Saturday Night Fever (1977) vs. Dirty Dancing (1987): Part 1

<v Speaker 1>This is a podcast from Minute Media two three.
<v Speaker 2>Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Sherwin You Can't
<v Speaker 2>Be Serious podcast. This is d Graves and I am
<v Speaker 2>here with my friend and co host Jason Colvin. What's up, Jason?
<v Speaker 3>Today we were talking about two iconic movies, one from
<v Speaker 3>the seventies and one from the eighties. I don't want
<v Speaker 3>to brag or anything, but I really do think that
<v Speaker 3>you can tell by the way we use our walk
<v Speaker 3>that we are women's men with no time to talk.
<v Speaker 2>Well, I don't know, man, the way you talk it
<v Speaker 2>makes me feel like dancing.
<v Speaker 3>Hopefully you guys will have a great time today as
<v Speaker 3>we dive into staying Alive and Dirty Dancing and trying
<v Speaker 3>to understand the New York Times.
<v Speaker 2>Effect on men.
<v Speaker 3>This is our first taste of the summer of eighty seven.
<v Speaker 3>We've got kind of a big summer coming up, and
<v Speaker 3>Dirty Dancing kind of hit in August of eighty seven.
<v Speaker 2>Yep, so it's not really dead center summer. Yeah. These
<v Speaker 2>two movies are forty five years old and thirty five
<v Speaker 2>years old respectively this year, so it's super exciting to
<v Speaker 2>cover these two dancing icons. Before we jump in and
<v Speaker 2>start talking about the awesomeness that is these two movies.
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<v Speaker 3>Yeah, here's the last one right here, from our buddy
<v Speaker 3>big Buck Roeblely. Due to my job, I travel a lot,
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<v Speaker 3>A few have become favorites, but only one has become
<v Speaker 3>an absolute must list in every week, Surely you Can't
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<v Speaker 2>Wow, what a review. We have the best fans in
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<v Speaker 3>All right, Thanks guys for those awesome reviews, and now
<v Speaker 3>we're moving on. Just Saturday Night Fever Nut. Okay, Saturday
<v Speaker 3>Night Fevers the older movie.
<v Speaker 2>Let's start with the older movie. It really begins with
<v Speaker 2>a new style of music called disco.
<v Speaker 3>Tell me what disco is, dee, because I've heard it,
<v Speaker 3>I recognize it, but I don't know how to describe
<v Speaker 3>it articulated.
<v Speaker 2>I am not a disco expert, but I can tell
<v Speaker 2>you that the origins can be traced to a beat
<v Speaker 2>called four on the floor and it's incredibly simple. It
<v Speaker 2>is the bass drum on every single beat and four
<v Speaker 2>or four measure, So you got boom boom boom boom,
<v Speaker 2>and you can hear it. It's like somebody's walking along
<v Speaker 2>sidewalk with a little bit of a strut and they're
<v Speaker 2>go on boom boom, boom boom. But when you hear
<v Speaker 2>that boom boom boom, it makes me feel like dancing,
<v Speaker 2>makes me feel like dancing. I'm on dancing, not away.
<v Speaker 2>So what can you tell me about the history of disco.
<v Speaker 3>I know a little bit about the history of disco.
<v Speaker 3>Basically it started in underground clubs. It was typically like
<v Speaker 3>a gay club thing and like R and B black thing.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, if you were black or brown and gay, you
<v Speaker 2>went out dancing in the seventies and you liked the
<v Speaker 2>four on the floor beat. It was one of.
<v Speaker 3>Those deals where the DJs were so important and they
<v Speaker 3>this is the mixing tables where they would find some
<v Speaker 3>obscure track and it wouldn't be like a play a song, stop,
<v Speaker 3>take out a record, put a new one on, play
<v Speaker 3>that record. The key to keep people dancing was a
<v Speaker 3>never ending beat.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's the two turntable method. We talked about it
<v Speaker 2>kind of in depth when we were exploring hip hop
<v Speaker 2>with our friend David Wright. But yeah, the dance clubs
<v Speaker 2>were really that were really doing the disco thing in
<v Speaker 2>the early seventies were mostly in New York City or
<v Speaker 2>over in LA. It wasn't something that you saw just
<v Speaker 2>across the country.
<v Speaker 3>What happened was people would go to these clubs, they
<v Speaker 3>would hear these obscure songs, and then they would start
<v Speaker 3>to request the local radio station to play those songs.
<v Speaker 3>And so in turn, what happened is that the music
<v Speaker 3>industry responded to that and started to make music specifically
<v Speaker 3>for the discothechts. And that's when you have the seventies
<v Speaker 3>disco era. Yeah, so disco was when did it really
<v Speaker 3>start to become big? Well, the first heyday of disco
<v Speaker 3>it was nineteen seventy four, Yeah, to nineteen seventy Okay.
<v Speaker 3>Also during this time, you had a counter reaction to disco, right,
<v Speaker 3>I mean I remember seeing people with t shirts that
<v Speaker 3>said Disco sucks.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>In fact, the Chicago White Sox had this big post
<v Speaker 3>ballgame party where they burned disco records and it got
<v Speaker 3>crazy and people were out of hand and there it
<v Speaker 3>was wire nuts.
<v Speaker 2>There were like cherry bombs and big explosions. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>I've never I can't remember in history a time where
<v Speaker 2>there was such a violent reaction against a particular style
<v Speaker 2>of music. So you said the first wave was between
<v Speaker 2>nineteen seventy four and nineteen seventy six. Now, the movie
<v Speaker 2>we're talking about came out in seventy seven, So if
<v Speaker 2>I'm understanding it, disco was on its way out, Like
<v Speaker 2>people hated it. It was becoming extremely unpopular, and then
<v Speaker 2>they made this movie. It seems like a bad choice,
<v Speaker 2>bad time to make a disco movie. Well here's the thing.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, So when you have something that's edgy and cool, huh,
<v Speaker 3>and then all of a sudden it's mainstream and you
<v Speaker 3>have bloods of you know, suburban white people who joined
<v Speaker 3>the crowd. I say, this is fun. I like disco. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>it becomes less cool and less edgy. Well what happened
<v Speaker 3>was Saturday Night Fever came along right as disco is dying,
<v Speaker 3>and it gave it some rocket fuel to surge it
<v Speaker 3>right back into the forefront of everybody's brain. And so
<v Speaker 3>it got its second life right there.
<v Speaker 2>Awesome, Well, let's talk about how the movie came to be,
<v Speaker 2>all right. Yeah, So the movie is based upon an
<v Speaker 2>article that was called Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night.
<v Speaker 2>This article was written by guy named Nick Khne. All right,
<v Speaker 2>so these are the rabbit holes that I go down. Okay,
<v Speaker 2>Nick Cohne's mother, her name was Vera Bordox. She was
<v Speaker 2>from Russia. She covered the Russian Revolution. Her mother was
<v Speaker 2>like this elite who did not support the revolution, and
<v Speaker 2>so she got sent to Siberia and so this child
<v Speaker 2>lost her mother. I think she was ultimately executed. And
<v Speaker 2>so she was a writer who wrote about the Russian
<v Speaker 2>Revolution as someone who was adamantly against it. His dad
<v Speaker 2>was professor and writer. His name was Norman Cone, and
<v Speaker 2>he had grown up in England. And then he moves
<v Speaker 2>to New York City, right okay, And he gets a
<v Speaker 2>job with the paper called The Guardian, and they need
<v Speaker 2>him to write an article. And so he's heard about
<v Speaker 2>this new disco thing that's going on and he decides
<v Speaker 2>to go down to the two thousand and one Odyssey.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah sound familiar, Yeah, for sure, it's in the movie.
<v Speaker 3>Right, Yeah, that's where everything takes place, and so.
<v Speaker 2>He writes this article called the Tribal Rights of the
<v Speaker 2>New Saturday Night, and people know this is going to
<v Speaker 2>be a great article. And one of the guys who
<v Speaker 2>gets a copy of the article before it's released worldwide
<v Speaker 2>is a guy named Robert Stigwood. Huh, you know who
<v Speaker 2>Robert Stigwood is.
<v Speaker 3>Robert Stigwood is the manager of the Beeches.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. So he when he finds out this article is
<v Speaker 2>coming along, he's like, we got to get a copy
<v Speaker 2>of that before it hits the papers. He reads the
<v Speaker 2>article and immediately calls his assistant Kevin McCormick and says, hey,
<v Speaker 2>we I want to get the option on making this
<v Speaker 2>article into a movie.
<v Speaker 3>He grabbed it before everybody had their chance at it.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. So he reads the article and it's about the
<v Speaker 2>life of these New Yorkers who go to these dance
<v Speaker 2>clubs and their kind of obsession with how they look
<v Speaker 2>and their indifference to kind of the craziness that's going on.
<v Speaker 2>There's only one problem. Yeah, it is all completely fabricated.
<v Speaker 2>What so nobody knows this, Like everybody thinks this is
<v Speaker 2>a legitimate, factual article that this guy Nick Cone has
<v Speaker 2>written and they've decided, Okay, we're going to option this article.
<v Speaker 2>Like I mean, when the article came out, there was
<v Speaker 2>people constantly calling trying to get rights to it, and
<v Speaker 2>it was too late. Stigwood and McCormick had already gotten
<v Speaker 2>the rights to it because they thought, this is our
<v Speaker 2>vehicle for our band, the Beg's, to become big again.
