Dirty Dancing

Dirty Dancing, a movie that premiered on August 21, 1987, tells the story of Frances “Baby” Houseman, the privileged, idealistic younger daughter of a doctor who vacations with her family at Kellerman's, a Catskills summer resort, and falls in love with a rough-edged, working-class dance instructor who introduces her to “dirty dancing.” The story is set in 1963, the summer of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech and the summer before John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The movie, propelled by the romantic appeal of a cross-class love story and a wildly popular sound track, was a smash hit. It was also, both on screen and behind the scenes, a reflection of America's diverse cultures.

The movie pulled in box-office receipts for the first 10 days that earned twice the movie's cost of less than $5 million. Final worldwide sales topped $170 million, and the original sound track was recertified platinum 11 times. A second album was quadruple platinum. The movie's theme song, “(I've Had) The Time of My Life,” written by Franke Previte, John DeNicola, and Donald Markowitz, hit number one and earned both a Grammy and an Academy Award. The album also reached the top position, outranking both Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen to do so. It remained at number one for nine weeks and returned to the top spot for an additional nine weeks in 1988. A poster of Patrick Swayze as Johnny Castle sold out, and the most quoted line, “Nobody puts Baby in a corner,” entered the lexicon of the American public. By August 1988, the Dirty Dancing enterprise—movie, sound track albums, video cassette, touring company, and television series—had grossed $350 million.

Eleanor Bergstein wrote the screenplay, basing much of the story on her own life. Like Baby Houseman, Bergstein was the daughter of a Jewish doctor. She was called “Baby” until she reached adulthood, and she vacationed with her family in the Catskills. Bergstein based Kellerman's, the resort the fictional Houseman family visits, on Grossinger's, the Catskills resort where her family vacationed. The setting is Bergstein's tribute to the Borscht Belt. The name refers to soup made from beetroot, a popular eastern European dish; it alludes to the heritage of many of the Jewish inhabitants of New York's Lower East Side who invaded the Catskills resorts each summer.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York considers Dirty Dancing a Jewish movie that captures an important slice of Jewish culture. The museum has a copy in its film archives. Bernstein [Page 708]herself has acknowledged deliberately evoking stereotypical elements of the Borscht Belt with its bad jokes, ill-conceived matchmaking, and liberal Democrat social values common among upper-middle-class Jews generally and Bergstein's family particularly. Bergstein was named for Eleanor Roosevelt. Her sister Frances, whose name Bergstein borrows for her heroine, was named for Frances Perkins, President Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of labor from 1933 to 1945. The future plans of Baby Houseman include studying the economies of the third world and joining the Peace Corps, and the Kellermans’ grandson anticipates joining the Freedom Rides in the south after the summer season ends. Bergstein has described the time in which she sets the movie as “the last summer of liberalism.”

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