:09:08Chris Winterbauer?

  This is a 47-year-old man.

• 1:09:11Chris Winterbauer?

  This is Jerry Orbach's cousin. But I, I do also think one of the reasons that it works so well narratively is obviously that Jennifer Grey, and what I like about it is that it makes her point of entry with this group of people believable because she is approaching another woman dealing with a quote, "woman's problem." And she's uniquely able to understand, empathize, and then help her in this situation, which allows, I think I really like that she first, at first thinks, obviously Swayze's a cad, but then we learn that it was Bobby, is that his?

• 1:09:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Robbie.

• 1:09:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Robbie, Robbie?

• 1:09:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:09:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Max Kanter, I think is that actor? Yeah, also died tragically young.

• 1:09:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:09:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Anywho, I think it works really well narratively as a catalyst.

• 1:09:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, Dirty Dancing premiered August 21st, 1987, and critics were, I think, pretty surprisingly lukewarm on it, with Variety calling it, quote, "skin-deep but inoffensive", and Roger Ebert saying it was a, quote, "tired and relentlessly predictable story of love between kids from different backgrounds." Again, Roger, these kids are 26 and 34. But it turns out it didn't matter what critics thought because it was a smash success. On, again, somewhere around a $5 million budget, I've seen 4.5, I've seen 6, we're gonna say 5, it pulled in over $63 million in its initial theatrical run, and it has gone on to make over $214 million through re-releases over the years.

• 1:10:39Lizzie Bassett?

  This thing raked in the cash.

• 1:10:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, I'm sure it made a boatload of money on VHS.

• 1:10:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it was one of the top VHS rentals.

• 1:10:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Which was Vestron's bread and butter.

• 1:10:53Lizzie Bassett?

  So Dirty Dancing catapulted Patrick Swayze to stardom, leading to a string of roles in films like Roadhouse, Next of Kin, Ghost, Point Break, and more. As we said, Emile Ardalino went on to direct a few more feature films, including 1993's Sister Act, but he did tragically pass away from AIDS the same year. Vestron Video never matched the success of Dirty Dancing, though they produced many more seemingly terrible, low-budget films, and they went bankrupt in 1991. Lastly, Chris, I want to end by talking about Miss Jennifer Grey. So, on August 5th, 1987, just a few days before Dirty Dancing's big premiere, Jennifer and her then-boyfriend Matthew Broderick were vacationing in Ireland. Broderick was driving, there had just been a torrential downpour,

• 1:11:37Lizzie Bassett?

  and at around 3:00 PM local time, he accidentally swerved into the other lane. They collided head-on with another car, breaking Broderick's leg and knocking him unconscious, and injuring ligaments in Grey's neck that would eventually require spinal surgery. Most tragically, in the accident, Broderick had killed a mother and daughter in the other car, Margaret Daugherty and Anne Gallagher. It was something neither Broderick nor Grey ever fully recovered from mentally, and they would go on to end their relationship a year later. As the LA Times cruelly put it in their headline on September 9th, 1987, "Jennifer Grey got the best reviews of her life for the film Dirty Dancing, a current box office hit. However, in a cruel twist of fate, she's getting more news coverage because of a Northern Ireland car accident last month that killed two people."

• 1:12:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Meanwhile, Swayze was being offered the kinds of roles he'd always dreamed of, but Jennifer Grey swiftly discovered there was still not, quote, "a surplus of parts for actresses who looked like her." She was told explicitly that her nose in particular was, quote, "a problem", and apparently prominent plastic surgeons were telling her she should have had a nose job prior to Dirty Dancing. Those surgeons are idiots, who I think misunderstood the entire appeal of Dirty Dancing. And it's worth noting that her nose did not bother her, it just seemed to bother other people an awful lot. So she caved and underwent a rhinoplasty, and then a second surgery to correct an irregularity in the first one. But instead of getting all the leading roles she'd been promised, she became the butt of every joke. Photographers didn't recognize her, and she told the New York Times,

• 1:13:05Lizzie Bassett?

  quote, "Being misunderstood on a global stage was very painful. Overnight, I lose my identity and my career." And sadly, that is kind of true. I mean, she went on to do plenty of other things. She had some guest starring roles in some prominent sitcoms, but she really never recovered from this. And I think it's tragic that she felt like she had to change her face for something that didn't bother her.

