Chapter 9

I read the script for Dirty Dancing one evening in our new house. Right away it filled me with emotion—but not the kind it was supposed to. I didn’t like it. It seemed fluffy— nothing more than a summer-camp movie. Lisa read it, too, and she felt the same way.

But at the same time, we both could see the kernel of a great story in there. The ideas behind Dirty Dancing were fantastic. There were elements of class conflict, relationships, sexual awakening, family issues—it had a little bit of everything. And even though the screenplay was weak, with some work it could explore all those elements through a strong story filled with compelling characters.

Potential is a wonderful thing, but would the writer and director be open to rewrites? The next morning, as Lisa and I worked on remodeling our kitchen, we talked about how the script could be better. And despite our initial reservations, we began to get a little excited about it. I was scheduled to go in and read for the part of Johnny Castle, a role that seemed perfect for me. I wanted to win it, but I also wanted to find out if we could really turn this into a great movie or not.

One thing that attracted me to Dirty Dancing was the fact that Emile Ardolino would be directing. Emile didn’t have a mile-long Hollywood resume, but he came from the dance world and had done award-winning work, including a televised presentation of “Baryshnikov at the White House” and a documentary about Jacques d’Amboise called He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin’ that won an Academy Award. Dirty Dancing would be Emile’s first feature film, but he was a class act and really knew dance. If anyone could pull this off, it was Emile.

But I still had reservations about going for the role of Johnny Castle, for one big reason. Even if the script could be vastly improved, I wasn’t sure this movie was the right step to take in my career.

The response to Skatetown, U.S.A. had made it clear that I could have my pick of similar roles—and make a lot of money doing them. But it was also clear that if I did choose that route, I might never be able to escape it. I’d always be seen as a dancer-turned-actor, rather than an actor. So in the eight years that had passed since Skatetown, U.S.A., I had purposefully avoided roles that involved dancing or had any kind of teen-idol flavor. I’d turned down that four-picture deal with Columbia that would have shot me to fame. I’d buried myself in acting classes. And I had been constantly on the lookout for parts that could stretch me as an actor.

Now, with Dirty Dancing, I had a choice. Should I stick to my guns and refuse to take a dancing movie? Or was this a different kind of movie, one that would allow me to dance but also to stretch myself as an actor? I was scared to say yes, scared I’d be undoing what I’d worked for the last eight years to build. But at the same time, both Lisa and I believed that Dirty Dancing had the potential to be wonderful.

So, after many conversations with Lisa, I made my decision: I would go for it, and give this role absolutely everything I had. If I was going to that place—the sexual, sensual dance role—I was going there 100 percent. I knew Johnny Castle had the potential to turn me into everything Hollywood seemed to want me to be, which was not necessarily what I wanted to be. But part of me was also excited about doing a dance movie— and of course, we now had house payments to make, too. So that afternoon I said to Lisa, “Okay, here we go.” And off we went, for the ride of our lives.

The role of Johnny Castle wasn’t mine for the taking. First I had to go in for a couple of auditions, one where I read, and one where Jennifer Grey and I danced together.

Whenever I read for auditions, I prefer to improvise rather than doing all the lines straight up. So for that first reading, I talked about growing up without much money in Houston, and how dance was a magical form of escape. The truth is, I really identified with Johnny. He was a blue-collar fighter whose soul was stirred by the beauty of dance. He was the kind of man who combined a tough exterior with a gentle soul—the kind of man my dad was, and the kind I was trying to be. In that first audition, I didn’t act out Johnny. I was Johnny.

For the second audition, Jennifer Grey and I went in to dance for writer Eleanor Bergstein, choreographer Kenny Ortega, and Emile Ardolino. Eleanor was incredibly close to the material—she’d based it partly on her own experiences in the early 1960s, when she was a teenage girl called “Baby” dancing in the Catskills, and the movie was really a labor of love for her. So she was the one who jumped up to show Jennifer and me what she wanted us to do.

