No one had any idea how successful Dirty Dancing would be, not even the cast. But when it was released, it was a phenomenon. People were calling dance studios to learn how to dance like the characters in the movie. What was most surprising was the fact that it was an independent production that didn’t spend a lot of money making the movie. It was still in the millions but at the lower end and that’s considered cheap by Hollywood standards.
Producer Linda Gottlieb was struggling at the time to find funding for the project that she thought would cost $8 million. Vestron Pictures came through at $5 million but made sure they knew that if the chairman "sees so much as a decimal point after the number 5," the funding would disappear. It’s hard to believe that 30 years have gone by since the movie was released. There are many that say it was a difficult production to be part of but there was also a lot of drama between the cast mates.
Since it’s been thirty years and with the release of Patrick Swayze’s autobiography The Time Of My Life, we’ve learned a lot about what it was like being on the set of Dirty Dancing. There are a lot of things out there that you may not realize about the cast of Dirty Dancing, though there were only two stars of the movie that really furthered their career from it.
10. PATRICK AND JENNIFER DIDN’T ALWAYS GET ALONG
When it came to working with Jennifer Grey, Patrick Swayze was serious about his acting career. When it was time to work that’s what he wanted to do. Especially since they were working long hours and sometimes still on set at 2 am. Sometimes Grey would get on his nerves because she would start giggling in the middle of a scene. "We did have a few moments of friction when we were tired or after a long day of shooting," Swayze said.
"She seemed particularly emotional, sometimes bursting into tears if someone criticized her. Other times, she slipped into silly moods, forcing us to do scenes over and over again when she'd start laughing."
Grey sounds a little like a drama queen especially since she was an unknown actor at the time.
9. PRODUCERS DIDN’T WANT PENNY’S STRUGGLE IN THE MOVIE
Illegal abortions were very controversial at the time and the movie was trying to bring awareness to the fact that women were dying because they had to go to see back alley doctors to have the procedure done. The producers wanted sponsors, but sponsors didn’t want to be associated with a movie that included it. “The producers called very excited because they had gotten someone to be a national sponsor who was going to put a tube of acne cream on each poster. Then the sponsor saw that there was an illegal abortion in it, so the producers came to me and said, ‘Eleanor, we’ll pay for you to go back in the editing room and take it out.’
I always had known this would happen one day. I said, ‘Hey, I would love to, but I can’t because if I take it out, everything will fall apart.’
There’s no reason for Baby to meet Johnny, for Penny not to be able to dance, for Baby to learn to dance with Johnny, for her to make love with Johnny — there’s no story without that.”
8. JENNIFER GREY NEVER LOOKED THE SAME AFTER THE MOVIE
The movie ended up being an unexpected success and that meant money and fame started rolling in for Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey. Grey decided she wanted to use her money to shave a bit off her nose to make it more elegant. She got more than she bargained for and left the office looking nothing like “Baby.” The surgery cost her a career that was just blossoming. “I went into the operating room a celebrity and came out anonymous,” she told The Mirror in 2012. “It was the nose job from hell. I’ll always be this once-famous actress nobody recognizes because of a nose job.” It’s really sad when you think about it, who knows where her career could have gone if she kept her Dirty Dancing look.
7. JENNIFER GREY WAS 26 AT THE TIME
She may have looked really young, but Jennifer Grey was 26 at the time that they made Dirty Dancing. Patrick Swayze’s character was in his 20s, but Baby was just a teen. Scandalous, right? It is if you really think about it. Producers weren’t convinced that she could play a teenager. Part of her audition consisted of the producers giving her roughly five minutes to show them that she could play the character of a girl in high school. If you want the video, it’s pretty cute how she went about auditioning for her role. The producers hired her after all so she must have convinced them she could play the role. It took her less than 5 minutes to convince them that she actually was 16.
