Out of the Corner: A Memoir by Jennifer Grey

Author:Jennifer Grey [Grey, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780593356708
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2022-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

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The Dirty Dancing shoot was famously beset with problems. Extremely chaotic. You could almost say, cursed.

The fictional story of Frances “Baby” Houseman’s awakening took place over the Houseman family’s summer vacation. Two resorts in tandem—one in Virginia and the other in North Carolina—would serve on screen as the singular Kellerman’s Catskills destination. But production had to put off shooting until after each resort’s real-life seasonal guests and campers had left. The movie’s summer had to be shot in the fall, and the art department, in a race against the change of seasons, began madly spray-painting the leaves green as trees slipped into their natural autumnal glory.

It also rained. A lot. When a movie is shot on a location where the weather is changeable, it becomes trickier and more expensive, especially if your story and scenes require being drenched in the warm glow of summer.

And when it stopped raining? There were mosquitoes.

Because I’m basically a mosquito magnet and this wasn’t a movie about a girl battling smallpox, the makeup artist had to cover up the red welts on me between every take (including during Baby and Johnny’s love scenes, dabbing makeup on pretty much every part of my nearly naked body).

There was another issue with the locations. In the fifties and sixties, bungalow colonies like Kellerman’s catered exclusively to Jewish New Yorkers escaping the sweltering summer in the city, because Jews weren’t welcome at the other resorts. For the movie to capture the authenticity of the Borscht Belt (or the Jewish Alps, as the Catskills resorts were also called back then), the extras in the movie needed to look identifiably Jewish. And there wasn’t exactly a surplus of Jews in the Appalachian South. There were precious few people in the area who could even pass as Jews.

Dirty Dancing had an Academy Award–winning documentary filmmaker as its director, its crew was overall top-notch, there were veteran New York actors filling out the cast, and everyone worked their tits off, devoted to making the movie the best possible version of itself. But it was an extremely low-budget production, and there remained a very real possibility that passionate dedication wouldn’t be enough to save the movie from an embarrassing B-movie fate. The $4.5 million budget came from Vestron, a home video company based in Stamford, Connecticut, that had never before made a movie.

The schedule was impossibly tight, the whole thing had to be shot in forty-three days, and while the premise of the movie was appealing, the script was not exactly ready to go. The melodramatic, fairy-tale structure was also riddled with plotlines that didn’t track and dialogue that didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. The story and language initially read a bit like a bodice ripper. For two weeks before the start of principal photography, in a cavernous studio in the Mountain Lake Lodge in Pembroke, Virginia, Patrick and I learned the building blocks of mambo for the better part of every day, and in the afternoons we rehearsed key scenes with Emile.

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