Eleanor put on some music and half-talked, half-danced us through what she wanted. I wasn’t exactly sure what she was looking for, but I took Jennifer into my arms and decided to wing it. Jennifer and I had never danced together before, and she probably still thought of me as that half-crazed forest warrior from Red Dawn. But as I led her through a couple of steps, we soon found ourselves in a comfortable rhythm together.

I moved her around slowly at first, pulling her toward me and spinning her back out. I wanted her to feel confident in her dancing, enough to lose herself in it a little bit and not feel self-conscious. We looked each other in the eyes, and though she was a little bit giggly at first, she soon got more comfortable. We started doing more complex moves, and as we danced I decided she was lithe enough and balanced enough to try a lift.

Lisa was in the room, too, so we showed Jennifer how the lift would work. Lisa and I had done it so many times, we made it look effortless. I knew that if I was to lift Jennifer successfully, she’d have to feel confident in it—and after watching me lift Lisa a couple of times, she seemed ready.

It’s not easy for a female dancer to execute her first lift. She’s got to trust her male partner completely and give in to the momentum he sets for her. Otherwise, one or both partners can get hurt. Jennifer got up and took Lisa’s place, and as we continued talking with Eleanor and Kenny, I just took her and gently pressed her over my head. I showed her I could control her completely—she could go forward, she could go back, but she would never tumble either way if she didn’t make any sudden moves.

Jennifer did break position a couple of times, which was a natural reaction for someone who’s never done lifts before. “Don’t worry,” I told her. “No matter what position you’re in, I can put you down safely.” The next time I lifted her, she posed beautifully, and I lowered her slowly to the ground, with our eyes locked on each other. It was a lovely moment, and very sexy. The room was absolutely silent—everyone was just staring at us.

Jennifer smiled when I put her down, and from that moment on, I knew we had it. We did a couple more sensual dance moves, and when the audition was over, Eleanor had made up her mind. As she told us later, at that point she felt that if they didn’t get me for the role of Johnny, they didn’t have a movie.

As perfect as the role of Johnny was for me, the role of Penny was equally perfect for Lisa. She auditioned for it, and wowed everyone. But ultimately, Cynthia Rhodes was cast as Penny. Cynthia was also a good choice, but what tipped the scales was the fact that she’d had a starring role in Staying Alive, with John Travolta. Cynthia had some momentum, and momentum sells in Hollywood.

What we didn’t know, but found out much later, was that Eleanor expected me to insist on casting Lisa as a condition of getting me. But I really didn’t think of myself as having that kind of power as an actor, so it never even occurred to me to ask. As Lisa now jokes, because she and Cynthia are both slender and blond, half the time people think it’s her in the movie anyway.

Once I’d been cast as Johnny, Lisa and I started looking at how the script might be improved. Eleanor, Emile, and others were doing the same thing, so it was definitely a group effort, but I was as grateful as ever for Lisa’s insights. Whether rewriting scripts or honing my performance, she and I have worked together on every movie I’ve ever done—she has an amazing ear for dialogue, a great sense of story, and knows how to zero in on performance. More important, she’s absolutely truthful, even if it’s something I don’t want to hear. I always knew I could trust her completely—which became more and more important as time went by and my stature in Hollywood grew.

A lot of actors surround themselves with “yes-men.” They like to be told that everything they’re doing is great, as it helps boost their confidence. But I’m the opposite. I want to know what’s weak, so I can work on improving it. Whenever we worked on a script or scene for a movie, we’d always play devil’s advocate with each other, switching positions and thinking through every angle but Sunday. What does the writer intend here? What does the director see? Could the story have higher stakes? Is this how my character would react? Do these characters talk like real live flesh-and-bone human beings? Once you’ve gone through every possible scenario with a script, when you get back down to the words on the page you know right away what works and what doesn’t.