• 1:13:27Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. The timing of this, what year did she get her surgery?

• 1:13:33Lizzie Bassett?

  It's not long after this at all. Everything says 87. I don't know if it was actually in 1987, but she definitely had the first one like very shortly thereafter. I think within a year.

• 1:13:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Interesting. Yeah. What's funny is, I always liked her nose. She looks different. We're so used to plastic surgery now that I think it's hard to look back and understand that it felt like a massive difference back then. I mean, if you look at the evolution of the Kardashians, for example.

• 1:14:02Lizzie Bassett?

  They look totally different.

• 1:14:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Many male stars now, you know, too. I mean, there have even been recent photos of Tom Cruise that people say he looks, quote, unrecognizable, right?

• 1:14:10Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that though, that with the people that we see now, they tend to do it slowly over a period of time. So it's a bit easier to adjust to. I do think this happened so quickly. I mean, you know, she had two in pretty quick succession. And also, the thing that is so difficult is like, she had a very specific look. And I do think that her nose was a big part of that. I mean, she's beautiful. She's still beautiful, obviously. It's no shame on anybody who wants to get a nose job or plastic surgery. What makes me sad is it doesn't sound like she wanted it. And she was doing it because she was being told, this is the way that your career will expand. You know, your problem is your nose. And it wasn't.

• 1:14:50Chris Winterbauer?

  No. And, you know, it really reminds me of the conversation around Amy Lou Wood in The White Lotus from this recent season, season three, who plays Chelsea. There's been a big conversation around her teeth. She has very prominent teeth. Again, very striking, fantastic actress. Oh, my God, she's just so appealing in that show. And it really kind of brings two thoughts to mind for me. One, if anybody tells you that you have a flaw, you need to understand that the flip side of that is your flaws are your style.

• 1:15:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:15:20Chris Winterbauer?

  And that's true. Of anything that you make, right? Your flaws are what actually make what you're doing unique. Wes Anderson's relial on like center punch framing and the 40 millimeter anamorphic lens could be considered flaws. Like those are his style. So her nose is her style. Now, whether or not that's in style, her agent, for example, I'm sure is one of the people giving her this advice is thinking, I could sell you a lot easier if you just had a more normal looking nose, right? In their mind.

• 1:15:48Lizzie Bassett?

  You can't though.

• 1:15:49Chris Winterbauer?

  But no, they're wrong, is my point. They're thinking about their short term success, not the long term success of the individual. And so I think if you're going into entertainment in any way, if you want to be any type of role, especially above the line, always remember that you're playing a long game and the people who are supposedly representing you and have your best interests at heart are also playing a long game in which you are a short term player.

• 1:16:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:16:16Chris Winterbauer?

  And so as a result, you're going to be very myopically represented by the people around you.

• 1:16:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, and I think also, you know, she just had this really earth shattering experience with that car accident, which like, that is not something that you're going to get over swiftly, if at all.

• 1:16:30Chris Winterbauer?

  No, and we need to talk, we'll talk about that when we cover Matthew Broderick, because that's, it's a very unusual incident. I don't know enough about it to speak intelligently here, but my understanding is he pretty much escaped any form of justice in that instance.

• 1:16:45Lizzie Bassett?

  He did. I think he paid like a hundred and 75 dollar a pound fine.

• 1:16:50Chris Winterbauer?

  It was not a great optic. It was obviously a horrifying tragedy. There, I get the sense there was a kind of a sense that like.

• 1:16:57Lizzie Bassett?

  He wasn't drunk. It truly was an accident.

• 1:16:59Chris Winterbauer?

