good evening everyone and welcome it's around
six o'clock so i think we'll get started thanks for joining tonight my name is lauren gilbert i
am the senior manager for public services at the center for jewish history if you joined a little
early you saw a slideshow of some upcoming events you can sign up for any of those at the calendar
on our website which is cjh.org if you'd like to enable the automated live captions on your screen
just click on the three dots on the lower right click liv
e transcript and then enable auto
transcription the chat function is disabled for participants so please put your questions in the
q & a box we will get to questions at the end as many as we have time for but you can type them in
as we go along today's program should be finished it was in about an hour and it is being recorded
and will be available on the center's web page and youtube page within a few weeks if you registered
for this event you'll receive an email with a link to the recordi
ng all right so let's get into
tonight's program let me introduce eleanor eleanor if you'd like to turn on your video eleanor bergstein is a novelist screenwriter
producer and director her stories have been published in national magazines ranging from
transatlantic review to red book and cosmopolitan her first novel advancing paul newman about
women in politics in the 1960s was published by the viking press and her first movie script was
it's my turn starring jill clayburgh and michael doug
las her second novel ex-lover about sexual
obsession was published by random house she has worked on a variety of film projects including
the final script revision of sister act she then wrote and directed let it be me which starred
campbell scott jennifer beals leslie caron and patrick stewart her most famous project was one of
the most successful independent films of all time dirty dancing the unique continuing response to
the story all around the world persuaded her that what audiences r
eally wanted was a chance to
be more involved in the story as it happened this led her to reimagine dirty dancing as a
stage event one that combined dance and story and music in a new way it was also her chance to
write additional scenes not in the movie which expand the characters as well as add songs she
had wanted for the movie and been unable to obtain it has played around the world in 22 countries and
34 productions to phenomenal success in places as diverse as holland south africa swe
den australia
new zealand germany hong kong singapore italy france denmark and mexico breaking records in many
of them through her company magic hour productions she has just completed a memoir and is preparing a
tv series based on her first novel advancing paul newman and is at work on a new stage musical set
in london in the late 1960s so thank you very much for joining us today eleanor hi so i'm going to
start with a question that you probably get asked a lot i realize the film is fictio
n not your life
story despite some superficial similarities just how closely does it mimic your life experience
well it uses can you hear me is this is this one okay i'm sorry i'm so unsure about how to
do all this technology it uses a lot of things from my life but it's not the story of my life
my father was a doctor i went to the catskills with my parents as a little girl but i was 10
and 11 and 12 as you see in those photographs and um i love to dance politics was very important
to me i
was a combination of the two sisters i very much wanted to change the world and i
thought if you reached out your hands you could but i wanted to do it in a matched sweater set
so i'm a kind of combination of the two sisters that's great so how accurate do you feel
the depiction was of the time period we worked very hard on that and i think it
was good i i i should say i was one of the co-producers of the movie so i was there at every
second from the casting or through the final sound mixi
ng so uh anything that's terrible i have to
take responsibility for i didn't have bad people doing what i didn't want uh having just re-watched
the film a few days ago i was really struck by the amount of social commentary and class issues that
you put into the film was that important to you oh yeah it was totally important and what happened
was is that uh people said that what is what is very interesting to me now is at the time people
said what are you putting abortion in for roe versus w
ade's been here for years remember we made
this in uh let's see in 89 about uh 63 and i said well you never know and they said uh and why are
you putting all the stuff in about uh vietnam it's over and i said well you know young men may be
sent off to fight in another place another time and one of the other things was is why do
you have-- the stage play has much more of this but it was the summer of martin luther
king's i have a dream speech and they said why is that stuff in and of course
as the show
is going around now we have black lives matter marches every place so what makes me not
happy at all is all the things that i was told had been laid to rest why was i inserting
it in this film have come back to haunt us and that can only make me sad yeah so um was there
anything that the filmmakers wanted removed that you know that you felt was important to keep in
well while it was going on they were concerned that more that they didn't want me to spend
so much money on the mu
sic it was more things like that you know do you really need these
songs couldn't you have sound alike but uh right before it came out the studio called me and
said oh we've just gotten some blow back from the catholic church so we'll give you the money to
go into the editing room and take the abortion out and i i guess i had always known this day was
going to come so i said i would be so happy to but uh the fact is it's the reason for the whole
story if we don't have it uh baby doesn't wan
t to dance with johnny uh there's no way they fall
in love there's no way that he is uh fired so i really can't and they said oh too bad we should
have seen it earlier and of course on the page it takes very little space it's just the
reason for everything and what i always tell um screenwriters or everyone if you're going to write