That’s how Lisa and I work together: We find the intention and emotional flow of a scene, and the words follow naturally. As the great director Elia Kazan once said, our character is often revealed by how we conceal our emotions, not how we show them. So, good writing has a lot do with how much your character conceals, rather than reveals. For example, it rips the audience’s heart out to see somebody go to the ends of the earth not to cry—much more so than watching someone over-emoting, crying in their pretzels.

The draft of the script we’d read only hinted at deeper sociological and emotional currents, but we all knew that if we could just push the characters a little further, and explore them a little more deeply, we’d really have something. So everyone jumped right in, working day and night to tear apart things that weren’t working and deepen the parts that were. Eleanor’s script had strong bones, but now we were adding the flesh to them—and we’d continue doing so all the way through filming. And by the time we were done, we had a beautiful script.

Some of what Lisa and I suggested made it into the film, and some didn’t. We inserted the fight scene between Johnny and the cad waiter, Robbie, to give Johnny the rougher edge his character needed. We wrote it so Johnny would stop before knocking the guy out, though, since he’d be wary of getting fired—something that had no doubt happened to him before. Lisa and I also stayed up the entire night before filming the final scene, where Johnny grabs the microphone in front of everyone at the resort, so we could rewrite his big speech. Sometimes we’d be working on new dialogue right up to shooting—and then continue fixing it between takes. We never stopped trying to make it better.

I felt all along that Johnny should ultimately end up with Penny, as they were so much alike and a more realistic couple than Johnny and Baby. That change got overruled, which was probably for the best. But when some on the set suggested I tone down the dancing with Penny early on, I put my foot down. They were worried that the dance scenes between Johnny and Penny were too sexy, that they would overshadow the later dance scenes between Johnny and Baby. I knew that wasn’t true, based on my audition with Jennifer. There was no doubt we’d be able to create the heat—and we did.

We did a lot of rewriting for the big final scene, but one line that I absolutely hated ended up staying in. I could hardly even bring myself to say “Nobody puts Baby in a corner” in front of the cameras, it just sounded so corny. But later, seeing the finished film, I had to admit it worked. And of course, it became one of the most-quoted lines in the entire movie. I even quote a version of it myself these days, saying “Nobody puts Patrick’s pancreas in a corner” when people ask how I’m doing.

Throughout the filming, we kept inserting little touches to help flesh out the characters and their relationships. There were times when Jennifer giggled uncontrollably, not as part of the script, but because she was just plain giggly—and those moments made it into the film. For the scene where we’re dancing and I draw my hand slowly down her arm, she nearly drove me crazy—she literally couldn’t shoot that scene without giggling all the way through, so we had to retake it about twenty-five times. Another moment I inserted was the line about listening to your heartbeat when you dance, and tapping Jennifer’s hand on my chest. Moments like these added depth to the characters, and Jennifer came up with many of her own, too.

The more we added and revised, the stronger the characters got. But it wasn’t just the rewrites that required us to put in serious overtime. We also spent hours perfecting the dance moves that would really make the movie pop. Lisa spent many late nights working with me, rehearsing and honing the dance scenes I’d shoot with Jennifer and Cynthia.

Following the lead of Kenny Ortega, who was like the Pied Piper, everyone in the cast spun and twirled and danced until we were ready to drop—Cynthia later said she lost ten pounds during the shoot, despite drinking milk shakes every day. But Kenny had an infectious energy. He was like Gene Kelly, whom he’d studied with. He was always dancing with a huge smile on his face, and having so much fun you couldn’t help but have fun, too.

Kenny was a real hoofer, a talented dancer who could cross genre barriers. I loved the fact that he worked in so many kinds of dance—jazz, swing, salsa. Jazz in particular had been a very big part of my early dance education, since my mother had pretty much single-handedly created the jazz scene in Houston. So jazz dancing was in my soul, and I loved the feeling of loosening up my body, being able to use my shoulders and pelvis, allowing the sensuality to flow through with the music.