  No, no, no, I'm not saying he was. It was an accident.

• 1:17:01Lizzie Bassett?

  But, but yes.

• 1:17:02Chris Winterbauer?

  But I'm just saying, I think there was a sense that like the celebrity element had allowed him to escape a little bit. The consequences did not apply to him.

• 1:17:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:17:11Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think she caught some of that as well.

• 1:17:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's what that LA Times article was pointing out that like, this is what's making the headlines about her, not what was supposed to be her, you know, big break. And I think she's wonderful. And I am sad that we didn't get more Jennifer Grey and an expansion of Jennifer Grey beyond this in a way that we could have.

• 1:17:30Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 1:17:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, that wraps it up, Chris. What went right?

• 1:17:35Chris Winterbauer?

  There are a lot of things that went right with this film for me, Lizzie. I just, if it'll allow me a brief detour, how it relates to my family. So the scene where she walks in, right, and she sees the Dirty Dancing happening for the first time. So, growing up, my mom's Puerto Rican, and she and her family would always throw a New Year's party, oftentimes at either my aunt's house in Texas or in Seattle. And it was always like, there was my mom's Latin family, their big family, and then it was all just the gringos, like all the, which I was kind of one foot in, one foot out. And eventually, people would start dancing, right? And they would play, they would play merengue, they would do, which is like the easiest dance to do if you're white, like me. And then they would do, like, so they would do salsa. And I can like kind of salsa, but then my mom and her, so it's my mom, her sister,

• 1:18:18Chris Winterbauer?

  and two brothers, and they would pair off and salsa dance, and they're like legit good. Oh, wow. My mom and her sister did flamenco, like, and my uncles are legit good dancers. And they look like Swayze and Penny in Dirty Dancing. And I remember, I will remember till the day I die, I'm in high school, and my friend turns to me, he goes, "Dude, why is your mom dancing with her brother like that?" And he was like so weirded out by the cultural clash of seeing like such an intense, from his perspective, sexual dance between like these two siblings. But I always love in Dirty Dancing, she thinks he and Penny, right, have this romantic relationship, but it's obviously, it's more of a sibling relationship, and it always reminds me of my, my mom. Anyway, okay. Oh.

• 1:19:02Chris Winterbauer?

  I will give my what went right to, I gotta give it to Patrick Swayze. I know, he's so good. He's so good in this movie. It's kind of the perfect role for him because you kind of need a jack of all, I don't know, he was obviously a professional dancer, but he is. He's also a really good actor. He is a good actor, but he's not, he's not the best actor, you know what I'm saying? And he, but he, and he wasn't the best dancer necessarily, in the sense that he was no longer doing professional shows because of his knee. But this movie was such, he's so good at dancing, and then he's definitely qualified for the material dramatically. And so as a result, he just shines. And I think he does too in Point Break and Roadhouse, movies where he gets to show off his physicality.

• 1:19:45Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it's the sincerity.

• 1:19:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, very sincere, very sincere. And he doesn't have to play above it all. He's very genuine. He's very angsty in certain moments. And so I'll give it to Patrick Swayze, who I also, I also think we lost. I know he had a good run in the early 90s, but his, his career.

• 1:20:00Lizzie Bassett?

  No, we lost him way too soon.

• 1:20:02Chris Winterbauer?

  And his career never did quite hit the highs that you might expect after Ghost, which was the highest grossing film of the year at the year that it came out.

• 1:20:09Lizzie Bassett?

  I love Ghost.

• 1:20:10Chris Winterbauer?

  So I'll give mine to Patrick Swayze, who I quite enjoy in this film.

• 1:20:13Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna give it to the crew who really understood how to capture dance on film. From Emile Ardalino to Kenny Ortega and Miranda Garrison to Girish Vargava. I think they might not have been obvious choices for a blockbuster feature film, but they truly understood how to translate the story via dance and movement. And Patrick Swayze is wonderful. Jennifer Grey is wonderful. I don't think this movie would have been that special without this below the line crew that was really able to do this and understood how to capture the dance and the musicality on screen. So that's my what went right for this one. But I love Patrick. I love Jennifer Grey and I love this movie. I think it's great.