something that means a great deal to you in terms of moral or ethical or social or political reasons
make sure that it's very completely necessarily put into the
plot because otherwise the day will
come and it will come i sound like the godfather don't I but when when it comes then you can
say i'd be so happy to take it after okay and did you have trouble getting the film made oh
yeah we a long long long time before anybody was accepted it was turned down by every studio
it was the time of uh flashdance footloose saturday night fever so we thought okay but
all the studios turned out to be very lucky because all the studios that made those films
ha
ted this and turned it down and had they made it they would have taken out the reasons that
i made it which was all this historical and social and political subjects uh because all
those films were fantasies you know girl works as a mother uh you know they they had no real
relation to the real world and my concern is that uh i didn't want to make a black and white
documentary about what was going on in the world i think you can with there are six social
classes in this there are so many thi
ngs going on but if you make a film that has wonderful
music and dancing and lovely actors and true love uh incidentally some of the other
things will come through and i think if you do make the black and white uh documentary which
is very very important most people who see it will have agreed with you in advance so was it true
that some of the studios rejected it for being too girly like there were a lot of really macho
male films that were blockbusters at that time um so do you think i me
an there aren't a lot of
films that tackle abortion now do you think you could have gotten it made now well actually there
are a lot of films to talk about abortion now or or in a different way it's interesting
about i don't know it was about five or six years ago someone came to me and to talk
about abortion i think it was vanity fair some big magazine and i said oh well ours was just the
first film but there have been so many since then and he said oh what and i thought about them
and th
e fact is there have been a lot of them but in the end the girl makes the decision
not to have the abortion and has the baby and has a happy life on central park west
with her true love so actually there haven't been a lot of films about abortion since then
right but it happened but at the end she said right so they're not really about abortion
because it doesn't happen yeah exactly yes um so how-- it's really about illegal abortion and
about all the pain and terror um so how involved were
you in the casting oh everything i was there
at every every casting session as i said i was one of the producers so i was every place and and
i think legally of course you have as the writer you have no rights and as the co-producer you
have even fewer but if you are there all the time and you have colleagues who want to do what
you wanted to do you pretty well get what you want um and i know that it wasn't actually
filmed in the catskills it was filmed in in virginia in north carolina what
was
that process like well we didn't have uh uh we didn't have we couldn't afford the
catskills because no place would uh could afford to close the hotel and let us take it we
had very little money we were making it on a tiny budget so we looked in right to work states that
mean states where you didn't have to use union crews and things we could save money and so
we went and as i was going with my crew they would say eleanor do these look like the catskill
mountains and honestly i had no
idea when i was there i was looking at boys i had no idea what the
moutains looked like i was so embarrassed i would say things like yeah yeah i think it does or if
you think nobody noticed was interesting because now those places are having a dirty dancing
weekends and things like that nobody wanted us so campbell north carolina virginia was very elegant
uh uh very um how shall i put it uh a rather uh certainly not a jewish resort none of them
were and so i'm trying to think of the most th
e kindest words to put on it but and i remember
they said when we agreed to stay there just for a few weeks they said tell us where you're going
to be on the property so maybe we'll come and visit and i thought oh gosh you don't know we're
going to be every place you won't be able to get away from us for half a second so when and
and the second place so i think two stories one is the second place uh on uh north carolina
we told them on the contracts that the name of the film was dancing not
dirty dancing and the
last night they gave us uh sweatshirts as a gift and it said in red letters it looked like the
devil's created said dirty dancing last day we went into town to all get moccasins or
whatever to bring home to our families and the only piece of clean clothing we had was this
new sweatshirt so suddenly we all came in these black sweatshirts with red devils writing saying
dirty dancing and it was so terrible it was as if the devil had suddenly appeared to town because
the
y'd liked us they thought we were making this movie called dancing and the first movie
in the very elegant north carolina east virginia place they had in the contract that
they would decide at the end whether or not uh they would put their name at the end saying thanks
to and they came to one of the later screenings of the film and by that time everybody hated the film
uh the exhibitors hated it the uh the distributors hated it i would sit in the back of the room where
they had their cigars
and they talked about how awful it was and they thought it was going to go
right into video and everyone no one had a decent word to say about the film that you saw a few
weeks ago and it isn't that we then changed it but uh emile the director and i were just so desperate
and when the people from north uh virginia came we wanted somebody to say something nice so they came
in three-piece suits and we came toward them when it was over and we wanted something nice we wanted
it made no differe
nce to us if they use their name on it or not we wanted something and so we i
remember walking up to them and they said well uh that baby took her clothes off too much and
she was fresh to her daddy but then she was sorry so we guess we'll leave our name on the film and
