Dirty Dancing documentary

I was on Skype talking to a friend in the very heart of Russia. She was getting ready for a holiday and had made some borscht. She wasn't sure how to explain what it was. I told her I knew---we call it borscht here, too. We don't really eat it, but the name is the same. We even had a Borscht Belt, I told her,  a series of resorts in the Catskill Mountains. Jews were barred from hotels and resorts, so they opened their own. I mentioned that the movie Dirty Dancing was set in the Borscht Belt. Then I was afraid that she would think I was recommending the movie and would think I was an idiot suggesting it, so I told her it was terrible, so don't watch it.

She told me she had seen it several times and liked it. I was embarrassed.

I had seen Dirty Dancing on TV years ago because one of my elderly relatives wanted to see it after it was recommended to her by a younger relatives. After talking to my friend, I turned it on again, and there were the '60's cars and the clothes and the setting---if the movie were Russian and set in the Soviet Union I would have been fascinated by it.

I just watched a documentary on Netflix about the making of Dirty Dancing. The woman who wrote the script was called "Baby" like the girl in the movie, her father was a doctor and they went to resorts in the Catskills like in the movie, and she and the other young people would hang around and they would do what they called "dirty dancing" and she was terribly good at it.

The director had won an Oscar for a documentary short. He had never done a feature film before. The short film had been about dancing, and that was how he happened to know that Patrick Swayze was a dancer---he left that off his resume because he also had a painful knee injury that kept him from doing it.

Swayze and Jennifer Grey had been in the movie Red Dawn together and she couldn't stand him, but he talked to her privately and she agreed to do  the movie. I should tell my Russian friend that. America's morbid, paranoid hatred of her country almost derailed a dance movie.

It's like every movie. They're so difficult to make, everyone involved in the production takes it more seriously than you would imagine.

It was bankrolled by Vestron which had raked in a fortune on home video. At the time, the studios just began to realize that there was money in videotape, so they started doing it themselves and Vestron had to start making their own movies. It was a low budget. They couldn't film in the summer so they had to film it in a resort in the South. Very short schedule. The director being a documentary guy meant he knew to keep the camera rolling to catch spontaneous moments like the girl annoying Patrick Swayze by laughing and ruining take after take.

The documentary talked about Swayze's death at 57 but didn't mention Jennifer Grey wrecking her career with an ill-advised nose job.

I don't know. It still seems stupid, but probably no more than most other movies. It was kind of a lady's film, so I hope that my disdain isn't sexist.