<v Speaker 2>He nailed that one. Well, the problem is is that
<v Speaker 2>what happened was Nick Cone went down to two thousand
<v Speaker 2>and one Odyssey. He walked close to the door and
<v Speaker 2>a fight was breaking out. It comes out into the
<v Speaker 2>sidewalk and somebody vomits all over his pants, and he's like,
<v Speaker 2>heck with this goes back to Manhattan. I think I've
<v Speaker 2>got enough to write an art. He never walked into
<v Speaker 2>the club, he said, while he was standing there watching
<v Speaker 2>the fight happen and this guy puking on his pants,
<v Speaker 2>he sees this kid standing at the door way who's
<v Speaker 2>just kind of watching, you know, eating some popcorn or something,
<v Speaker 2>indifferent to everything that's going on, just like, hey, it's
<v Speaker 2>another Saturday night. That's hilarious. And so when he grew
<v Speaker 2>up in Derry, there were these kind of rebellious kids
<v Speaker 2>called mods, and he knew several of them, and so
<v Speaker 2>he took what he knew of the mods in England,
<v Speaker 2>took those characters that he knew and put them in
<v Speaker 2>the dance clubs of New York City and pretended like
<v Speaker 2>it had all really happened. See, this is crazy to me.
<v Speaker 3>I did read that in the mid nineties. He finally
<v Speaker 3>revealed that this is all made up twenty years later.
<v Speaker 2>I guess I'm in at all, guys, twenty years later,
<v Speaker 2>And he said at the time, he was like, I
<v Speaker 2>couldn't even believe that people believed that this was real,
<v Speaker 2>that this was not fictitious. I mean, reading the article,
<v Speaker 2>it sounds like fiction. But he said, I was just
<v Speaker 2>a young kid. I didn't have a lot of money.
<v Speaker 2>I didn't think anybody really care about this article. So
<v Speaker 2>it didn't bother me that I was completely lying. Wow. Yeah, wow,
<v Speaker 2>I know this is not just some nobody guy. This
<v Speaker 2>guy was considered the father of rock criticism, right, wow,
<v Speaker 2>he was. He did a review of the rough Mix
<v Speaker 2>of Tommy by the Who okay, and he was like, guys,
<v Speaker 2>I don't think you got a number one hit on
<v Speaker 2>here and at that Pete Townshend said, well, I've got
<v Speaker 2>this song called Pinball. You think we should put that
<v Speaker 2>on there? Because he knew that Nick Cone was a
<v Speaker 2>pinball fan. And history is made. Nick Cohn wrote this
<v Speaker 2>book called I'm Still the Greatest, says Johnny DiAngelo. This
<v Speaker 2>was the inspiration for David Bowie's The Rise and Fall
<v Speaker 2>of Ziggy Stardust. I mean this guy huge. And then
<v Speaker 2>in the early eighties he gets arrested and prosecuted on
<v Speaker 2>a drug trafficking case for bringing in four million dollars
<v Speaker 2>of Indian heroin.
<v Speaker 3>Wait anyway, Yes, Nick Cohne was arrested for bringing in
<v Speaker 3>a bunch of Indian heroin.
<v Speaker 2>Four million dollars of Indian heroin, but he refused to testify,
<v Speaker 2>and without him making admissions on the stand, they had
<v Speaker 2>to drop the charges to simple possession. He got probation
<v Speaker 2>and a fine. That was it. Whoa So, Kevin McCormick,
<v Speaker 2>Robert Stigwood have got the rights to this story. They
<v Speaker 2>don't have a big budget. It's about a four million,
<v Speaker 2>four and a half million dollar budget thereabouts, right, I
<v Speaker 2>got three and a half. Yeah, it's not much.
<v Speaker 3>Everybody in this movie is nobody's right, except for one.
<v Speaker 3>John Travolta, who was from Welcome Back Carter.
<v Speaker 2>But he was big at the time. I mean he
<v Speaker 2>was on the cover of all the teen magazines. Everybody
<v Speaker 2>knew him from Welcome Back Cotter. He was the teenheart
<v Speaker 2>throb of the day. But he had only done one
<v Speaker 2>movie for TV, movie called Boy in the Bubble. All Right,
<v Speaker 2>So Robert Stigwood and Kevin McCormick have the rights to
<v Speaker 2>this article that Nick Cone has written. They give it
<v Speaker 2>to Nick Cone and said, we want you to make
<v Speaker 2>a screenplay out of it. He gives it a first
<v Speaker 2>draft sends it to them. They're like, okay, thank you
<v Speaker 2>for your time, and then they hire this guy named
<v Speaker 2>Norman Wexler to actually write the screenplay.
<v Speaker 4>Right.
<v Speaker 2>Are you familiar with Norman Wexler? Okay, So he hasn't
<v Speaker 2>written that many movies. But of the movies that he's written,
<v Speaker 2>one of them is Joe, which is an interesting movie
<v Speaker 2>that I saw when I was a kid, has Peter
<v Speaker 2>Boyle and Susan Sarandon in it as very young folks. Wow.
<v Speaker 2>He wrote Mandingo, which of course is what Django unchained,
<v Speaker 2>is kind of loosely based on ok And he wrote
<v Speaker 2>a little movie that came out almost the same time
<v Speaker 2>as movie we just got finished talking about starring mister
<v Speaker 2>al Pacino, movie called Surperco. Okay, that makes total sense.
<v Speaker 3>He's got the Cerpit Gol poster on his wall and
<v Speaker 3>when he's dancing, she's like kiss me, and he kisses, Oh,
<v Speaker 3>I just kissed al Pacino.
<v Speaker 2>He's like, I don't look like Alba. Okay. So Norman
<v Speaker 2>Wexler is writing the script and then they're like, okay,
<v Speaker 2>we need a director. Who can we get and they
<v Speaker 2>get the.
<v Speaker 5>Guy who directed Rocky.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, so they hired John Advildson. He was the guy
<v Speaker 3>who directed Rocky. I mean this guy was scorching hot.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Absolutely, kid on the scene like mister on fire
<v Speaker 2>right then. And so they've got Hey, they've got a
<v Speaker 2>good director. We've got this guy who's a teen heart
<v Speaker 2>throb who's interested in being the lead role in the thing.
<v Speaker 2>But the problem is that they're not getting along because
<v Speaker 2>Advilson wants to make Tony a better guy. He wants
<v Speaker 2>them to be a guy who's doing favors for people,
<v Speaker 2>and John Travolta is like, hey, that's a nice idea,
<v Speaker 2>but that's not what I signed up to do. He
<v Speaker 2>wants the dirty, nasty Tony.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, let's stop right there, because John Allison just came
<v Speaker 3>off of Rocky. Yeah, people freaking love Rocky. I love Rocky.
<v Speaker 3>Of course, it's a feel good story. We love Rocky.
<v Speaker 3>Tony Manero not that likable of a character. No, I
<v Speaker 3>wouldn't have minded if they softened his edges a little bit.
<v Speaker 2>The movie is obviously hugely famous, yes, and iconic. Yes,
<v Speaker 2>would it have been as much so if Tony had
<v Speaker 2>been a little more nice.
<v Speaker 3>I think it would have been even better.
<v Speaker 2>Well maybe, Okay, who knows what the world thinks at
<v Speaker 2>this point?
<v Speaker 6>Right, right right?
<v Speaker 2>I mean, because we know that the article was really
<v Speaker 2>about the indifference of these type of folks, right. They
<v Speaker 2>were self obsessed. They were the me generation. That was
<v Speaker 2>what the seventies and disco was. I mean, you're coming
<v Speaker 2>off Vietnam and hippies and Let's save the world, and
<v Speaker 2>you're having the reaction to that of you know what,
<v Speaker 2>screw the world, save me. This is about me and
<v Speaker 2>my time, and I want to have fun and dance
<v Speaker 2>and get laid f the future.
<v Speaker 3>It's Saturday night, right, all right? Do you let's take
<v Speaker 3>a quick break and just hear from our friends at
<v Speaker 3>Vintage Video Pod.
<v Speaker 1>On the Vintage Video Podcast, we'll be reviewing every single
<v Speaker 1>wide release of the nineteen eighties in chronological order, over
<v Speaker 1>two hundred and fifty episodes to enjoy and thousands more
<v Speaker 1>to come. Shawn enters the store now to order another
<v Speaker 1>can of ether. I picture him outside like Homer with
<v Speaker 1>the gas a halt.
<v Speaker 6>When for you?
<v Speaker 2>When for me?
<v Speaker 1>I also like to think about that the kids renew
<v Speaker 1>their vow not to talk about the murder. They're taking
<v Speaker 1>a bloodof with someone else's blood. The stuff is seven
<v Speaker 1>times more powerful than uranium.
<v Speaker 6>Okay.
<v Speaker 2>They open up the vault that it's contained and not
<v Speaker 2>wearing any kind of.
<v Speaker 1>Protective gear, and it's wooden crates.
<v Speaker 2>Wooden crates.
<v Speaker 1>It's like the guys in Chernobo picking up the graphite rocks. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>and go like nah because there's rocks hugging the elephant foot,
<v Speaker 1>which is like, oh, this thing's smooth, it's so warm.
<v Speaker 1>He turns to dial the number from the classified AD
<v Speaker 1>without even thinking about the numbers. We know this because
<v Speaker 1>we can hear his thoughts and he's talking about how A. J.
<v Speaker 1>Was right that Nindas are misdirecting him there. I really
<v Speaker 1>wish they could turn to the fund of Man, like
<v Speaker 1>six six Vintage Video. We're rewatching the eighties, so you
<v Speaker 1>don't have to love it.
<v Speaker 2>Definitely go subscribe to that podcast.
<v Speaker 3>They're great fun. They do kind of what we do
<v Speaker 3>over there. Check them out Vintage Video Pod.
<v Speaker 2>So your lead actor and your director, who are both huge,
<v Speaker 2>are disagreed. Yeah, one of them has never been in
<v Speaker 2>a movie in his life and one of them is
<v Speaker 2>about to get nominated for an Oscar. Which one do
<v Speaker 2>you get rid of? The one nominated for an Oscar? Right?
<v Speaker 2>So they bring him in to tell him. They're like, Okay, John, hey,
<v Speaker 2>love you don't want this to hurt our friendship. But
<v Speaker 2>we've got good news and bad news. The good news
<v Speaker 2>is we found out you've been nominated as Best director
<v Speaker 2>for Rocky Yay. Bad news is you're fired. Oh, he's like,
<v Speaker 2>you still want to be friends? Gosh, So Oscar nominated
<v Speaker 2>and olultimately Best Picture winning director is canned at the
<v Speaker 2>outset and so they have to go and get another director.
