![]() ![]() Real people have to have abortions even as they're dancing and falling in love. Baby would be out working her ass off for Hillary and I hope that you will be, too." I had a video going around which I made for the 2016 presidential campaign that said, "Everybody wonders what Baby and Johnny would be doing now. I'm always concerned about things like that, but look, here we are. I knew that attitudes hadn't really changed that much, so I thought, It's great that it's here, but I'm not sure that all those attitudes have turned around in response to it. ![]() I was, and everyone told me that I was crazy, but I was concerned. When you were making the film, were you concerned that Roe v. You can make a film about true love and wonderful music and pretty dancing and sexy people, and have in it a lovely girl who ends up with a dirty knife and a folding table screaming in the hallway, and maybe you understand it. You can make a film, and only people who agree with you will see it. ![]() They grew up as Planned Parenthood babies-when they were fourteen, they went and got pills from Planned Parenthood, so they really didn't know. They didn't know, because if their mothers had had illegal abortions, they didn't tell them, and they'd never heard of it. I hoped they would know what it was like before there was abortion. I hoped they would learn not to take it for granted. What did you hope younger women would learn about abortion from the film? You mentioned that you had younger women in mind in particular while making Dirty Dancing. If it's in the corner of the frame, it will always go out. What I always say to people-since people are always complaining that they put serious moral themes in their movies that get taken out-is that if you're putting in a political theme, you really better have it written into the story, because otherwise the day will come when they'll tell you to take it out. None of these things will happen without the abortion, so I simply can't do it even though I'd be so happy to do what you want." So we lost our national sponsor. ![]() There's no reason for Baby to help Penny, for her to dance or fall in love with Johnny. The studio came to me and said, "Okay, Eleanor, we'll pay for you to go back into the editing room and take the abortion out." And I had always known this day would come-and that I could then say, "Honestly, I would be happy to, but if I take it out, the whole story collapses. Then the national sponsor, who was some big food company, saw the whole film and saw that there was an illegal abortion in it, and said to take the abortion out. The people who made it loved it, but we had no support at all. There was no sense that it was going to be anything other than a crappy little video release. Shortly before the film came out, the studio thought it was the biggest piece of junk in the world, and that it was going to go right to video. What kind of pushback did you get around including the abortion plot? So I put very, very graphic language in, and I worked very hard on shooting it to make sure it was shown realistically. The reason I put that language in there was because I felt that-even with it being a coat hanger abortion-a whole generation of young people, and women especially… wouldn't understand what was. I had a doctor on set to make sure was right. I left the abortion in through a lot of pushback from everybody, and when it came time to shoot it, I made it very clear that we would leave in what is, for me, very purple language: references to dirty knives, a folding table, hearing Penny screaming in the hallway. If you're putting in a political theme, you really better have it written into the story, because otherwise the day will come when they'll tell you to take it out. Anthony, saying, "Oh, just remember, remember, remember." Worse than that, there were also very young women then who didn't remember a time before Roe vs. Wade," and I got a lot of pushback on that. Wade-what are you doing this for?" I said, "Well, I don't know that we will always have Roe vs. We talked about Dirty Dancing's abortion plotline and its reception, the activist potential of popular media, and much more.īROADLY: Why did you choose to include an illegal abortion plotline in Dirty Dancing?Įleanor Bergstein: When I made the movie in 1987, about 1963, I put in the illegal abortion and everyone said, "Why? There was Roe vs. Bergstein-who also wrote and produced a stage rendition of Dirty Dancing that's been selling out around the world since 2004-is currently hard at work on a new stage musical, and on a TV series based on her first novel about women, feminism, and politics in the 60s. In honor of Dirty Dancing's anniversary, Broadly caught up with the film's screenwriter and co-producer, Eleanor Bergstein, by phone to discuss the film's political themes. ![]()
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