Dirty Dancing - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of Dirty Dancing or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to Dirty Dancing

[kristina]

Patrick Swayze actually hated the line 'Nobody puts Baby in a corner,' and had to muster all his strength to get it out.

[bryan]

Even though the movie is set in 1963 and several of the dance songs are from that period, the song "I've Had the Time of My Life" was written in 1987.

[lena]

When Baby mentions "monks burning themselves in protest" at the beginning of the film she is referring to the day a Buddhist monk (Thích Quang Ducset) set himself on fire in Saigon in a ritual suicide to protest government anti-Buddhist policies. Therefore we can assume the action starts after June 11, 1963, when this occurred.

[jeffrey]

The love scene between Johnny and Baby during the "Cry to Me" sequence that was cut from the film is featured on the 20th anniversary DVD release in 2007.

[darrell]

In the last scene, Baby's mother, Marjorie Houseman (Kelly Bishop), says of Baby's dancing, "I think she gets it from me." This is a two-fold "in-joke". First of all, Jerry Orbach and Kelly Bishop (Baby's parents) appeared together on Broadway in 1968 in the original cast of 'Promises, Promises', for which Orbach won the Tony Award. In 1976, Orbach was again nominated for a Tony for originating the role of Billy Flynn in 'Chicago'. He did not win this time but Kelly Bishop did win the Tony that year for originating the role of Sheila in 'A Chorus Line'.

[nicholas]

Billy Zane was considered for the lead role, but he didn't dance well.

[eli]

Baby was born in 1946.

[amber]

The film's soundtrack started an oldies music revival, and demand for the album caught RCA Records by surprise. According to Franke Previte, before a single had even been released, there were a million albums on back-order. The Dirty Dancing album spent eighteen weeks at number one on the Billboard 200 album sales chart, and went platinum eleven times, selling more than thirty-two million copies worldwide. It spawned a follow-up multi-platinum album in February 1988, titled "More Dirty Dancing".

[kenzi]

Cynthia Rhodes asked Eleanor Bergstein to write the scene where Penny tells Baby that she doesn't sleep around. It was written the night before it was filmed, and David Chapman built the locker room for it on such short notice that it was a surprise to Eleanor Bergstein.

[kim]

The Pembroke, Virginia resort where many of the Kellerman's scenes were filmed hosts three Dirty Dancing-themed weekends a year. Dinners, a sock hop, a screening of the movie, a watermelon toss, group dance lessons, and a Dirty Dancing scavenger hunt are just some of the many activities on the agenda.

[camila]

Producers could only afford 14 days of shooting in the Catskills so they moved to a boys camp in North Carolina with pavilion where they could film the dance sequences.

[lena]

This was the top rental video of 1988.

[kenneth]

The scenes at Kellerman's were shot at the Mountain Lake Hotel in Virginia. The crew could only film during the hotel's off-season in autumn, even though the film was set in summer. In several scenes, autumn leaves had to be painted green, scenes had to be reframed because steam from the hot lights kept drifting into the shots, and the cast, who did all their scenes in light summer clothes, wore coats between takes. In their scene in the lake, Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey are shown only from a distance because close-ups revealed them covered in goosebumps and shaking from the ice-cold water.

[toni]

In contrast to his screen image, Patrick Swayze was an alcoholic who smoked 40-60 cigarettes a day.

[bernice]

Although religion is never mentioned outright in the movie, and many non-Jewish viewers never perceive this aspect of the plot, the Houseman family and many other main characters are supposed to be Jewish. The resort on which "Kellerman's" was based, Grossinger's Hotel (along with most of the other Catskills resorts in the so-called "Borscht Belt") was opened in the early twentieth century to cater mostly to Jewish vacationers; this was because at the time, it was very common for other hotels and resorts to reject Jewish customers. Max Kellerman uses the Yiddish terms for "grandmother" and "grandfather" ("bubbie" and "zaydee") when reminiscing about his grandparents "serving the first pasteurized milk to the boarders." When this movie was released, many reviewers mentioned the family's Judaism as a matter of course; for example, Vincent Canby's New York Times review called Baby's background "conventionally liberal [and] Jewish," and Roger Ebert's print review said that "the family's opposition to a Gentile boyfriend of low social status" was "obviously the main point of the plot." In a 2011 interview, screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein characterized it as a Jewish movie "if you know what you're looking at."

[sandra]

Emile Ardolino: At the scene right before Johnny goes in to the kitchen to get Penny.

[frederick]

Billy Zane told TMZ that he and Sarah Jessica Parker had auditioned for the leads.

[albert]

The movie's line "Nobody puts Baby in a corner." was voted as the #98 movie quote by the American Film Institute (out of 100).

[jesse]

The film gave Wayne Knight his first big movie role. Before starring as Stan, the resort's social director, Knight had small roles in a few television movies, including an uncredited role in the nuclear holocaust drama The Day After (1983). This movie showcased his talents, which in 1992, led him to be cast as Newman on Seinfeld (1989).