<v Speaker 2>They still don't have a fully functional script yet either.
<v Speaker 2>Norman Westler's working on it, but it is not completed
<v Speaker 2>at this point. And so the guy they end up
<v Speaker 2>with is this guy named John Battap who has done
<v Speaker 2>zilch before this. Sure, I mean he's I don't know,
<v Speaker 2>he sneezed on a camera once. He had mostly done TV.
<v Speaker 2>His only film credit before this hadn't even been released
<v Speaker 2>at the time they gave him the job. His sole
<v Speaker 2>film credit was the Bingo Long Traveling All Stars and
<v Speaker 2>Motor Kinks Oh Iconic. Yeah, so it was released while
<v Speaker 2>Saturday Night Fever was already well into production. So they
<v Speaker 2>are literally taking somebody who's never done anything motion picture wise,
<v Speaker 2>has only worked in television. But they think, hey, John
<v Speaker 2>Devaulta worked in television, why not.
<v Speaker 3>It's almost like the Kim Bessinger Batman thing, like number one,
<v Speaker 3>who's available?
<v Speaker 2>Number two, who's cheap? Number three? Can they be here tomorrow? Right?
<v Speaker 2>And so you have this completely inexperienced director working with
<v Speaker 2>a teen star who's never been in a movie before,
<v Speaker 2>with a script that isn't completely done, on a very
<v Speaker 2>low budget. It doesn't sound like the recipe for success.
<v Speaker 2>It really does not. And on a topic that is
<v Speaker 2>dying is the decline of disco.
<v Speaker 3>Up until the release of the movie, they thought they
<v Speaker 3>had miss time this. They thought they were released in
<v Speaker 3>this movie one year too late.
<v Speaker 2>I'll tell you this. We're going to cover movie to
<v Speaker 2>movie for these episodes, but our next episodes are going
<v Speaker 2>to be soundtrack to soundtrack, right, And so I can
<v Speaker 2>tell you that. John Badam said, I looked at this
<v Speaker 2>like it was a musical, and it was a different
<v Speaker 2>kind of musical. It wasn't a musical where people broke
<v Speaker 2>into song. It was just the bits of the story
<v Speaker 2>are broken up by these musical numbers and dance numbers,
<v Speaker 2>which is what you get in a musical. That's true,
<v Speaker 2>and it may have been the key to the success
<v Speaker 2>of this movie.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, we talked about this a little bit when we
<v Speaker 3>talked about Footloose last summer. About every ten minutes or so,
<v Speaker 3>a new song happens. It juices the scene, it sets
<v Speaker 3>the mood, and it just kind of leads you down
<v Speaker 3>this trail.
<v Speaker 2>Song to song to song to song.
<v Speaker 3>Here in two weeks we're gonna do soundtrack to soundtrack.
<v Speaker 3>But I can tell you this, the three key ingredients
<v Speaker 3>to the success of Saturday Night Fever Threefold Number one.
<v Speaker 3>The article by Nick Coom travel Rights of a New
<v Speaker 3>Saturday Night. Number two is John Travolta and number three
<v Speaker 3>is the Begs.
<v Speaker 2>It's the Beg's, So it's gonna be hard talking about
<v Speaker 2>two of the three and not the third. I gotta say,
<v Speaker 2>you have to have all of those ingredients. But I
<v Speaker 2>think you could have had a different actor you. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>obviously the article is completely fabricated, but if you take
<v Speaker 2>the Beg's out of this mix, you don't have a winner.
<v Speaker 2>I think you're right about that.
<v Speaker 3>I think the Beg's are the most important ingredient here.
<v Speaker 2>So be sure and tune in on our next couple
<v Speaker 2>of episodes to find out what we think about each
<v Speaker 2>and every song and the story is behind them. Yes
<v Speaker 2>for sure. Okay, before we get into casting on Saturday Night, Felt,
<v Speaker 2>let's talk about a movie that came along ten years
<v Speaker 2>later that was also about dancing. Dirty Dancing sounds like
<v Speaker 2>a porno. That's what Bill Medley said. That's what Patrick
<v Speaker 2>Swayze said too. So it sounds like a movie about strippers.
<v Speaker 3>I can tell you in my church, I mean the
<v Speaker 3>title dirty Dancing. It raised a few eyebrows, trust me.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. This story begins back in the fifties with a
<v Speaker 2>young girl named Eleanor okay, who would go to the
<v Speaker 2>Cat Skills with her family. Her dad was a doctor, right.
<v Speaker 2>She had a sister named Francis, and until she was
<v Speaker 2>twenty everyone called her baby.
<v Speaker 3>This is kind of autobiographical, I would say, right.
<v Speaker 2>So when she was a kid, not only did she
<v Speaker 2>go on vacations with her families and the Cat Skills,
<v Speaker 2>but she also dance. Is a matter in fact, she
<v Speaker 2>was a mambo dancing champion, and so she was heavy
<v Speaker 2>into the field of dance. But then she went to
<v Speaker 2>college and became a writer and she wrote novels books,
<v Speaker 2>and she also wrote a script for a movie called
<v Speaker 2>It's My Turn.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, this one was Michael douglas film.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Michael Douglas and Jill Claiburne. So in this script,
<v Speaker 2>Michael Douglas's character and Jill Claiborne's character are in this
<v Speaker 2>kind of affair and Eleanor has written this dirty dancing
<v Speaker 2>pre sex scene. She's excited about it because it's something
<v Speaker 2>she's familiar with. Dancing is her first love. Right, And
<v Speaker 2>then as they're making the movie they get to that
<v Speaker 2>scene and they're like, yeah, we'll got that and go
<v Speaker 2>straight to the sex. So She's a little irritated by this, huh,
<v Speaker 2>and she's like, they cut my dirty dancing scene. And
<v Speaker 2>so she thinks, I'm going to have a movie where
<v Speaker 2>that is a scene that cannot be cut. It's got
<v Speaker 2>to be the main part of the movie. And she
<v Speaker 2>goes for quite a while trying to find somebody to
<v Speaker 2>make this new idea for her into reality, into a film,
<v Speaker 2>and she can't find anybody to do it right. And
<v Speaker 2>so there's this girl that she remembers that she used
<v Speaker 2>to double date with that had mentioned that, hey, I'm
<v Speaker 2>a film producer, right. Her name was Linda Gottlieb. Okay, now,
<v Speaker 2>Linda Gottlieb says I'm a film producer, but her credits
<v Speaker 2>are pretty sparse and unknown. The movie that she produced
<v Speaker 2>right before this was The Electric Grandmother.
<v Speaker 3>The Electric Grandmother, The Electric Grandmother, another iconic movie.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, I remember watching this movie on TV when I
<v Speaker 2>was a little kid. It was like a robotic Grandmother.
<v Speaker 2>The inventor was Edward Hermann. Yeah. Lost Boys and Max
<v Speaker 2>Yeah and Gilmore Girls Yeah, which, of course we know
<v Speaker 2>that Kelly Bishop is was. That's right, It all ties together, right. Wow.
<v Speaker 2>So Linda Gottlieb has done next to nothing. Eleanor Berkstein
<v Speaker 2>has done one movie which wasn't really well regarded, and
<v Speaker 2>so they decided to meet for lunch, and so Linda's like,
<v Speaker 2>tell me your idea. Eleanor's like, okay. So it's a
<v Speaker 2>story about two sisters who go to the Cat Skills
<v Speaker 2>on vacation with their parents. And Linda's like, yawn or yeah, okay,
<v Speaker 2>why don't you tell me more about you We don't
<v Speaker 2>really know each other that well, tell me more about yourself.
<v Speaker 2>She's like, well, you know, I was called baby until
<v Speaker 2>I was twenty, and I went to the Cat Skills
<v Speaker 2>with my parents, and I was a mambo champion, and
<v Speaker 2>you know, at night we would go down to the
<v Speaker 2>basement and we were dirty dance. And Linda Gottlieb said,
<v Speaker 2>what did you just say. She's like, well, we would
<v Speaker 2>dirty dance. And she goes, that is the title of
<v Speaker 2>the movie. And she's like what she said, Dirty dancing
<v Speaker 2>is a million dollar title.
<v Speaker 6>And she's like.
<v Speaker 2>I don't want a title at that I doesn't have
<v Speaker 2>anything to do with the main story. She goes, don't
<v Speaker 2>worry about the story. Later the title was dirty Dancing.
<v Speaker 2>That's fantastic. And so she was wrong. It was not
<v Speaker 2>a million dollar idea. It was a two hundred and
<v Speaker 2>fourteen a million dollar idea. So she's like, we've got
<v Speaker 2>to make this happen. So all these bad movies that
<v Speaker 2>Linda had been making, she had been doing as an
<v Speaker 2>employee of MGM. She was a producer that worked for MGM. Right, okay,
<v Speaker 2>And so when she gets this idea, she has eleanor
<v Speaker 2>Wright the script, She's got the perfect title. Once it's done,
<v Speaker 2>they bring it to the president of MGM, Frank Yoblins,
<v Speaker 2>and Frank is like, I love it, and they're like really,
<v Speaker 2>and he's like, yes, we have to make this movie.
<v Speaker 2>And they're like perfect. Everything is falling into place just
<v Speaker 2>like they want it. And then the next day Frank
<v Speaker 2>gets fired.
<v Speaker 3>How many times does this happen? It seems like this
<v Speaker 3>has happened several times.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it happened with Dumb and Dumber, Right, exact same scenario.
<v Speaker 2>I love it, let's do it. Oh yeah, that guy
<v Speaker 2>got fired and so again, same type of weird scenario.
<v Speaker 2>She has the rights to this script for a year
<v Speaker 2>until they revert to MGM, And so Linda Gottlieb is
<v Speaker 2>now on a deadline. We have to get this movie made.