we were so happy because we thought at least we've gotten one positive thing from this whole thing
now both uh mountain lake and uh lake moore had dirty dancing weekends where you pay a fortune to
leave your car there and go
through all the places so i i mean the people were nice i like them but
it's very confusing to me to see what's happening so why do you think everyone got it so wrong
about the film the i mean the initial viewers the producers and the studios you know you know it's
very interesting the audiences got it right away it's middle men who for any of you out there
writing books making films uh doing plays the middlemen are the hardest uh those
audiences within the um uh within the first show we w
ere okay and it was really funny you know
what we we my husband wrote the kellerman's anthem you know kellerman's come to me and we we thought
that it was going to be in theaters only for about three days and so we were supposed to go to venice
then but we didn't because we wanted to have the experience of it in the theater so we went to
almost every show just to see it on a big screen and we uh the second day we were there and
we were behind a whole row of young women uh actually young afr
o-american women very elegant
and they were singing the words to the kellerman's anthem you know i mentioned and i and my husband
started poking me saying he's a poet a professor at princeton and he's saying listen to that
listen to that and i thought what a jerk and i said to him yeah they're very nice words
honey because i thought what how stupid is it we walked out he said did you hear they knew all
the words and i said yeah yeah yeah and he said no for them to know those words it's the
second day
they already had to see the film at least three times and that's what happened people saw the film
walked out and went right back in and saw it again and uh something that we didn't know because you
know we weren't those kind of professionals you know it was a friday night show that did exit
polls and the biggest exit poll that made them we went to one theater and an usher came over
and she said oh i'm so sorry we had some one guy who hated the film and when they did the exit
po
lls he button-holed them and told them how awful the film was so i thought oh here it goes
and that friday night we were watching and they said exit polls for dirty dancing and i put my
head under the covers and my husband pulled it out and he said listen but the big fact which
we didn't know until later was yes nine out of 10 people liked it and 9 out of 10 people said
they would recommend it to their friends but the real item which was astounding was is that uh 10
out of 10 people said th
ey would go see it again and that's what happened people went right back in
and saw it again so it went on and on and no one anticipated that at least of all us and we just we
just kept calling each other saying and the first week after the first week the numbers always go
down and when they went up i called the studio and i said look look look and they said they must have
counted wrong so there was nobody who believed in this but and even we who made it didn't we just
had done what we want
ed yeah um you mentioned to me in an earlier conversation that there are
a lot of misconceptions about the making of the film so do you know where these stories came
from and do you want to dispel any of these myths patrick and jennifer got along fine uh you know
uh it was hard because we had no money it rained a lot the seasons changed so we had to paint the
leaves green because they were turning so that's true yeah that was true but that happens on almost
any low budget film uh but my col
leagues were absolutely wonderful uh one of one of the lovelier
things that happened the way at the time it wasn't was is that uh the studio called me and they
said do you want to hear something really crazy sit down and i said okay i'm sitting down and they
said the new york times wants to do an article on the movie before it comes out and you'll never
guess who they want to interview they want to interview you isn't that the stupidest thing
you've ever heard and i said you know and they s
aid uh we tried to get them to interview somebody
else but they said no they would see eleanor they would just interview you so my husband and i
ran out and bought an air conditioner because we didn't have an air conditioned apartment and
actually i remember it and you can't return it and it was expensive and the reporter walked in the
man named samuel friedman who i love to this day and he said uh it's too noisy would you turn
it off and i remember thinking oh seventy-five dollars oh what
are we gonna do and he said uh and
though they said he probably he's an expert on the music and history of the period he probably wants
to talk to you about all the mistakes in the film this is the studio and i said well actually
there aren't any mistakes in the film and there are a lot of mistakes of artistic execution
we did our best but certainly in terms of politics and particulars and what happened to
it i was very very very scrupulous about this and he walked in and said there are no
mistakes in
the movie and he had actually wanted to talk to me because he thought it was a very serious uh
social and political subtext to this movie and the poor writer because they turned
it into this rather stupid teenage movie so he wanted to give me a chance to
explain to the new york times what i had meant and at that moment you just want so badly
to say everything bad is everybody else and everything good is me but it really was not true
because my colleagues were there just to do w
hat i wanted so i had to explain that i'd been one
of the producers that everything was the way i wanted and that the music and the love story and
the plot were all for me uh what i had intended and he was a very good reporter i i don't believe
i made him like the movie any more than he did because you can't do that but he wrote a very
very careful article explaining exactly what i had had in mind that was on the front page of
the entertainment section of the new york times and the studio w
as so astounded by this that
they sent a thousand copies across the country and this is why why you've seen the movie now