We all worked incredibly hard, but we had a hell of a lot of fun, too, especially during the scenes where the camp staff was dirty dancing after hours. Shooting those scenes really was like a party—just rock and roll and everybody sweating on the dance floor. The actors and dancers in the movie were so game and so talented, they just tore it up.

I drove the van between locations, with Kenny and Jennifer and Cynthia and whoever else wanted to come along. We all spent hours together in that van, singing songs and talking about the scenes. We were like a posse—a gang of young, energetic artists who’d been thrown together in this Podunk little town of Lake Lure, North Carolina, in a beautiful old colonial-style hotel, with nothing to do but create. It was one of the most exhausting shoots I can remember—but also one of the most fun.

• • •

With all the dancing and jumping and running around, it’s no surprise that my knee began swelling again. I’d ice it after shooting the dance scenes, but as filming went on, I had to start getting it drained again—just as I’d done so often when dancing in New York. But it wasn’t dancing that caused me the most knee pain of all. It was the scene where I’m balancing on the log with Jennifer.

We had to balance very carefully so we wouldn’t tumble onto the rocks below. It looks like fun in the movie, but shooting that scene was dangerous and physically taxing. When you’re balancing like that, your joints are working overtime, making constant tiny adjustments. And because most of the cartilage in my knee was gone, the bones were just grinding painfully on each other. After spending a couple of hours filming that log scene, I had to go straight to the hospital to get my knee drained. It was definitely more painful and difficult than anything I did on the dance floor.

In fact, I struggled constantly with Kenny and Emile to give me more serious dance moves. I wanted to show the audiences that although Johnny was blue-collar, he really could dance— throughout the shoot, I was dying to have Johnny show some real moves.

All the dirty dancing was fine, but I had to subordinate my ego for the role, as I was a more highly trained dancer than Johnny. In the end, the closest we got to letting Johnny do anything difficult was in the final scene of the movie, after I leaped off the stage. We spent hours rehearsing multiple different ways of doing the jump, and I leapped off that stage again and again, trying not to land too hard on my left knee because of the sheer number of times we shot it. But the real dance move came after the jump, when I did a double pirouette and double turn to the knee.

Shooting scenes indoors could also be unbearably hot, especially early on, when temperatures outside hit the nineties. Inside, with the cameras and lights, temperatures soared to above one hundred, and several dancers and actors passed out from all the exertions. Paula Trueman, who played Mrs. Schumacher, the wallet thief, even had to be taken to the hospital after fainting on the set. But with such a short shooting schedule, everyone hung in there, fighting through the heat to do multiple takes and get everything perfect.

Jennifer Grey worked as hard as anyone. And while she and I had a rough start on Red Dawn, we ended up getting along well during Dirty Dancing. But we did have a few moments of friction when we were tired or after a long day of shooting.

I tend to be extremely focused when I’m working, and I like to get down to business on the set. Jennifer was working her ass off, and doing an amazing job considering the fact that she had never been a professional dancer. But she also seemed particularly emotional, sometimes bursting into tears if someone criticized her. And other times, she slipped into silly moods, forcing us to do scenes over again when she’d start laughing. I was on overdrive for the whole shoot—staying up all night to do rewrites, squeezing in dance rehearsals, shooting various scenes—and was exhausted a lot of the time. So I didn’t have a whole lot of patience for doing multiple retakes.

The lift scene in the lake was a perfect example of how simultaneously fun and exhausting the shoot was. It was horrifyingly, hypothermically cold in that lake, and we filmed that scene over and over. The crew had to build a platform under the water—it would have been too deep otherwise—but whenever I slipped off that platform, I’d be treading water and scraping the shit out of my legs trying to get back on it quickly. And despite the fact that Jennifer was very light, when you’re lifting someone in water, take after take after take, even the skinniest little girl can feel like five hundred pounds. By the time we finished shooting that sequence, my arms were like rubber, my body temperature had plunged, and my legs were a scraped-up mess.