<v Speaker 2>I love this idea, I love this movie. We have
<v Speaker 2>to get it made. But we have to find a
<v Speaker 2>different production company. So she goes to one production company
<v Speaker 2>after another after another. Eleanor is having to demonstrate dirty
<v Speaker 2>dancing in front of a room full of men, directors,
<v Speaker 2>board of director, type of guys, and everyone is saying no,
<v Speaker 2>over forty times, no, no No. Then what happens with
<v Speaker 2>scripts is they get sent off to lower production companies.
<v Speaker 2>Well there's this lower quote unquote production company called Vestrin Video. Now,
<v Speaker 2>in the early eighties, videos were really just the way
<v Speaker 2>you saw pornos, and so vest And Video said, okay,
<v Speaker 2>we're going to do regular movies on video, and we're
<v Speaker 2>going to be the distributor. So they they had been
<v Speaker 2>distributing other big production companies VHS tapes. Yeah okay, and
<v Speaker 2>they made themselves a nice chunk of change doing this.
<v Speaker 2>But right about the time that all of this is happening,
<v Speaker 2>the big studios are like, why are we outsourcing this.
<v Speaker 2>There's a ton of money that these guys are making.
<v Speaker 2>Let's just do it ourselves. And so Vestron was about
<v Speaker 2>to lose this business, but it had this nice nest
<v Speaker 2>egg setup. And so they said, well, if the production
<v Speaker 2>companies are going to start doing VHS distribution, we are
<v Speaker 2>going to start doing movie production. Good for them. And
<v Speaker 2>so they're starting to get all of these scripts that
<v Speaker 2>have been roundly rejected by everybody else. And so they
<v Speaker 2>hire a guy who made a couple of really bad
<v Speaker 2>movies to be their movie producer guy. And his name
<v Speaker 2>was Mitchell Connell. Okay, And so Mitchell and his assistant
<v Speaker 2>Dory Bernstein, who has no movie experience at all at
<v Speaker 2>the time, are going through scripts every single night, just reading, reading,
<v Speaker 2>and it's all trash because these are scripts that have
<v Speaker 2>just been rejected over and over again. And so one weekend,
<v Speaker 2>Mitchell comes across the script called Dirty Dancing. He's like,
<v Speaker 2>oh gosh, then don't they know we're not doing poor
<v Speaker 2>nos anymore? And so he starts reading the script. And
<v Speaker 2>I think a key idea when you're reading a script
<v Speaker 2>is you have to be able to see it in
<v Speaker 2>your head. Sure, yep. Well, as it turns out, Mitchell
<v Speaker 2>Connall grew up going to the Catskills with his parents
<v Speaker 2>on vacation every sing wow. And so when he starts
<v Speaker 2>reading the script, he's got the images in his head.
<v Speaker 2>It's bringing him back to when he was a kid.
<v Speaker 2>And not only can he see it, he loves it.
<v Speaker 2>All of the little intricacies that are key in the
<v Speaker 2>script he identifies with. So he calls Linda Gottlieb the
<v Speaker 2>next day and he's like, Hi, my name's Mitchell Connold.
<v Speaker 2>I'm from bestro On Video and I'm interested in making
<v Speaker 2>your movie. And Linda's Gottlieb is like prank caller. Yeah, really,
<v Speaker 2>and he's like, no, I'm serious, and we have money.
<v Speaker 2>We have close to four million dollars that we can
<v Speaker 2>put towards this movie if we get it approved. And
<v Speaker 2>she's like let's go. Wow, she had lost in every
<v Speaker 2>other circumstance. This even though it's bad video, like b
<v Speaker 2>video movies that have this company is the one that's
<v Speaker 2>offering to make the movie. She's like, let's get it done.
<v Speaker 2>At least we'll get our movie made, right, Yeah. And
<v Speaker 2>so they go to Vestaurant and they're like, Okay, we
<v Speaker 2>need a director. Do you guys have any ideas And
<v Speaker 2>they're like, well, it's a dance movie and we know
<v Speaker 2>this guy named emil Ardalino that has done a bunch
<v Speaker 2>of PPS specials on dance. They're like, are you serious
<v Speaker 2>right now? Has he ever directed a features your link movie? No,
<v Speaker 2>but he really knows the dance world, like he's a
<v Speaker 2>stage actor and he's done lots of dance and choreography. Oh,
<v Speaker 2>by the way, he did just make short documentary called
<v Speaker 2>He Makes Me Feel Like Dancing. It won the Oscar.
<v Speaker 2>It won the Oscar.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, okay, this is insane, man, this is crazy.
<v Speaker 2>When they had initially offered it to a Meal, he
<v Speaker 2>was on jury duty and he's so he's like, he
<v Speaker 2>sends them a letter that says, I'm sequestered on jury duty,
<v Speaker 2>but please don't give this script to anyone else. And
<v Speaker 2>so they talked to him. They love him, they think
<v Speaker 2>he's perfect. They're like, okay, we want you to come
<v Speaker 2>and tell your vision to our board of directors because
<v Speaker 2>we still have to get this approved by the board.
<v Speaker 2>And so Emial comes in and opens his mouth and
<v Speaker 2>goes he can't speak. He has a panic attack. He
<v Speaker 2>leaves the room not having said a word, and everybody's
<v Speaker 2>just looking around, not knowing what to do. But I
<v Speaker 2>don't know what divine intervention happened. But the board said,
<v Speaker 2>you know, what he got scared he's won an oscar
<v Speaker 2>for a dance documentary. Who else are we going to get? Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>And that's how Emil got the job. Oh my god,
<v Speaker 2>you're blowing my mind. Man, awesome, you are blowing my mind.
<v Speaker 2>So the way that Eleanor Berkstein wrote this script is
<v Speaker 2>that she went through all of her old final records
<v Speaker 2>from back when she was dancing in the fifties, okay,
<v Speaker 2>and she made herself a mixtape and she was like,
<v Speaker 2>I'm going to pick out my favorite songs from that time,
<v Speaker 2>and I'm going to write as I'm listening to my
<v Speaker 2>mixtape right, Yes. So then she writes the script and
<v Speaker 2>when she and Linda start shopping around to all of
<v Speaker 2>these producers, she is giving them the tape and saying,
<v Speaker 2>listen to this because this is the this is the soundtrack,
<v Speaker 2>this is everything that I used. And all of the
<v Speaker 2>producers are like, no, no, we don't want this now,
<v Speaker 2>we don't want this. But then a few months we'll
<v Speaker 2>go by and she'll get a call from one of
<v Speaker 2>the directors and they're like, hey, my eb's dirty Dancing
<v Speaker 2>mixtape has worn out? Can you send me to She's like,
<v Speaker 2>you realize that you're asking me for the soundtrack for
<v Speaker 2>the movie that you don't want to make. That's awesome. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>but it's a great singer.
<v Speaker 3>It is a great soundtrack, and we're going to talk
<v Speaker 3>about that here in a couple of weeks. The story
<v Speaker 3>that you're describing, though, Room reminds me of Matt Reeves
<v Speaker 3>writing The Batman while listening to Nirvana.
<v Speaker 2>There's something in the way. Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>It just sets the tone. It puts you where you
<v Speaker 3>need to be to appreciate the story.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. I mentioned when we talked about Jaws and Jurassic
<v Speaker 2>Park the relationship between Steven Spielberg and John Williams that
<v Speaker 2>Steven Spielberg, back when he was nobody just trying to
<v Speaker 2>write scripts, bought a John Williams soundtrack and that's what
<v Speaker 2>he listened to whenever he was writing a scripts. That's right.
<v Speaker 3>What is like The Avengers or something like that.
<v Speaker 2>It's something, Sir Paul Newman movie, The Revelers, Revelers, the Revelers.
<v Speaker 3>Wow, that's impressive right there.
<v Speaker 6>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, so we've got a production company ish, yes, right,
<v Speaker 2>we've got a script, We've got a director. Yeah, Now
<v Speaker 2>we have to worry about casting and getting the rights
<v Speaker 2>to the music. Yeah, and that last one is a
<v Speaker 2>tough one, yes, for sure. So earlier, like three years
<v Speaker 2>before this movie was being made, the Big Chill came out,
<v Speaker 2>And before the Big Chill, people didn't really realize how
<v Speaker 2>much money there was in old music style soundtracks. But
<v Speaker 2>the Big Chill happened, and it becomes one of the
<v Speaker 2>best selling albums of nineteen eighty three, and suddenly people
<v Speaker 2>are like, Hey, if you're going to use my song
<v Speaker 2>in one of your movies, you're gonna need to pay me,
<v Speaker 2>and you're gonna need to pay me a lot. And
<v Speaker 2>so it went from being a relatively affordable thing to
<v Speaker 2>a very expensive thing, and if they didn't like the
<v Speaker 2>idea of the movie, they could say no. So all
<v Speaker 2>very tricky, and she had a lot of songs that
<v Speaker 2>she felt like were absolutely integral to the movie itself.
<v Speaker 2>Had to be there.
<v Speaker 4>She wouldn't budge.
<v Speaker 3>We are going to have a great time dissecting the
<v Speaker 3>Dirty Dancing soundtrack here in a couple of weeks.
<v Speaker 2>Just a quick thing on that. And they hired this
<v Speaker 2>guy named Jimmy Heiner, and so he comes back a
<v Speaker 2>few weeks later. He says, I kissed Phil Spector's big
<v Speaker 2>toe and said, I have to have this music and.
<v Speaker 3>Go wow, and you're blowing my mind left and right.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, we raised podcasting. Yeah, that brings us to casting.
<v Speaker 2>Let's jump back to Saturday Night Fever.