because they were pitching it up until then as a teenage movie they were going to the malls and
a movie never goes up when this article went out the first weekend we got an adult audience
and from an adult audience you can go down to teenagers whatever but if you start pitching
it for 14 year olds i'm never going to go further than that so i even though he didn't
really
like the movie he did a fair job and he was and that that it's the little things that
get you over the hump suddenly and you know we had a lot of bad breaks but that was such a good
break and i think that's why we had a chance to find our audience um in what way if any would
you describe it as a jewish film sort of just uh beyond the obvious the family is apparently
jewish and it's a catskills resort well i was very concerned about that i mean for because i had gone
to grossingers with my
parents as a little girl so i was very concerned that we had we had a texas
crew i was very concerned that we never had milk and meat on the on the table at the same time
uh we had because we all our extras came from north carolina we went to local temples so that
we would have somewhat jewish faces and then it turned out when we'd scheduled that we hadn't seen
but we had the big finale dance on yom kippur and that was so terrible there was nothing we could do
it was scheduled that way and
we went and begged the people to come back and then my cast which was
my crew which was really trying to help them was very nice when they came and handed them little
wrapped ham sandwiches i'll never forget i said oh so then they were so upset that when they were so
apologetic when they came back next time uh they uh they made a shrimp curry and i said no no no so
by that time i i got the whole crew together and i explained that i really couldn't have any mistakes
in it and was very very c
areful though they had really meant so well and then i remember at some
point in the scene in the kitchen where penny is crying somebody opened a cabinet and said look
eleanor and you opened the cabinet and there were box after box after box of matzah and they said
look jewish food and i said oh no this is august so we kept the doors closed if you look at
that scene you will see the doors never open so i tried to get the details right
if you know what you're looking for you will see from th
e name you will see from
what's going on uh um i mean for me it also had to do with uh uh doctors and there's more about this
in the stage play but but but that that generation of jewish doctors and that generation of jewish
people who felt that they were-- it was 63 they had just come out of the holocaust and they
felt the next thing that you did was help the uh uh the negroes then to see that uh they could
have their help and that was very important the catskills were the only place in th
e country
where blacks and jews swam in the same swimming pool together and it was very important to me
that i put those kinds of things in and you understood what was going on there and what they
did and a very important scene for me is that uh when penny has her abortion baby comes and wakes
her father up and unhesitatingly he grabs his bag and runs across this forbidden transgressive
space to take care of her now what i say in the film that what you do and don't see is clearer
in the st
age play is that he was risking losing his medical license jail time uh uh an enormous
fine and he didn't hesitate and that was that generation of uh of doctors and professionals who
uh just had a very strong ethical basis for what they did and i i've always associated that with
you know jewish doctors and jewish professionals um so switching gears a little bit tell us about
your struggle to get the music of your choice into the film and why you thought that was so important
oh well you kno
w i i the steps were my steps from dancing in junior-- i mean we had a wonderful
choreographer kenny but they they were based on the kind of dancing i did as a little girl in
brooklyn and uh the music was based on my old 45s so i had taken out all my old 45's when i say
that to my assistants they say 45 78 what are you talking about they don't know what i'm talking
about but i got out all my records and then i wanted to uh uh use them and uh that was okay
for a while because i mean they tho
ught the movie was such a piece of junk that it kind of didn't
matter no but nobody questioned me at first toward the end when we were putting
the music in and we had put the music in while we were shooting the scenes but that was
on a different track where you could take it away they said it's too expensive
these songs cost too much to do and when you would take the music out of
the scene the scene would just go just sync and i said no we have to have the music in and somebody
wanted to u
se the fine young cannibals and i said and we need that music from the sixties and
nobody knew it then the only time that you could hear that music was on something called the
late show so for a dollar you could get 30 songs i mean it was not popular music but it cost a
lot to try to put it in a movie so they said we'll do sound alikes and what it sound alike
is a cover band does it and i didn't want any of them i wanted the original movie and i music
and i just whined and complained and yo
u know moaned and said they were ruining the whole movie
and finally i just wore everybody down with so much irritation that they said okay this is what
we'll do they came in to see me at six o'clock at night when we were closing the studio and
they said okay tomorrow morning at nine come in and we're going to play 10 sound alikes
and 10 originals and if you can get 6 out of 10 we'll give you the originals and if
not you get the sound alikes and shut up and i thought okay that's right when
i came home i tried
to listen but i didn't i had i had originals but i didn't have sound alikes and i thought okay here
the trumpet comes in here's the vibrato but by the time i came in the next morning i didn't know what
i was doing and i thought i was going to lose it all and so they had sound alikes and it really
took me no time because i heard a sound alike and then i heard an original and it was so
