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