<v Speaker 3>Back to Saturday Night Fever, we talked about how John
<v Speaker 3>Travolta was the only known actor that they hired. His
<v Speaker 3>manager actually had read the article Tribal Rights of the
<v Speaker 3>New Saturday Night and thought, man, if they make this
<v Speaker 3>into a movie, you're perfect for this role. Right, So
<v Speaker 3>he already had his eye kind of on it. And
<v Speaker 3>like you said, John Travilta was a star from the
<v Speaker 3>show Welcome Back Cotter.
<v Speaker 6>Welcome back Your dreams were your ticket?
<v Speaker 2>Were Vinnie Barberino.
<v Speaker 3>Up your nose with the robojse Yeah, Vinnie Barbarino, mister gout.
<v Speaker 3>We know John Travolta now on this side of history
<v Speaker 3>as a major movie star. Yeah, but this is like
<v Speaker 3>you said, He had done that TV movie The Boy
<v Speaker 3>in the Bubble. His girlfriend, her name was Diana Hyland.
<v Speaker 3>She actually developed breast cancer during the filming of this movie.
<v Speaker 7>She died.
<v Speaker 3>She passed away. During the making of this movie. They
<v Speaker 3>had to shut down production, so he could go to
<v Speaker 3>her funeral.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and it was a big deal. She was the
<v Speaker 2>one who had told him he needed to do the movie.
<v Speaker 2>She's like, you've got the moves, the music on this
<v Speaker 2>is going to be great. You need to do this.
<v Speaker 2>I know that I'm going through this, but you need
<v Speaker 2>to go and make this movie. So listen to this.
<v Speaker 3>Robert Stigwood, we talked about him being the producer of
<v Speaker 3>this movie. He was also the manager of the Beg's.
<v Speaker 3>He had been a producer on Broadway and John Travolta
<v Speaker 3>had auditioned for him and when he was seventeen years
<v Speaker 3>old for Jesus Christ Superstar.
<v Speaker 6>Wow.
<v Speaker 2>And at that time he thought that guy's a movie star.
<v Speaker 3>Wow.
<v Speaker 2>So John Travolta had been a dancer on stage. He
<v Speaker 2>danced in musicals and other Broadway things on stage, but
<v Speaker 2>it was never disco.
<v Speaker 3>He had never danced on a dance floor.
<v Speaker 2>He had not done any kind of disco. But he
<v Speaker 2>was still a dancer. And so you brought in some choreographers.
<v Speaker 2>You have Lester Wilson and you had Denny Torino, who
<v Speaker 2>were both world class choreographers. Denny had worked with him
<v Speaker 2>multiple hours a day for weeks straight to get all
<v Speaker 2>these dance moves in. And when Lester Wilson showed up,
<v Speaker 2>John Travolta started dancing, and Lester's like, I don't really
<v Speaker 2>know that I got anything I could teach you.
<v Speaker 6>Wow.
<v Speaker 2>John Travolta is a phenomenal dancer, and in that time
<v Speaker 2>of dancing he dropped twenty pounds and he was not
<v Speaker 2>a heavy guy to begin with. I love to watch
<v Speaker 2>you dance. Can I wipe your full head?
<v Speaker 3>But He's like, I wanted them to love John, not
<v Speaker 3>for his character, but just because they love to watch
<v Speaker 3>him dance.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And so I thought that was really cool. Well,
<v Speaker 2>they certainly weren't going to love him because of his character. God,
<v Speaker 2>he's such a turnis. He's a douche bag, a bag
<v Speaker 2>of douche but his friends are even worse.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, Okay, so now they're looking for the part of Stephanie.
<v Speaker 3>So Stephanie, they looked at Jessica Lane, Kathleen Quinland, Amy Irving, okay,
<v Speaker 3>and Carrie Fisher, Carrie Fisher, Princess Leah herself.
<v Speaker 2>That would have been an interesting one. Okay. These two movies,
<v Speaker 2>Star Wars and Saturday Night Fever come out at the
<v Speaker 2>same time. It's been quite a year for carry Fisher.
<v Speaker 6>Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>So they end up hiring this girl named Karen Lynn Gorney.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, do you know how she got the job. She
<v Speaker 2>shared a cab with the producer's nephew. This blows my mind. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>they're both going for the same cab. They're like, you
<v Speaker 2>wanted to share? Yeah, that's fine. They sit down. She's like,
<v Speaker 2>so what do you do and he's like, uh, I'm
<v Speaker 2>working on this movie. Oh really am I in? It
<v Speaker 2>was like, well, they do need a woman lead. That
<v Speaker 2>was it.
<v Speaker 3>She gets out of the cab, she calls her agent.
<v Speaker 3>She's like, get on this right now, fate.
<v Speaker 2>Yes. Now, she was nine years older than John Travolta.
<v Speaker 2>Is nine years older than John Travolta is, and she's
<v Speaker 2>playing a young twenties girl. Yeah, she looked a little
<v Speaker 2>bit older than the part that she was playing.
<v Speaker 3>She took some slack because most people weren't that impressed
<v Speaker 3>with her dancing.
<v Speaker 2>Uh huh. I can see that.
<v Speaker 3>I can see that, especially when I compare it to
<v Speaker 3>Cynthia Rhodes for example.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Cynthia Rhodes is.
<v Speaker 3>Freaking unbelievable and I know nothing about dancing, right, yeah,
<v Speaker 3>she blows me away.
<v Speaker 2>The grace is palpable. Yes.
<v Speaker 3>So anyway, they hire Karen Lynn Gourney. Like you said,
<v Speaker 3>she's nine years older. She did have some dance experience,
<v Speaker 3>but she had trouble keeping up with John Travolta.
<v Speaker 2>Yea, and in truth, he kind of buries her in
<v Speaker 2>this movie.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, I mean she gets swept up in his wake
<v Speaker 3>in my opinion.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean he's a strong lead. He can carry her. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>and he does. And he does.
<v Speaker 3>Now then the girl who plays a net, her name
<v Speaker 3>is Donna Pescow.
<v Speaker 2>I remember watching her in Angie. It was an old
<v Speaker 2>like sitcom from the eighties.
<v Speaker 3>Really, yeah, she was an age We've talked about Angie before.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, we have. What was that connection? That was Robert Hayes,
<v Speaker 2>who is in Airplane Airplane and the lady who wrote
<v Speaker 2>the song the theme song for Angie is the singing
<v Speaker 2>nun from Airplane.
<v Speaker 3>Oh my gosh.
<v Speaker 2>Be sure and go back and check out. I mean
<v Speaker 2>that's talking about that's our second series of episodes, Airplane
<v Speaker 2>Versus Spaceballs. Be sure and check it out for more
<v Speaker 2>random knowledge trivia.
<v Speaker 3>Your recall is blowing me away today. Okay, So they
<v Speaker 3>hired Donna Pescal to play the part of a net Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>but they thought initially she was too pretty.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so how did they combat that's put on some weight?
<v Speaker 3>Would you just go put on forty pounds?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, you won't be as pretty when you're fat. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>she's still pretty though, she is. She is just the eyes,
<v Speaker 2>I mean.
<v Speaker 3>She's she's so, she's sweet, she's nice, she's likable, and
<v Speaker 3>they just treat her like crap the entire movie.
<v Speaker 2>The only redeemable character in the whole movie. And she's
<v Speaker 2>the one who probably is going to have post traumatic
<v Speaker 2>stress order after it's all over.
<v Speaker 3>Oh just listening to a sob on that bridge, Oh
<v Speaker 3>my gosh.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, okay, so we'll get there. We'll get there when
<v Speaker 2>we talk about the movies. But not only is she
<v Speaker 2>put on the weight, she had to go back to
<v Speaker 2>her old Brooklyn accent that she had spent so long
<v Speaker 2>time I read of in acting school. Had to relearn
<v Speaker 2>that so that she could she could also be kind
<v Speaker 2>of dumb.
<v Speaker 3>Sound you know Donna Pascal and Val Bisuglio, who plays
<v Speaker 3>Frank Senior.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, they both show back up in the Sopranos. Oh nice,
<v Speaker 2>So that kind of nice little throwback there. I will
<v Speaker 2>tell you this. When I saw Frank Junior's picture on
<v Speaker 2>the mantel, I was like that, it's the young priest
<v Speaker 2>from the Exorcist. Yeah it's not. It looks like it's
<v Speaker 2>a different guy. But my gosh, he looks it really does.
<v Speaker 6>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yep.
<v Speaker 3>So she auditioned for that role six times, right, okay,
<v Speaker 3>three for the first director, and then he got fired.
<v Speaker 3>And the second director is like, I want you to
<v Speaker 3>bring her into audition. She's like really again, she auditioned
<v Speaker 3>three times for him as well.
<v Speaker 2>Wow, Okay.
<v Speaker 3>Now, then listen to this. Rayleota and David Caruso both
<v Speaker 3>auditioned for the.
<v Speaker 2>Road of Joey. Wow.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, ray Liota from Goodfellas.
<v Speaker 2>I know he would have been very young, very young. Yeah, okay, okay.
<v Speaker 3>Now, then most of the cast Joseph Kelly, Shelley bad
<v Speaker 3>Danny Dillon, Fran Drescher.
<v Speaker 2>Fran Dresser, dresser first movie appearance.
<v Speaker 3>It is all these people, it's their first movie appearance.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, she became a stand up comedian and then
<v Speaker 2>went on to become the Nanny and has a super
<v Speaker 2>annoying voice that she's well known for. But in this movie,
<v Speaker 2>shouldn't have that. She's smoking hot, and she is young
<v Speaker 2>and pretty and speaks well.
<v Speaker 7>Are you as good in bed as you're on that dance?
<v Speaker 2>Boock?
<v Speaker 7>Whll?
<v Speaker 2>Are you you know what?
<v Speaker 4>Else?
<v Speaker 3>She's not wearing any underwear during that scene.
<v Speaker 2>Well, nobody did back then. I guess it's the seventies. Yes,
<v Speaker 2>nobody wants a panty line. I wants something getting in
<v Speaker 2>the way when you're going out to the car in
<v Speaker 2>between Beg's numbers. Nobody.