clear it isn't where the vibrato comes in or where there's a trumpet because it's the sa
me
on the sound alikes it's that the originals sounded like songs that i loved and the sound
alikes sounded like songs that i used to love so i nailed them all and they gave me the originals
and that was i guess that was where a lot of the small budget for the film must have gone
yeah yeah at the end and i have to say that uh they released the record they released the
record during the summer and the film came out in august they released in july nobody knew
what dirty dancing was nobody bo
ught the record so they they put it in a warehouse when the film
came out people walked out of the film and into a record store remember them and went into a record
store to buy the record but it wasn't around so uh anyway then they retrieved the records
from the record and then we were the number one soundtrack i mean we've sold something
like that 60 million copies of the soundtrack it's been great we outsold michael jackson so
that was that that that was great for me um so why do you thi
nk the film struck such a chord
and has become so ingrained in in pop culture um i you know any given time i'll give you another
answer uh you know anything i hear from anyone i take in and i'm i mean i'm just really grateful
as my husband says if you're not happy with this you better make films on the moon because i
have all over the world most heartfelt audiences and that's really just a pleasure so i can i
can give you reasons and everybody has their own reasons i think everyone has a mo
ment in their
lives when they think if i had walked through this door instead of that everything would have changed
and that's why i think the most important scene is when she says most of all i'm afraid of walking
out of this room and never feeling the rest of my whole life the way i feel when i'm with you so
i think it's a a moment that if you're very young you're just coming to a moment in the middle of
where you're wondering if you missed it a moment later when you're looking back at th
at moment so
i think it's that that's part of it but uh i think it's it's about a time for me when you felt when
baby who was in great courage felt that if you reached out your hand and you were brave enough
you could change the world and make it better and of course it's much more complicated than that
as we know so i think it speaks to that that moment when we all feel there's a moment when
we can make the world better and and how are younger generations finding the film is it like
mothe
rs introducing their kids or oh that's that's such a pleasure because i mean what i mean more
than a pleasure it's a blessing because i i hear and one of the things that happened almost
immediately is that grandparents came with children came with grandchildren all
ages see it together and that i mean i i feel so blessed and lucky about that that's
and right now we have young audiences well what we have is just so interesting because uh we have
well the movie came out 30 years ago and we ha
ve you know 16 17 18 year olds who see it over and
over and over again and i remember being in spain and being interviewed by a young girl and
i suddenly said oh and i said in spanish obviously not very sweetly when we made this
film your parents hadn't yet met and had sex upset or anything but that's true i mean we
have audiences whose parents have never met yet before they made it but it does go on to all
generations and that as i said i'd have to go to the moon not to be grateful for tha
t um you've
alluded a bit to the stage musical so what has it been like to work on that and can you talk
about the reception a little bit oh well that's that's been wonderful first of all because it's
all over the world and i love to travel but it's it's two hours and the movie is 90 minutes so i
could put in so many things about the world about what was happening some of martin luther king's
speeches more songs that we couldn't afford to get uh i i could now afford to use in the stage
pla
y i could put in scenes that i couldn't put in the movie because we didn't have time and uh i
felt really it was interesting because uh studio i mean i get a lot of reader mail so because they
don't know who else to write to so that's why i get it but they're really writing to the movie and
so i i'm just incidentally written to but people uh radio stations all over the world i started
running it in a loop say on a sunday running it at eight in the morning and running until midnight
and they
found to their surprise instead of people you know popping in and out in the course of the
day uh people even if they had the cassette or the dvd or whatever would sit and watch it over and
over and over and over again all day long and just blow off their days and just sit and watch it and
i tried to think that why that was and it wasn't because they thought it was just the best movie
they'd ever seen or they were looking for anything it was because they wanted to be there while it
was hap
pening that something happened to them in their own lives while they were watching it and
if that was true then its natural form would be live theater and i still think its natural
form is live theater and the the show is the audiences at the show every place i mean
from england australia wherever uh hong kong you feel that they are connected with a golden
cord to what's happening on stage and it's it's it's really quite astounding and lovely
so that that's that's warm do you still dance oh
yeah yeah i love to dance yeah dirty dancing
dirty dancing you know uh well this summer we were uh in the hamptons with uh david who's my
choreographer on a lot of things and he has a four-year-old who we taught to do a lot of these
steps so yeah i do any kind of dancing i i love latin dancing i love uh um uh uh yeah i love
rock dancing i love any kind of dancing i don't like disco dancing actually that i don't
like not dancing with a partner i don't like it when you don't know who you're
dancing with you
know what everybody did they were the only floors i didn't want to be on discos, or just everything
else i like um i mentioned in the bio that you just completed a memoir so can you tell us a
little about that yeah i just i just finished it a few months ago because when it
