As 'Dirty Dancing' Goes on Tour, Screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein Shares Stories Behind the Iconic Film (EXCLUSIVE)

Few films are quite as beloved as Dirty Dancing. Released in the summer of 1987, it was one of the great cinematic success stories. Shot on a low budget and frequently misunderstood by the film industry during its production, the '60s-set coming-of-age romance, which starred Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey, went on to be a tremendous success at the box office, and remains a favorite with viewers of all ages today.

Now, Dirty Dancing is coming back to theaters, complete with a live performance of the iconic soundtrack. Starting in January 2025, Dirty Dancing in Concert will be touring over 50 cities across North America. The production blends a screening of Dirty Dancing with live-to-film performances of the soundtrack by a full band with vocalists (and an afterparty!) making for a uniquely immersive experience. 

In anticipation of Dirty Dancing in Concert, the film’s screenwriter and coproducer, Eleanor Bergstein, spoke to Woman’s World about her personal connection to the story, the challenges of getting the film made (since no one puts Baby in a corner), that unforgettable cast and soundtrack and more.

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Woman’s World: What aspects of Dirty Dancing came from your own life?

Eleanor Bergstein: Growing up, my father was a doctor. We went to the Catskills when I was about 12 or 13. I loved to dance. They called me Baby until I was 21. There are many, many, many things about my life that are in it — my family, my sense of this resort that I saw as a 12 year old with my nose pressed to the dance studio, and I imagined the rest — but this is not the story of my 17th summer. It's not an accurate story of my life, it just uses lots of elements of my life.

I went back and did research in the Catskills for the year of 1963, which was not when I was there. It’s quite accurate, but it’s not the story of little Eleanor who went and fell in love with a dance instructor. I did interview maybe 30 or 40 dance instructors who had been there in that period and tried to put it together with this rather heated notion I had when I was a 12 year old, and actually it was closer than I might have thought.

What’s lovely is that I got many letters from women who had been at the Catskills in those years and thought I was writing about the person who had been their crush and they wanted to find out what had happened to him and how he was. I would have to say, “I'm sorry, this is not based on the person you remember.” I always feel I'm disappointing people when they say, “Where's Johnny now?”

WW: Music is such a huge part of Dirty Dancing, and of course it will be highlighted in the upcoming concert tour. Did you always know what songs you’d include in the film?

Eleanor Bergstein: I had every line of dialogue against a line of lyrics. I had my old 45s and I played them all over and over again. In many cases I was using the B-side, because I just remembered a song I'd love to dance to. Even looking at the Billboard charts didn't help me, because often it was something that I had particularly loved that hadn't gone as high on the chart. So I got the songs from my records and then I wrote everything in. Even the lyrics from the songs were in the script, because I knew where I wanted the song to be when people said the dialogue. 

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Then I made a cassette called “EB's Dirty Dancing,” and I sent it along with the script. And that was when everyone rejected the script. They said it was too stupid, it was too juvenile and nobody liked it, and they said it wasn't a real blockbuster like Flashdance and Footloose, which had just come out before that. I'm delighted that none of those studios made it, because they would have made it non-reality based, like those movies, and the whole point of this was that it was reality-based. And they said, “The kids don't like the music, it's not what people are listening to.” Nobody knew these songs then, but they were still in my heart. 

WW: What were some of the biggest challenges of getting the movie made?

Eleanor Bergstein: Well, I also had 60 pages of dance description in it. I'm very ballsy when I write scripts. I know exactly what I want. I write novels, and when you write novels, the writer is everything, but here there were going to be so many people in between me and the film getting made, so I was terrified that they wouldn't do what I wanted. 

We were distributed by a little video company who wanted to put us right on video. I had stuff in the screenplay about illegal abortion and the Civil Rights movement, since it took place the same year as Martin Luther King’s speech, and the Catskills was actually the first place in the country where Black and white people were allowed to swim together. 

If you look at it carefully, there’s a lot of political stuff in there, which is now almost all anyone talks about. That was something I never expected. At the time, people said, “Why is this here? Nobody cares about it. Vietnam is over.” 

I was fought on everything. I was told to take everything out, but the people making it cared so little about it that they never checked to see if I bothered to take things out.