• 1:20:57Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a very fun film. Thank you, Lizzie, for guiding us through the dirty, dirty annals of dirty dancing. Of course, we have to let you know what's coming up next. Donnie Darko, the cinematic equivalent of Wells for Boys, an incredible SNL skit, if you've never seen it. A favorite film of mine. I'm really excited to talk about it. It was also the result of a poll that we ran on our Patreon, which brings me to the fact that there are four easy ways for you guys to support this podcast. If you are enjoying What Went Wrong, we appreciate you and we would love it if you could help us spread the word about this show.

• 1:21:37Chris Winterbauer?

  The easiest thing to do is back somebody into a corner, friend, family, stranger, and tell them to give our show a listen. Two, with hardly any more effort, you can just hit subscribe or follow on whichever podcast platform you are listening to this show on, be it Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or whatever bespoke service that you prefer. Three, leave us a rating and review on one of those platforms. And four, you can join our Patreon. Patreon is a platform that connects creators like us with fans like you, gives you a more direct line to communicate with us, as well as bonus material. For $1, you can vote on upcoming episodes. We just had a really fun James Bond poll, and we got a bunch more coming this summer.

• 1:22:21Chris Winterbauer?

  For $5, you can get an ad-free RSS feed. So if you really don't like the ads in this podcast, which we completely understand, for $5 a month, you never have to listen to those again. Or for $50, you can get a Full Stop shout-out, like we're about to do in just a moment. But I also wanted to remind you, folks, that there's also a free tier. We post a bunch of stuff to the public page of our Patreon. We did so with our Snow White episode. I posted a little article about Donnie Darko. So if you'd just like to hang out and kind of see what free material comes around, by all means, come to Patreon. That's patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast. No need to spend a dollar. I know budgets are tight right now. Which is why we are so deeply appreciative of our Full Stop members. David, cue the music.

• 1:23:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Casey Boogie Simmons, Scary Carrie, The Provost Family, where the Os sound like Os, Zach Everton, Galen, David Friskelanti, Adam Moffett, Film It Yourself, Chris Zaka, Kate Elrington, MXodia, CGraceB, Jen Mostromarino, Christopher Elner, Blaze Ambrose, Jerome Wilkinson, Lauren F., Lance Stater, Nate the Knife, Lena, Half Gray Hound, Lauren Dunn, Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling, Ashley Renee, Richard Sanchez, Jake Kellen,

• 1:23:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Andrew McFagelbagel, Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter, Ellen Singleton.

• 1:23:54Chris Winterbauer?

  JJ Rapido, Jewishri Samant, Sadie, Just Sadie, Brian Donahue, Adrian Pang Korea, Chris Leal, Kathleen Olson, Brooke, Steve Winterbauer, Don Scheible, George Kay, Rosemary Southward, Tom Kristin, Jason Frankel, Solman Chanani, Michael McGrath, Lon Relad, and of course, Lydia Howes. Thank you all so much for your continued support of this podcast. We truly could not do it without you. And of course, that goes for all of our dedicated patrons. We appreciate you.

• 1:24:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Thank you so much for those Full Stop shout outs, Chris, and thank you Full Stop supporters. There is of course, one other way that you all can help support us, and that is by using some of the codes that we share through our sponsors for this show. I totally understand that hearing ads is not everyone's favorite thing. However, it really does help us. It helps us stay independent, which is something that's important to us. It helps us keep bringing you this content and hopefully bring you this content more frequently very soon. So if you feel like it, take yourself on a little shopping spree. And that's it for us this week. We'll see you back in two weeks. Bye.

• 1:25:19Speaker 05

  Go to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast to support What Went Wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom Podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman. Research for this episode was provided by Sarah Bound with additional editing from Karen Krupsov.