was all done i suddenly realized that you really couldn't do it without also
having an added thing about what's happening now you know it was so i wrote another
part of it which i hadn't planned to and u
h so that's that's all done and now i'm
looking for the perfect editor and the perfect publisher but again it's middlemen i feel i
know from the questions that people ask me that i will find my audience for it i just have to
find the right middleman to get it to the audience okay um maybe we should i see a few questions
uh piling up so maybe we should move on to some audience questions um the first one's
more of a comment but it's a nice one uh please let her know that it's my turn
as one
of my favorite movies of all time oh hey you know that makes me so happy because
i got a letter about a year ago from a woman in milan and she said i didn't know her at all and
she said that she saw that movie and she based her life on it and she would come to new york once
a year and visit all the places in the movie and they had just torn down the mayflower hotel and
she was terribly upset because that was where jill and michael-- and she said how had
i allowed that to happen and i though
t oh what a nice letter so i wrote her back in italian
saying she had given me joy so that way because i i that was the first movie i'd ever written and
i i remember coming to uh the uh uh the studio and the the casting people not the casting the
prop people were there and there was a table of glasses and they said wine glasses and they
said eleanor which kind of glass did you want and i reached out my hand and i touched the glass
and i said this kind and it was the first time anything had
ever come out of my head that i could
hold in my hand and i was so excited that was so wonderful it just it just kind of-- and then
then we had one scene that we shot in yankee stadium and i was so thrilled and i kept saying to
my husband look at this it all came out of my head and he said eleanor yankee stadium did not come
out of your head but there there is a picture of me on home plate and i look like i am sure it
came out of my head i am so full of myself but anyway that was that was g
reat fun um this one's a
comment too to our conversation about films about abortion the only recent film i can think of with
an abortion theme is the film grandma with lily tomlin yes i was thinking of that one as well
yeah um and another comment that uh she thinks the scenery was very well done in terms of looking
like the catskills so if even if you didn't notice eleanor somebody else did um there's a question
about if you were involved with the sequel no i had nothing to do with
any of
them and i have to say the dirty dancing audience for 30 years is really
really really smart because they look at something and it takes them five minutes to say this is
not this is not right and they just go home so i'm always afraid when something comes out that i
had nothing to do with and i don't really think is uh what our film is about i'm always afraid
it will replace the film or change it but instead it just disappears thanks to
our really really really smart audience uh a question
were there other choices for the
lead roles other than swayze orbach etc uh no uh uh patrick i saw patrick and i said i remember
meeting him at the airport when he flew to new york and i said when i wrote this i didn't
know you existed now if you decide not to do it it's very hard for me to think
i'll go ahead and make this movie and uh his people didn't want him to make it
because he was he's a very good actor very very he was a very very serious actor he had a a
very damaged knee he wasn
't going to dance anymore in fact he had no dancing on his
resume and i was talking about the kind of eyes i wanted i wanted very hooded frightening
eyes so that you know you really had to make a a real effort of will and bravery to go after them
and uh we were going through things and emile who come from the world of dance i said okay
those are the eyes i want and he said oh actually he's a joffrey dancer and he turned
it over he said his name is patrick swayze he turned it over there was
nothing on patrick's
resume to indicate that he'd ever danced and emile just happened to know this from this
in the world of modern dance so we contacted patrick he said i'm not dancing anymore uh but
then we talked to a lot and then we brought him to new york and i just said that's that's
it i can't do the movie without him and he's everything i want um question why didn't samuel
friedman like the movie and can you talk about how the leads were chosen well i guess you just spoke
about how
patrick was chosen uh jennifer came and she we had everybody first choose a song and dance
to it when they came in because we wanted to see how people moved and it wasn't that i wanted
professional dancers i wanted somebody who felt the music and jennifer had i think the jackson
fives and songs but when she came in she said her father joel grey was by coincidence in the hallway
and she came in she said uh wish me luck daddy and she just somehow closed the baby space in my mind
and then she
danced the jackson five thing and she was charming and adorable and then she said i know
i can do it better please let me do it again and from that moment on she was the only person i
wanted and i had not she had not been what i had in mind because i had in mind someone i guess
who looked sort of like me who was a skinny little kid with lots of black hair all over the place and
and jennifer is lovely and rounded and blonde so it my idea was to have this little skinny dark
girl um you know
with long legs and long arms but uh jennifer just closed that baby space
in my mind and i never wanted anybody but her uh did jennifer grey have a dance background also
uh some not as much as patrick nothing like that um here's another nice uh comment the film
is powerful provocative and life-changing and its social justice messages are
universal and more compelling than ever um thank you eleanor for your strength for
fighting through the multiple obstacles and for your brilliant vision wel
l thank you so much
um another comment a big piece of the magic is that everything fits nothing seems superfluous
the flow is impeccable and the moment in time is captured not only obviously but with nuance thank