I was very interested in putting as many political things as I could in a movie that had pretty clothes and dancing and love, and then maybe it could make somebody change their mind about something. Whereas if I made a black-and-white documentary, the only people who saw it would have already agreed with me before they ever walked in the door. That was an intent of mine, to have this political and social subtext underneath that maybe a few people would see.

Now the political and social subtext has come way up, to my amazement. I’m not happy this turned out to be prescient, but all the things they tried to have me take out have come to pass. 

WW: What was the casting process for the film like?

Eleanor Bergstein: It was very simple. Jennifer Grey walked into the room, I saw that her father was in the hall, and she said, “Wish me luck, daddy!” She came in, and in a way she closed the space in my mind. She looked like a little girl who made her life happen by her spirit and her intelligence, so I knew I wanted her. 

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Patrick Swayze was a much more complicated thing. We saw so many people. I wanted someone who had hooded eyes. Eyes that could be scary, and could make it hard to make the leap into someone. It was the opposite of someone like John Travolta, who had these lovely eyes. 

I wanted him to be threatening, and Emile Ardolino, our director, had a bunch of headshots, and we started to go through them. I said, “Those are exactly the eyes I wanted” — those kind of hooded, “You don't know me and you never will” eyes. And it was Patrick. He was quite unknown at the time. Emile had come from the dance world, and said Patrick was a dancer. We looked at his resume, and he had no dancing on it at all.

We called Patrick, and his agent said, “He's not dancing anymore. He had a knee injury.” When we saw him and had him dance, I looked at him and I thought, “Okay, that's it.” We flew him to New York and I met him at the airport. He had not committed to it at all, and his agents really didn't want him to do it. I said, “I didn't know you existed when I wrote this, but now that I've met you, I don't really think that I can make this movie if you decide not to do it.” I meant that with all my heart. 

Patrick and Jennifer had had a very bad time on [the 1984 action film] Red Dawn, and she said, “Anybody but him, please.” I told him this on the ride to the studio, and he said, “Okay, I'll take care of it.” He went into the dressing room where she was, and they came out a half hour later with both their eyes red. They did a dance routine for us. It was about three minutes into it when the producers, who had wanted somebody else, looked at me and said, “I see what you mean,” because there was just no denying it. It was so obvious. They were the couple, and they were wonderful. 

Patrick, in addition to being a wonderful dancer, was a wonderful actor. We were in the editing room and we'd have 20 choices with every scene, because he was so great. When he died, everyone talked about how sexy he was and what a great dancer he was, but the most important thing, which nobody said at that point, was that he was a very good man, and that was mainly what he wanted to be. He really wanted to be a good person, and he really was. We're very lucky to have had him, and I don't know how I would have made the film without him, actually. 

WW: In addition to writing the movie, you also adapted it into a musical for the stage. Dirty Dancing in Concert is a bit different, since it shows the original movie and features musical performances. What was your first impression of showing the movie in this format?

Eleanor Bergstein: Most of the spinoffs make me wince, but the reason I thought this was a good idea is that when you sit in the audience, you can always hear people very softly singing along. 

People really wanted to sing along with the music. If you're watching it at home, of course you can do that. But to sit in a community and sing along — I realized that’s what people mainly want to do. And that’s also what I've been working on in the stage show, and why I think it has been a success. When people come to the stage show, they don’t want to see the movie put onstage, they want to be there while it's happening. Being there while it's happening means that you can sing along, and up until now, you had to sing along under your breath so that you wouldn't horrify the people sitting next to you.

I think this allows you to do what you would’ve secretly wanted to do when watching the live performance of it. I thought it was a nice idea. When I heard about this, I thought it would make people feel even more a part of the movie in the way they wanted to be.

WW: Decades later, how does it feel to see Dirty Dancing remain so popular?

Eleanor Bergstein: It’s such a pleasure. While we were making it, everybody just told us over and over what a piece of junk it was and how nobody would see it. My colleagues and I put our hearts and souls into this. We worked all night. We had no money, we had nothing. After all these years, every time we get together, we just hug each other and giggle. I saw Cynthia Rhodes, who plays Penny, recently. She's a very close friend of mine, and still as beautiful and sweet as ever. We just kept laughing, saying, “Can you believe it?” It’s a blessing, that's all. 

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