<v Speaker 3>So this is not really a casting related thing, but
<v Speaker 3>I thought i'd throw this in there real quick. Okay,
<v Speaker 3>the guy who plays Tony Manaro's dad, when he's sitting
<v Speaker 3>at the table and he's got the he's got the
<v Speaker 3>big napkin around his shirt because he doesn't want anything
<v Speaker 3>on his shirt.
<v Speaker 2>He's not hungry.
<v Speaker 3>And the guy's mad and he's like, you're gonna eat,
<v Speaker 3>right right, You're gonna eat. So he's sitting there and
<v Speaker 3>he starts yelling at people, and John Travolda's character Tony
<v Speaker 3>talks back to him and he gets smacked upside the head.
<v Speaker 3>That was a total improv line. He's like, will you
<v Speaker 3>watch the hair, Just watch the hair? He hit my
<v Speaker 3>hair I worked really hard and he hits it.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, he said. Jon Revolta said, when he hit me,
<v Speaker 2>really hit me, really, And I've spent a long time
<v Speaker 2>on my hair, and I thought, well, that'd be a
<v Speaker 2>funny thing for me to say right then, and it's
<v Speaker 2>It's one of the best lines.
<v Speaker 6>In the movie. We washed the hair.
<v Speaker 2>Well, I work on my hair a long time and
<v Speaker 2>you hit it.
<v Speaker 6>He hits my hair.
<v Speaker 2>So let's talk about casting for Dirty Dancing now, please.
<v Speaker 2>This is kind of crazy. Okay. So we got a
<v Speaker 2>very low again, very low low budget movie. Were and
<v Speaker 2>a half million dollars to make the movie, limited amount
<v Speaker 2>of time to get it done, new director, new writer,
<v Speaker 2>and our only hope for the cast, given the money
<v Speaker 2>that we're probably gonna have to spend to get the
<v Speaker 2>songs that we want, is to get some relatively unknown actors.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, so let's talk about Johnny Castle first, Okay, Okay, yeah.
<v Speaker 2>This is who they wanted. Okay, Val Kilmer, Okay, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I mean that he at that time.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, he's the hunk, he's studley, he's coming off top gun.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, he's hot or whatever. Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>Not interested in playing the hunk though, No, No, I
<v Speaker 3>checked himself out.
<v Speaker 2>No, not for me. Okay, okay, he had some good movies,
<v Speaker 2>have top secret. He danced, so I can I can
<v Speaker 2>see that yet, Okay, Billy Zain, he was the top
<v Speaker 2>contender twenty years old. It was between Billy Zaine and
<v Speaker 2>Patrick Swayze. It was between those two guys. Linda Gottlieb
<v Speaker 2>loved Billy Zaine thought he was the next Marlon Brando,
<v Speaker 2>like she just thought he was the best. But as
<v Speaker 2>Eleanor Bergstein describes it, he looked like he learned to
<v Speaker 2>dance really wonderfully for his bar mitzvah. Yeah, he's not
<v Speaker 2>a smooth dancer. As good looking as a guy he is,
<v Speaker 2>he has not got the pop and lock down he is.
<v Speaker 2>He's very awkward looking when he dances.
<v Speaker 3>Well, so, first of all, he's barely out of his teens. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>he's a good looking guy, but he's still a few
<v Speaker 3>years away. You know, Titanic is ninety seven. It's he's
<v Speaker 3>got some time to come into his own a little bit, right, Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Right, So they're they're looking through resumes first, right, go ahead,
<v Speaker 2>And what Eleanor Bergstein says is, I'm looking for a
<v Speaker 2>guy with hooded eyes. You know, like, yeah, you we
<v Speaker 2>get the shadows over the eyes, right yep. And so
<v Speaker 2>she's just looking at the eyes as she's flipping through
<v Speaker 2>these resumes and she comes to Patrick Swayze's picture and
<v Speaker 2>she's like, that's it. Those are the eyes I want.
<v Speaker 2>Right there. She flips the resume over and in big
<v Speaker 2>bold letters, it says no dancing. It's like, well, crap,
<v Speaker 2>throws it to the side, Okay, keep looking. So that's
<v Speaker 2>how they get Billy's ain in there. That's how they
<v Speaker 2>get all the other guys who came in. And then,
<v Speaker 2>as it turns out, a Meal comes to her and
<v Speaker 2>he says, hey, you know, I noticed that she didn't
<v Speaker 2>call Patrick Swayzee on this deal. She's like, oh, but
<v Speaker 2>his face was so wonderful. I just it says no dancing.
<v Speaker 2>And he's like, well, I know his mother. She's the
<v Speaker 2>dance teacher in the state of Texas. Like, she's the
<v Speaker 2>most famous dance teacher in the state. And he grew
<v Speaker 2>up dancing. I've seen him in multiple things that he dances.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know why he says no dancing on there. Well,
<v Speaker 2>here's why. He's a football player, yes, and playing football
<v Speaker 2>in high school. He hurt his knee, significant knee injury,
<v Speaker 2>and he didn't want to be known as a dancer.
<v Speaker 2>He could still dance a little bit, but it was
<v Speaker 2>hard on him, and so he wanted to be known
<v Speaker 2>for his acting abilities. And so that's why he wrote
<v Speaker 2>no dancing. And if you'd seen him in anything before that,
<v Speaker 2>you'd seen him maybe dancing in a beer commercial, okay,
<v Speaker 2>or he was doing some roller skate dancing and like
<v Speaker 2>his first movie. Yes, but then you saw him in
<v Speaker 2>Red Dawn and The Outsiders, no dancing in that, right,
<v Speaker 2>So I can see how they didn't know, Hey, this
<v Speaker 2>is the perfect guy for this movie, for this part.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, let's just talk about Patrick Swayze for a second. Okay,
<v Speaker 3>he is the key to this movie in my opinion,
<v Speaker 3>no question. Okay, you have to have somebody who is masculine, Yes, studeley, Yes,
<v Speaker 3>great dancer.
<v Speaker 1>Ye.
<v Speaker 2>Sometimes those don't go well together. Sure, in Texas in
<v Speaker 2>the eighties, a guy saying, oh yeah, I'm a dancer
<v Speaker 2>meant okay, well have fun with your flowers. I mean
<v Speaker 2>that was that was it. That was that's right. But
<v Speaker 2>he grew up with it and he knew it and
<v Speaker 2>he was good at it. Now, there's probably lots and
<v Speaker 2>lots of guys that are in that category. It's just
<v Speaker 2>it was a bad perception that people had back in
<v Speaker 2>the South.
<v Speaker 6>Back then.
<v Speaker 3>Patrick Swayze is so huge, and he later is he's
<v Speaker 3>an action star.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>He plays body in Point Break, one of the coolest
<v Speaker 3>characters of all time. He plays Dalton and Roadhouse. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>this guy is a masculine guy. He's muscled up, he's strong,
<v Speaker 3>he's tough. When he beats up Robbie, you're like, whoa,
<v Speaker 3>this guy beat the crap out of somebody.
<v Speaker 2>I thought you'd be taller.
<v Speaker 3>I thought he's gonna pull Robbie's throat out right.
<v Speaker 2>There was time not to be nice.
<v Speaker 3>So Patrick swayzey a huge, huge git.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, right.
<v Speaker 3>So Eleanor Burstein also loves Jennifer Gray.
<v Speaker 2>She does. So here's what happened. When Jennifer Gray comes
<v Speaker 2>in for her audition, her dad forces her to come
<v Speaker 2>and basically pushes her into the audition space, and she's like, okay, okay,
<v Speaker 2>wish we loved daddy and comes in and they're like, nope,
<v Speaker 2>we're already there. We found her here. It is curly hair.
<v Speaker 2>This is what Eleanor Burgstein wanted because she had curly
<v Speaker 2>hair growing up. She wanted a curly haired, petite, babyface girl.
<v Speaker 2>And here's this girl who just called her father daddy
<v Speaker 2>as she walked in. She immediately was the perfect choice,
<v Speaker 2>but the producers weren't as convinced. Okay, do you know
<v Speaker 2>who the producers the best dron video producer suggested as
<v Speaker 2>the as the lead. Sharon Stone, No, went on a writer.
<v Speaker 3>No, Sarah Jessica Parker, No, what do you got?
<v Speaker 2>Pia is a doorra piasa dora. He is a door.
<v Speaker 2>They're like, you know who'd be perfect for this part?
<v Speaker 2>Pia is a door, the sex kitten, sex bomb, whatever
<v Speaker 2>you want to call her, with very low acting ability.
<v Speaker 2>That's who they decided they wanted. They wanted them to
<v Speaker 2>try to cast. They're like, Okay, well we'll think about it.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, not so much, right, Wow, that's a name I
<v Speaker 3>was not expecting to hear. Yeah, when other riders Sharon
<v Speaker 3>Stone and Sarah Jessica Parker were up for the part
<v Speaker 3>of baby. Yes, Sharon Stone, that would have been interesting innocence,
<v Speaker 3>not at all, not so much, No, sir, Jessica Parker.
<v Speaker 2>She was the other top Runner. It was basically it
<v Speaker 2>was Billy Zane, Sarah, Jessica Parker, Patrick Swayzee, and Jennifer
<v Speaker 2>Gray and they mixed them all up to see how
<v Speaker 2>they would play off of each other. Right, huh, Now
<v Speaker 2>it's interesting. This is a little kind of weird sidebar,
<v Speaker 2>this weird connection. At the time, Jennifer Gray was dating
<v Speaker 2>her co star from the movie that had just come
<v Speaker 2>out the year before called Ferris Pueller's Day Off. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>mister Matthew Broderick. Yeah, so she was dating Matthew Broderick
<v Speaker 2>at the time. Now, sad story, as this movie was
<v Speaker 2>about to come out, like just before its premiere, she
<v Speaker 2>and Matthew Broderick were in the UK and they had
<v Speaker 2>a plan for the day. We're into a car, went
<v Speaker 2>out driving. Not sure what happened, but they went across
<v Speaker 2>the line, struck another car and killed a mother and
<v Speaker 2>daughter instantly at the scene. You know, where are you
<v Speaker 2>going to be after that? You're not going to care
<v Speaker 2>about some low budget movie that you made. You're going
<v Speaker 2>to be extremely distraught after all. Yes, for sure. So
<v Speaker 2>you don't see a whole lot from Jennifer Gray about
<v Speaker 2>this movie. My guess is that it's because of the
<v Speaker 2>bad feelings that come along with it.