you for the magic so many lovely comments thank you wait wait robin you want to turn the light on
it's getting dark in here sorry um yeah so a lot of these are more just um appreciative uh comments
more than questions my best friend and i were like i'm totally happy with that yeah
my best friend
and i were that target age of 14 in 1987 and we watched dirty dancing over and over and over to
this day if it comes on tv we all call each other and make sure we watch it again thank you for this
wonderful gift to the world well that makes me so happy you know i was in london one day because you
slowly did we realize that more and more people were seeing it and i remember uh we were thinking
i was thinking of bringing the show to london and i went to london and i was in uh b
oots one of
their uh you know uh stores that sell makeup and i said to the girl there um uh do you have you ever
seen the movie dirty dancing and she said oh yeah yeah you know i have two cassettes of it and i
said oh okay uh why do you have two two cassettes of it and she said well because it's uh uh worn
out in different places where i go back to it and the girl at the next counter said oh i have three
and i heard this and i thought oh that's so nice uh there's a request to talk about pat
rick swayze
i mean you did a little bit but is there anything you'd like to add about patrick swayze yeah
i actually would because when when he died i was very concerned because i had the show
going all over and i was very concerned that we not sell tickets on his [...] and i was uh
and the actors in the play who loved patrick and they didn't know him but they loved him they
all wanted to give interviews saying oh i based my performance on him or whatever and i i sent
out uh notices all th
rough the country i think we had something like 15 shows then saying no one
is allowed to give anything but a statement saying the whole cast and crew sent out you know i was
very very very so i was constantly concerned that we not seem to be capitalizing on him i've been
in touch with patrick all the time and he was a very very very loved friend of mine and um so
i didn't give any interviews at all because again i was just so concerned that then somebody
asked me about the show or somethin
g so i was so concerned stopping interviews that i didn't give
any interviews and when i looked them over later i was very sorry that i hadn't because
what i would have said which i'll take advantage of this thing to say now is that
though they all talked about his career and how sexual and beautiful and wonderful he was and a
great dancer and a great actor what they didn't say is that he was a very very good man and that
was really what he wanted more than anything else to be an honorable
and a good man and he was
and i wish i said it then so because nobody taught no they didn't say he wasn't a good man
but that wasn't what they were concentrating on and so i take every opportunity i can now to say
that thank you um i comment i wish i could move the way the dancers did and still do as a dancer
do you think that baby could have learned to dance to move her body that way in that short amount of
time yes and we worked very very very hard on that to to be to be fair uh because w
e had uh uh we had
uh a camera because we were emile and i were very busy we had originally planned for me to go to
the dance studio and he would do the others but we wanted to do everything together so we would
keep like a big brother camera in the dance studio and then we would sit and watch it and watch
it and watch it and saw because jennifer didn't know how to do any of these dances patrick
of course was a professional dancer he could but jennifer was not so we would watch what she
co
uld and couldn't learn and how long it took her and then the last dance is really one of the
reasons that that that we have the same dance over and over and over again i remember kenny who i
loved had done a beautiful final dance and we said kenny we can't do it because baby wouldn't have
had time to learn it so it's got to be the first dance that she does in the sheldrake only better
so we have the same dance three times it's the a mambo that baby that that penny and johnny do
to begin wit
h it's it's the dance that baby does very clumsily at the sheldrake and then it's the
best version of it the way you can dance when your heart is high so what we say is we showed if you
look very carefully at the film you will see her learning just about every step that we do there
and because she does it better in the finale for sure i feel it's the kind of dancing that if your
heart is high enough you dance better than you've ever danced before and will ever again perhaps
um here's a comm
ent i went to grossingers for passover holiday when i was in high school in
the 60s getting on the dance floor to cha cha with a handsome college student was magical did
you have that experience too yeah i love well well i it wasn't in college so much it was when i
went with my parents to the catskills they had a champagne hour where they had people come out to
dance and my parents would hit the golf course and i would just go to the dance studio and i was just
a little girl but i would put
my uh nose against it and i did so they thought it was funny this
little girl was there and i had all these lessons and then in the um uh on thursday night champagne
hour i would come out and do all these mambos and things and it was so funny to see this little 11
or 12 year old doing it that i would always win and my parents would drink the champagne so
that that that's my memory of the mambo which i love and then the cha cha yeah um uh comment i
also love this film i was 13 in 1990 i rem
ember thinking that it was the first movie i'd seen
where the heroine looked jewish-slash-ashkenazi was that deliberate yeah we wanted her to be
well it wasn't so much that she looked jewish what she had to do was a girl whose
mind and spirit made her beautiful and that's someone who in repose well like cynthia
who's a very close friend of mine cynthia rhodes but she's so beautiful that when she even had the
abortion they they brought her out and i said oh for god's sake you know she's just
had an abortion