6. JENNIFER GREY HAS DANCING IN HER GENES
We have often wondered how Jennifer Grey ended up looking so flawless in the movie. It was like she had been born to be a dancer. We are well aware that there is always training and choreography involved when it comes to learning a role for the movie. Plus, Swayze was a dance teacher in another life, so he was probably helping the other actors out as well. We already know that Patrick Swayze was an accomplished dancer before he went into acting, but you may not be aware that Jennifer Grey also has dancing in her genes. Her father Joel Grey is a legendary and well-known Cabaret song-and-dance “phenomenon.” So, maybe she had the natural dancing rhythm flowing through her veins at the time.
5. PATRICK SWAYZE SANG "SHE’S LIKE THE WIND"
In the movie, during the scene where Johnny has to say goodbye to Baby, there is a song playing in the background while he drives away. The song was called She’s Like the Wind and Patrick Swayze sang the song. Bart Herbison of Nashville Songwriters Association International told the story of the song. “(Swayze and I) became friends in his acting class and discovered that we lived right around the block from each other. So, we became fast friends and started hanging out together. He was a very musical guy, and we had talks about music.
Swayze said, 'I have this idea for a song. I've been kicking it around for a while, and I can't get anywhere with it. Do you want to work on it with me?' I said, 'Yeah, sure. Come on over.'
So he came over with his guitar, and I was at the piano at my apartment. He started playing the same chords over and over: C to E-minor, C to E-minor, and he had these opening lines that I liked, which were: "She's like the wind through my tree/ She rides the night next to me."
4. PATRICK SWAYZE HAD TO GET HIS KNEE DRAINED
During the filming of the scene in the woods where they are practising balance on a fallen down tree, Swayze actually fell off the tree at one point. This poor guy dealt with a great deal of pain throughout filming because he recently had knee surgery. Instead of keeping pressure off his knee, he was filming a dancing movie. When he fell off the tree stump, his knee started to swell up. He had to go to the hospital the next day and have his leg drained of the fluid. He also twisted his ankle during the final dancing scene, so the guy definitely had some issues during filming. He didn’t dance again after Dirty Dancing until he filmed the movie One Last Dance with his real-life wife, Lisa Niemi.
3. JENNIFER GREY LITERALLY STUCK TO THE FLOOR
For some reason, the floor of the stage in the movie was recently painted before they started filming. That’s not good for dancers because it leaves the surface sticky which can make sliding elegantly around the dance floor very difficult. Jennifer Grey found that she was constantly sticking to the floor when she tried to do the turns required in the dance sequence. “I remember doing the big dance finale and they had just painted the stage and it was sticky,” Jennifer said.
“The paint would stick to my feet, so I couldn’t turn. All the extras were sitting around, just hundreds of people, watching you about to fall on your face.”
There were definitely a lot of issues during filming and it made the cast members wonder if the film was cursed.
2. JENNIFER GREY’S BOYFRIEND MADE THE NEWS
At the time of Dirty Dancing’s release, Jennifer Grey was actually dating Sarah Jessica Parker’s husband, Matthew Broderick at the time. The two were vacationing in Ireland after the release of the movie and while driving with Broderick, he crossed into the other lane and collided head-on with a Volvo. A local mother and daughter were in the other vehicle and they both died. Surprisingly, Broderick was only convicted of careless driving and got $100 fine. It was something that weighed heavily on Grey’s conscious and she had a hard time enjoying the success of the film because of it. “The juxtaposition of that deep sorrow, the survivor’s guilt, and then being celebrated as the new big thing just didn’t jibe. It didn’t feel good to be the toast of the town.”
1. JENNIFER GREY STEPPED AWAY FROM ACTING
Survivor’s guilt is a pretty serious thing and even though she wasn’t the one responsible for the tragedy, she was in the car. Obviously, the relationship between her and Broderick didn’t last, but she also felt the need to step away from the spotlight until she could deal with what happened to her. She stepped away from acting for a few years and when she came back, it was after the plastic surgery nightmare, so her fame was never quite the same as it was back then. She got a taste of being America’s sweetheart and it all disappeared for her.
“I’ve made changes in my life when I realized I don’t want to live a certain way anymore.
So, I’ve eliminated people from my life because they’re too negative.”