But with that said, it was still a great feeling to lift Jennifer up in the middle of that beautiful setting, knowing the scene was going to look amazing. And despite any little irritations I felt, I have to say that overall, Jennifer did a truly phenomenal job.

In my life, I’ve encountered very few people who have the natural talent Jennifer has. She learned incredibly quickly, and she was game for anything. And as time went on, everything became easier for us both, because she never hit a plateau in terms of her ability or willingness to try new things. She had courage—emotional and physical courage—and the movie wouldn’t have been half as good with anyone else in her role. I believe, and have for a long time, that Jennifer’s performance was really underappreciated. In many ways, she made the movie.

As the summer turned to fall, we wrapped up filming. The shoot took only forty-four days, but because there had been a few delays, we ended up shooting later in the year than planned. The leaves had begun to turn at Lake Lure, so the crew rushed to spray-paint them back from orange and red into summer green for the last few scenes. Everyone—Emile, Kenny, Eleanor, and all the actors and dancers—seemed proud of what we’d done. And I felt really invested in this film, with all the dancing, acting, and rewriting. Not to mention the addition to the soundtrack of a song I wrote with Stacy Widelitz, “She’s Like the Wind.”

I’ve always written music, and I’d been singing onstage since my music theater days in Houston. I studied violin and guitar growing up, and ever since, there’s nothing that relaxes me more than noodling around on a guitar and coming up with new melodies. While Lisa and I lived in New York, I played at a few Greenwich Village bars, trying out my own material and doing a few covers. Music has always been a huge part of my life, so it was natural to try to integrate it into my movies, too.

Stacy and I didn’t write “She’s Like the Wind” for Dirty Dancing—in fact, I started writing it for Grandview, U.S.A., and Stacy later helped me finish it. I was disappointed when the song didn’t make it into that film, but I didn’t give up on it. While at Lake Lure, I played the demo for Emile, who liked it enough to pass it on to the music supervisor, Jimmy Ienner. Jimmy loved it, and he ended up picking it for an extended sequence in the film.

In the mid-1980s, movie soundtracks weren’t a big business yet, so I wasn’t thinking in terms of record sales at all—I was just happy that the song would finally get heard. Movie soundtracks had never been great sellers, so the music companies didn’t charge much for the use of old songs. In fact, the entire Dirty Dancing soundtrack cost just two hundred thousand dollars. But this modest little soundtrack ended up changing the music business forever—just as this modest little $5.2 million movie would change all our lives forever. We just didn’t know it yet.

• • •

After Emile and his team completed their final cut of Dirty Dancing, the producers set up a private screening so we could go see it before it was released. We’d heard that the first cut hadn’t been very well received—in fact, one producer was rumored to have said, “Burn the negative and collect the insurance.” But Emile had gone back into the editing room, determined to make the movie as great as we all envisioned it as being.

So, Lisa and I walked into that private screening knowing that everyone involved had done good work, but not having any idea what to expect beyond that. With all the thousands of little decisions that go into making a film—in writing, shooting, sound, lighting, cutting, editing—it’s almost impossible to know how the final product will turn out.

We settled into our seats and the lights dimmed. Almost two hours later, when the credits rolled, Lisa and I turned to each other and smiled. The story had turned out better than we’d hoped for, all those months before in our kitchen. I thought it was a great teaching ground for mothers and young girls, a way to get into conversations about the birds and the bees. But what made me happiest was that it wasn’t just a shallow movie about two people sucking face—it was a moment in time when these two very different souls really do connect. And Jennifer and I had achieved that together onscreen.

With all that said, we still figured it would be a modestly successful movie, and not much more than that. Lisa thought it was the kind of story people would be drawn to, where the good guy falls in love with the funky girl. We had no idea what was coming—that after the movie opened we would be swallowed by a tidal wave of fame and attention, like nothing we’d ever imagined.

In the meantime, Lisa and I headed for a place about as far away from Hollywood as you can get—geographically, spiritually, and otherwise. We flew to Africa to make our first feature together: Steel Dawn.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 685