<v Speaker 3>She had surgery in two thousand and nine to repair
<v Speaker 3>damage in her spine that she was still dealing with.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so this is an ongoing thing for her. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>The movie is kind of known for having a cursed set,
<v Speaker 2>and it kind of followed her even past production. Now,
<v Speaker 2>the interesting thing is Matthew Brodrick and she, of course
<v Speaker 2>eventually break up and he ends up marrying Sarah Jessica Parker.
<v Speaker 4>Nuts.
<v Speaker 2>That is crazy.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, Before I get off of Jennifer Gray and Patrick Swayze,
<v Speaker 3>they had worked together in a movie you might remember
<v Speaker 3>called Red Dawn. Here's what I know about Red Dawn.
<v Speaker 3>Great young ensemble cast. It's what would happen if the
<v Speaker 3>Russians invaded Middle America. It's a great nineteen eighty four
<v Speaker 3>America versus the Russians movie. Okay, here's what else I
<v Speaker 3>know from that movie. Patrick Squayze and Jennifer Gray couldn't
<v Speaker 3>stand each other.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, when they were trying to decide who to cast,
<v Speaker 2>she said, please anybody, but Patrick, uh huh. They had
<v Speaker 2>to go to him. They're like, hey, you know this
<v Speaker 2>is a problem. You're perfect, but she's perfect too, and
<v Speaker 2>so you know, we don't know what happened, he says. Listen,
<v Speaker 2>I'm not going to tell you that I'm taking this part.
<v Speaker 2>I'm not sure that I am. But let me go
<v Speaker 2>talk to her. And so the only thing that I
<v Speaker 2>know is that they went in together. Yep. It's been
<v Speaker 2>about half an hour talking, both came out with red eyes, yep,
<v Speaker 2>and had resolved whatever the problem was. Now, obviously they
<v Speaker 2>still had some issues.
<v Speaker 3>Along the way on the set they did, but.
<v Speaker 2>It kind of played like passion, is what it played like. Yes,
<v Speaker 2>that's exactly right.
<v Speaker 3>I heard the producers talking that sometimes angst plays really
<v Speaker 3>well as passion. They were a little bit angry at
<v Speaker 3>each other about half the time, and since there's always
<v Speaker 3>that emotion there, it felt like passion. When they got
<v Speaker 3>together and did the screen test together, everybody loved it.
<v Speaker 3>Like they had the sizzle and the pop and the
<v Speaker 3>screen test and they man, the look at these people.
<v Speaker 3>They chemistry, chemistry, chemistry. And so as the movie progressed
<v Speaker 3>and they would get irritated with each other, you actually
<v Speaker 3>have that great scene where he's running his hand down
<v Speaker 3>the back of her arm and she starts cracking up
<v Speaker 3>and he clearly is irritated frustrated. Yes, they had done
<v Speaker 3>take after take after take, and she's cracking up and
<v Speaker 3>it's pissing them off.
<v Speaker 2>Yep, same sequence. Were the bang Heads together. Yes, that
<v Speaker 2>also really happened. Like so much of it was stuff
<v Speaker 2>that just happened a long way. But here's what else
<v Speaker 2>also just kind of spontaneously happened. Yes, the scene where
<v Speaker 2>their lip syncing and crawling towards each other on the floor,
<v Speaker 2>that was a complete improvisation scene. They just put it
<v Speaker 2>on and started. They both loved the song and knew
<v Speaker 2>the song, and it's one of the best scenes in
<v Speaker 2>the movie, her slinking towards him and him play in
<v Speaker 2>the air guitar. How do you call your love a boy?
<v Speaker 2>It's great that as actors that they could go there,
<v Speaker 2>that they could find not only those moments that things
<v Speaker 2>were going wrong that they caught, but when things went
<v Speaker 2>really right, and they caught that too.
<v Speaker 6>Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>As the movie progressed, they started to like face off
<v Speaker 3>before every scene. It was contentious, and so the producers
<v Speaker 3>finally had to take them both aside and they showed
<v Speaker 3>them the screen test. Right, I said, guys, look at this.
<v Speaker 2>That was Emil Artlino who would do that. He knew
<v Speaker 2>when it was time to go back and say, hey, guys,
<v Speaker 2>remember our rehearsal, remember how it was, then we need
<v Speaker 2>to bring that back.
<v Speaker 3>Jennifer Gray's sense of humor. To me, it offsets Patrick
<v Speaker 3>Swayze's intensity. The scene where they're dancing together when she
<v Speaker 3>comes in to rescue and she misses the lift and
<v Speaker 3>she gives the old thumb slide. That is so frigging funny.
<v Speaker 2>I thought you were going to talk about when they
<v Speaker 2>were very first dancing together at the first dirty dancing
<v Speaker 2>scene and like the song finishes and he walks off
<v Speaker 2>and she's still dancing around and then realizes he's gone
<v Speaker 2>and kind of awkwardly beabops around. Okay, she's funny, she's
<v Speaker 2>the perfect actress to play baby she's baby faced, she's young.
<v Speaker 3>I had trouble initially getting over the fact that she
<v Speaker 3>was Genie Butler. Yeah, the brat sister of.
<v Speaker 2>A fair completely different character, completely different character. But no,
<v Speaker 2>she nailed it, and it was it's interesting because you're
<v Speaker 2>about to talk about Cynthia Rhodes. They the producers didn't
<v Speaker 2>want Jennifer Gray because they thought there's no way that
<v Speaker 2>Johnny Castle would pass up on Cynthia Rhoades in favor
<v Speaker 2>of Jennifer Gray, which kind of a hurtful thing. That's
<v Speaker 2>a hurtful thing. But Cynthia Rhodes is amazingly yes, I mean,
<v Speaker 2>she's amazingly beautiful. Jennifer Gray is very pretty, but it's
<v Speaker 2>an entirely different look.
<v Speaker 3>I do think that that is a issue in the
<v Speaker 3>movie a bit. I think that Jennifer Gray's character sort
<v Speaker 3>of brings out the best in Johnny and that's what
<v Speaker 3>he finds attractive.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, but he.
<v Speaker 3>Seems to match Cynthia Rhode's care i mean dancing, and
<v Speaker 3>they do have same interests and work together and anyway,
<v Speaker 3>so let's talk about Cynthia Rhods.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, Cynthia Rhodes.
<v Speaker 3>Clearly dancer, right, as we know from Toto Toto's Rosanna video.
<v Speaker 2>You got it? Or she's Rosanna, right? Okay?
<v Speaker 3>You know who else was in that Rosanna video with her?
<v Speaker 2>Some guy that looked a little bit like Patrick Swayzey.
<v Speaker 3>It's still unresolved on whether that was Patrick Swayze or not.
<v Speaker 3>It is interesting when you go back and look at
<v Speaker 3>the Rosanna video. If you missed our Toto episode. There
<v Speaker 3>is a dancer in that video that looks so much
<v Speaker 3>like Patrick swayzee.
<v Speaker 2>He has he has the hair that Patrick Swayzey has
<v Speaker 2>in The Outsiders, and he has a similar forehead. Beyond that,
<v Speaker 2>I mean, I cannot agree.
<v Speaker 3>I really wish that you got Johnny and Penny dancing
<v Speaker 3>in the in the Rosanna video.
<v Speaker 2>That's what I really want, I know.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, So Cynthia Rhodes, she was in an emotion the
<v Speaker 3>rock band Oh wow, Okay did you know that?
<v Speaker 2>No?
<v Speaker 3>I did not famous for the song obsession, But have
<v Speaker 3>you heard the song room to Move? Big song in
<v Speaker 3>nineteen eighty nine, let Me pay It for you here
<v Speaker 3>is got the hell?
<v Speaker 6>That's that's that song? Well that song? Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah about a ned Okay, yeah, I think I kind
<v Speaker 2>of remember that one. Yeah, that's a big song.
<v Speaker 3>In eighty nine, all right, Shelson married Richard Marx. The
<v Speaker 3>song right here Waiting is written about her.
<v Speaker 2>Oh that's right.
<v Speaker 3>Wow, you know what she gave up? All this stuff,
<v Speaker 3>Cynthia Rose. This is why you don't see her in anymore.
<v Speaker 2>Okay.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, she decided that instead of being a dancing superstar,
<v Speaker 3>she wanted to be a mom.
<v Speaker 2>H and so she's at home. I love it.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, it's wonderful, all right, So hopefully I'm gonna blow
<v Speaker 3>your mind with those little facts right here. Okay, Jerry
<v Speaker 3>Orbach plays Baby's dad. Okay, he plays Jake Houseman, yes,
<v Speaker 3>doctor Houseman, yes.
<v Speaker 2>Okay.
<v Speaker 3>Now he's famous for being in law and Order and
<v Speaker 3>all this stuff.
<v Speaker 2>Yep, Okay. What you may not know.
<v Speaker 3>Is he is the voice of Lumire from Beauty and
<v Speaker 3>the Beast.
<v Speaker 7>Be our guest, be our guest, put our service to
<v Speaker 7>the test. Tie your naptune around your next sherry, and
<v Speaker 7>we provide the rest.
<v Speaker 2>Souper do jut Or, my son in the stage production
<v Speaker 2>of Beauty and the Beast played that part as well.
<v Speaker 3>Wow.
<v Speaker 2>As a matter of fact, I'm like, you need to
<v Speaker 2>watch the movie to get the French accent down, because
<v Speaker 2>Jerry or Box, who is not remotely French, does the
<v Speaker 2>perfect French accent.