that almost killed her take the makeup off her and i sent her back and i sent her back five times
and finally they said eleanor she has no makeup on the more we scrub her face the more gorgeous
she looks so it was really really hard but uh uh jennifer is someone who's uh who's very smart
and very charming and very funny and very lovely and who's uh who has made her beauty happen by who
she is inside and that was very important to me that it wasn't someone who just in uh in
repose was beautiful but someone whose heart and integrity and manner made her beautiful
it's a request to talk about baby's sister oh okay uh so as i said you know i mean
i have a sister named frances who who unfortunately i lost two years ago who was a
friend of your mothers yes and uh that's it that's how we came together and she was wonderful
she was an executive for ibm uh a high executive all over the world one of the highest women
in ibm uh very brilliant very loving wonderful didn'
t like to dance with no sooner have dirty
danced than walked down the street naked uh we my parents divided the world uh she was math
and science and i was writing stories from the time i was in kindergarten and we loved each
other very much and that was the inspiration well what i wanted to do was have but as i said i
kind of divided us in half so i had this earnest really smart uh baby who loved to dance
so it was you know it was half fran and half me and i put us together and i mushed
t
his together and i made two characters um here's a comment one of my favorite moments
is when honi coles dances with jack weston for a few moments can you talk about that oh it's you
know i love that too and that's what i mean about uh uh 90 minutes honi coles was probably
the best tap dancer in the world oh we just lost your sound eleanor you
happy now yes okay uh the most terrible one of the big disappointments for me was
is that we got honi to come and do it and we could only use him a l
ittle bit i wish so
much we had more of him he was wonderful and i you know i haven't even made films but when
you make them you you come and you have to wait on and on and on until it's time for you to
shoot your scene and once it was raining and i came and i loved honi i have some pictures of
honey and me dancing because we used to do the mambo and the quarter and he was a wonderful
man and he and jack became very good friends and jack was so thrilled to be dancing with honi
and one day
i came to the set and they said oh honi and jack are all the way up on the
hill we have to wait 20 minutes before they come down for the suit tell them they've got
to wait on the set so i went up in this pouring rain to where they were in a cabin and i said
uh oh you know we need you to sit on the on the side of the set til we're ready to do it and
jack said eleanor i'm too old and too rich to do anything like this and honi said eleanor i'm
too old and too poor to do anything like this so w
e arranged to never have to have them
wait on the side but that that is for me a great sadness because i would have loved to have
20 minutes of honi dancing he's really a dancer i was so sad not to have more of that um what
attracted jerry orbach to the role if you know uh well you know we gave jerry this is before law
and order and things like that and we gave jerry uh uh i gave out uh participation points which
usually agents laughed in my face because who who thinks you're going to get 2
0 cents on
a participation profit point on a little movie about a little girl in the catskills as
jerry says had they known how successful this movie had been they wouldn't have given
them to me because we did and he made a lot of money to like [...] but he came and he
was just so wonderful i can't imagine anybody like him and i remember a story that somebody
told at his funeral where jerry loved to travel and he had gone they were off on a
greek island and they took a boat that changed to
another boat that changed
to a beach they changed to another boat that went to another island and when they
got there everybody was very lovely and the uh and they gave him a handwritten note in greek
when they got back on the boat on the island on the other boat on the next boat they gave the this
handwritten note to uh uh the captain of the ship of the greek ship and they said what does this say
and it said we love you dirty dancing doctor so jerry said wherever i go jake houseman follow
s
me around so it was i don't know why he did it but i'm just so grateful because he was wonderful
and another comment a comment says i cannot carry a watermelon without thinking about the scene
of baby carrying the watermelon over the bridge and here's uh maybe we can uh end it on this
question because it sort of brings it back to current events what do you think baby would do
in states like texas to help people get abortions oh well i think she would be working her ass off
you know when
uh in the last election i just kept saying i put out a video saying you know people
ask what baby and johnny would be doing now they'd be working their asses off in this election to
elect hillary to elect joe biden to do it you know why yeah i know it's it's quite clear they would
now just just be doing everything we could to make the world the way they wanted it to be you
know it this this was set in 63 so summer 63 two months after the events of this movie martin
luther king's speech mart
in luther king spoke then uh uh john kennedy jfk was killed then
the beatles came and the following summer this would not have happened because uh rock
music was above ground nobody would have been down below and doing cha chas above so what i
what i always call it is it was the summer that was the last summer of liberalism sorry the
last summer of liberalism liberalism, 63 yeah all right well thank you so much for taking
this hour with me and thank you to everyone for joining us it was rea
lly fascinating
well thank you for your kind questions and thank you for inviting me and i uh
wish you a happy holiday coming up and it was a great honor and pleasure for me to be
here so thank you so much take care eleanor bye
Comments
Lovely woman.
O scriitoare de succes care a cucerit publicul cu acest film .Am apreciat cuvintele elogioase la adersa tuturor celor care au contribuit la realizarea filmului.