Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) Read Online Free Page A

work for them (‘It made me so mad!’ she wails, still just as infuriated today as she was three decades ago). During the making of that film, Bergstein included a dance sequence inspired by the kind of dancing she used to do with her friends when growing up in Brooklyn, but it was ultimately cut. This was fortunate for two reasons: one, just the thought of Michael Douglas dirty dancing is faintly traumatising; and, two, this then made her determined to write a movie that foregrounded the dancing. After a few years, she wrote the story of a young woman known as Baby (Jennifer Grey) who goes to a holiday camp in the Catskills with her parents and sister in the summer of 1963 and falls in love with the dance instructor, Johnny (Patrick Swayze).
    After having endured so much studio scepticism about the film, Bergstein has become pretty hardened to critics misunderstanding and dismissing her film. Proving author William Goldman’s adage that no one knows anything in the film business, one producer said before the film was released that it was so bad they should just burn the negatives and collect the insurance money, and, hundreds of millions of pounds later, Bergstein laughs at the memory. But there are two comments she frequently hears that drive her crazy: ‘I hate it when people describe Baby as an Ugly Duckling, because Jennifer [Grey]’s beautiful, obviously. I also can’t stand it when people describe it as a Cinderella story, because all Cinderella ever did was sit on her rump!’
    Baby definitely does a lot more with her rump than just sit on it. When the film opens she is reading a book about economic development because she’s going to major in the economics of underdeveloped countries – not English literature, she impatiently corrects a condescending suitor – and join the Peace Corps. ‘Our Baby’s going to save the world!’ her proud father, Dr Houseman (the delightfully eyebrowed Jerry Orbach), boasts to the folk at Kellerman’s, the (not very subtly Jewish) holiday camp ( Dirty Dancing is easily the most Jewish eighties teen film, which is probably another reason it is so close to my own Jewish heart. As Bergstein says, ‘You just have to know how to spot the clues’).
    But until she can save the world, Baby sets about saving everyone she meets. Grey is perfect as a naïve and idealistic but likeable teenager, one who is determined to help the poor and downtrodden, and yet has no concept of what life is like for anyone who is anything other than Jewish fn1 and middle class (another probable reason why I found it so easy to relate to this film so much). She is repulsed by the disdainful manner with which the holiday camp’s bosses treat the (Catholic) working-class entertainment staff, and she is horrified when she realises her father is just as big a snob. When she learns that the dance instructor Penny (Cynthia Rhodes fn2 ) is pregnant with the waiter Robbie’s (Max Cantor fn3 ) baby, she tells Robbie to pay for Penny’s abortion. When he refuses, she gets the money herself. When Johnny needs someone to stand in for Penny for the dance routine, Baby offers herself. When Penny’s abortion is botched, she gets her father to step in.
    Baby doesn’t understand the lower-middle-class world in which Johnny and Penny live, a world in which one can easily lose one’s dreams in a snap, but she doesn’t judge. Baby is a great film heroine. As Johnny says, Baby looks at the world and thinks she can make it better, and at first he finds this irritating and dismisses her as a ‘Little Miss Fix-It’. But it’s also what makes him fall for her: when she messes up the dance and misses the lift, she improvises and they get away with it. ‘That is when Johnny falls in love with her,’ says Bergstein. ‘Because he sees how she always wants to make it better, and she shows him that she can.’
    She is just as determined when it comes to getting what she wants in her own life, and what she wants in Dirty