<v Speaker 3>He sings freaking be our guest, glance and then you
<v Speaker 3>will be our guest, We our guest, be our guest, be.
<v Speaker 2>Guest, to be our guest. I heard it throughout the house.
<v Speaker 2>I can't tell you how how many times.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, that's amazing.
<v Speaker 2>To me. Yeah, Jerry Orbach is fantastic and a key
<v Speaker 2>ingredient in this movie as well. Now here's something that
<v Speaker 2>you may not know. Okay, Missus Houseman. Yes, the Doctor's wife,
<v Speaker 2>if you will, okay, was not originally supposed to be
<v Speaker 2>played by Kelly Bishop. Okay. Now Kelly Bishop did have
<v Speaker 2>a part of the movie, but it wasn't as Baby's mom. Okay.
<v Speaker 2>That part was originally supposed to be played by Lynn Lipton. Okay,
<v Speaker 2>do you know who Lynn Lipton is?
<v Speaker 3>No?
<v Speaker 2>Well, she did another movie in eighty seven as well.
<v Speaker 2>It was called Thundercat's Hoe. She was the voice of
<v Speaker 2>Wiley Kit and she had done Cheetah whatever the Cheetah
<v Speaker 2>Thundercat was for the series as well. Whoa, that's Linn
<v Speaker 2>Lynn Lipton. And I told you that this set was
<v Speaker 2>plagued by problems, people getting hurt, people getting sick. Well,
<v Speaker 2>she got sick, and she got so sick that she
<v Speaker 2>couldn't come back. I don't know if it was like
<v Speaker 2>got sick of the movie or really legitimately sick, but
<v Speaker 2>she was out. They didn't have a Missus Houseman, and
<v Speaker 2>you have to have Baby's Mama, yeah for sure. So
<v Speaker 2>what they did is they said, Kelly Bishop, you are
<v Speaker 2>no longer going to play the cougar, the bungalow bunny,
<v Speaker 2>the vixen, if you will, the Vivian, the vixen, Yes,
<v Speaker 2>who is getting the special dance lessons from Johnny Castle?
<v Speaker 7>Uh huh.
<v Speaker 2>You are going to play the part of missus houseman,
<v Speaker 2>and you're going to ease your husband's conscience throughout this movie.
<v Speaker 2>And what's interesting the putts. You know the scene where
<v Speaker 2>they're golfing together and she's like, what am I doing wrong? Sincaput? Sincaputt. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it was originally supposed to go the other way because
<v Speaker 2>Eleanor Bergstein's mother was a world class golfer and her
<v Speaker 2>dad was pretty bad at golf. But Jerry Orbach actually
<v Speaker 2>made both of those putts, and so he was so
<v Speaker 2>excited about it. They're like, okay, we'll just leave it.
<v Speaker 2>It is. So now Kelly Bishop was supposed to be
<v Speaker 2>the vixen, the one who falsely reports that Johnny has
<v Speaker 2>stolen the wallet, right, Yeah, who gets caught in bed
<v Speaker 2>with Robbie. So they need somebody to fill that part.
<v Speaker 2>Since Kelly Bishop's now playing the mom, who do they pick.
<v Speaker 3>The assistant choreographer.
<v Speaker 2>That's exactly right. Her name is Miranda Garrison. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>she was one of the most believable characters in the movie. Absolutely,
<v Speaker 2>it's kind of funny. The assistant choreographer had a memorable
<v Speaker 2>and very well performed part. So she was thirty seven
<v Speaker 2>when she did this movie. Yeah, she looked older. She
<v Speaker 2>looks I mean she's cougarish.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, I think it's just because we're in our forties now.
<v Speaker 3>But she had her boobs out front and she looked great.
<v Speaker 2>You know, it would have been you could see how
<v Speaker 2>Johnny struggled with the decision for a little bit there.
<v Speaker 2>You really could. It's interesting because she was part of
<v Speaker 2>all of the choreography that was going on. Now. The
<v Speaker 2>main choreographer for this movie was Kenny Ortega. Okay, And
<v Speaker 2>it's funny because after this movie came out, suddenly Kenny
<v Speaker 2>is getting called by Oprah and saying, Hey, can you
<v Speaker 2>come on the Oprah Winfrey Show and teach us how
<v Speaker 2>to do dirty dancing, to which when he gets on
<v Speaker 2>this show, he says, well, it's kind of like having
<v Speaker 2>sex with your clothes on. You don't feel guilty afterwards.
<v Speaker 2>So here's the thing.
<v Speaker 3>About Miranda Garrison right as Jennifer Gray learns to dance.
<v Speaker 3>We actually see that on screen. Okay, so she starts
<v Speaker 3>out not so great and she works up to it. Well,
<v Speaker 3>all of that training and stuff we see on screen. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>the scene where Cynthia Rhodes is standing behind her with
<v Speaker 3>her hands on her hips and kind of guiding her
<v Speaker 3>as Johnny's dancing with her.
<v Speaker 2>Amazing scene that was.
<v Speaker 3>Actually done by Miranda Garrison when she's teaching Jennifer Gray
<v Speaker 3>how to do it. And when the producer saw that happening,
<v Speaker 3>they thought this is kind of sexy, you know.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Yeah. They walked in and Kenny Ortega is teaching
<v Speaker 2>Jennifer Gray a move and it's the same position that
<v Speaker 2>you see man. So you've got Kenny Ortega in Patrick
<v Speaker 2>Swayze's position, Jennifer Gray in her own position, and Miranda
<v Speaker 2>Garrison guiding her hips behind her. And when they walk
<v Speaker 2>in and saw that, they said that has to go
<v Speaker 2>in the movie. And it's such a memorable part because
<v Speaker 2>you are seeing him starting to fall for her and
<v Speaker 2>you can see Penny still being in love with him
<v Speaker 2>but realizing that he's not in love with her. It's
<v Speaker 2>all from the look of the eyes.
<v Speaker 3>This movie is executed so well by the acting. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>I just don't know if Sarah j Justica Parker and
<v Speaker 3>Billy Zane could have pulled off the scene.
<v Speaker 2>I don't think so.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, a couple more people I want to bring up. Okay,
<v Speaker 3>Max Cantor. Yes, he plays Robbie the Douche. Yes, he
<v Speaker 3>grew up in New York in the Dakota Building. What
<v Speaker 3>he was friends with John Lennon? What?
<v Speaker 6>Yes?
<v Speaker 2>Oh my gosh.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, so this was his first major acting role. Okay,
<v Speaker 3>he quit showbiz to be a journalist. Okay, now get this.
<v Speaker 3>I don't want to give too many details on this,
<v Speaker 3>but so he was found dead in his apartment at
<v Speaker 3>age thirty two. He had a mixture of heroin, cocaine
<v Speaker 3>and prozac that he had been abusing since he had
<v Speaker 3>been studying this serial killer New York. Okay, so get this.
<v Speaker 3>The guy's name was Daniel Rakowitz. In nineteen eighty nine.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, Okay, this.
<v Speaker 3>Guy captured and killed a dancer, cut her head off,
<v Speaker 3>made soup from her brains, Oh my what, and then
<v Speaker 3>served it to homeless people in the park.
<v Speaker 2>Oh my gosh.
<v Speaker 3>And so that kind of drove this guy to drugs
<v Speaker 3>and he ended up dying.
<v Speaker 2>Wow. That is a deep rabbit hole, my friend, but
<v Speaker 2>I'm glad you went down it. Whoa intense right, his nuts.
<v Speaker 3>So the people in this movie, a lot of them
<v Speaker 3>go on to be other iconic pop culture roles. Okay, yes,
<v Speaker 3>Patrick his body in Point Break, yep, he's Dalton and Roadhouse.
<v Speaker 3>Jennifer Gray of course is Genie Bueller and Ferris Bueler's
<v Speaker 3>Day Off. Jerry Orbach plays Lumier the candlestick from Beauty
<v Speaker 3>and the Beast. Cynthia Road is Rosanna. Kelly Bishop is
<v Speaker 3>Missus Gilmore from The Gilmore Girls.
<v Speaker 2>There you go. We've got the Electric Good Brother and
<v Speaker 2>Vinner Edward Herman together with Kelly Bishop and the Gilmore Girls.
<v Speaker 3>I got one more for you to Wayne Knight. Oh right,
<v Speaker 3>he's kind of the MC.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>He goes on to play Newman in Seinfeld and Dennis
<v Speaker 3>Nedri in Jurassic Park.
<v Speaker 2>I got one that's even deeper than that. Are you
<v Speaker 2>ready for this? Yes? Bruce Morrow Okay, he's the DJ.
<v Speaker 2>Every time you hear a DJ on the radio, it's
<v Speaker 2>Bruce Morrow because he was a DJ. Okay, he's also
<v Speaker 2>in the movie, he's the magician. Whenever baby is getting
<v Speaker 2>cut in half, he got blue cross. Don't you there?
<v Speaker 2>You go? Wow? Tomorrow? Okay, guys, that's gonna do it
<v Speaker 2>for part one of Dirty Dancing versus Saturday Night Fever,
<v Speaker 2>be sure and come back next week for part two,
<v Speaker 2>where we will go into the production of the movie,
<v Speaker 2>the reception of the movie, and what's happened since then.
<v Speaker 2>Also final judgment, Yeah, final judgment if we get to
<v Speaker 2>decide which of these two movies is the best, and
<v Speaker 2>then for our next two episodes after that, we're going
<v Speaker 2>to cover the soundtracks of both of these movies, and
<v Speaker 2>we're going to decide which of those two.
<v Speaker 3>Is the best, and then we'll probably rank all four.
<v Speaker 2>How about that? That sounds like a challenge? All right?
<v Speaker 2>Come back next week, everybody. What do you call your lover?
<v Speaker 6>Boy?
<v Speaker 2>Come here, love a boy.
<v Speaker 6>The girl