Dirty Dancing

The classic 1987 film "Dirty Dancing" is going to be remade, adding songs from the 1960s and brand new compositions to some of the original music, Lionsgate said Monday. The beloved coming-of-age movie, starring the late Patrick Swayze as smoldering dance teacher Johnny Castle in a forbidden romance with teenager Jennifer Grey as Frances "Baby" Houseman, will be modernized for a new generation, producers said. Kenny Ortega, the film's original choreographer and the director of the Michael Jackson concert movie "This Is It" and "High School Musical," will direct the new version, which has not yet been cast.

The classic 1987 film "Dirty Dancing" is going to be remade, adding songs from the 1960s and brand new compositions to some of the original music, Lionsgate said Monday. The beloved coming-of-age movie, starring the late Patrick Swayze as smoldering dance teacher Johnny Castle in a forbidden romance with teenager Jennifer Grey as Frances "Baby" Houseman, will be modernized for a new generation, producers said. Kenny Ortega, the film's original choreographer and the director of the Michael Jackson concert movie "This Is It" and "High School Musical," will direct the new version, which has not yet been cast.

If you want to do it right, listen up. First, there's the music--something that will create the mood for you and your partner. Then, when the moment is right, you start: Let your hips sway from side to side, your rib cage shake invitingly and your fingers slide suggestively over your partner's cheek. If things are still going well, lean your friend back and plant tiny kisses in a straight line from breast bone to chin. The moves, of course, are all part of the latest dance craze.

'Cabaret' Joel Grey won a supporting actor Tony for the 1966 Broadway production of "Cabaret" as the malevolent Master of Ceremonies at the Kit Kat Klub and the supporting actor Oscar for Bob Fosse's celebrated 1972 film version. 'Dancing With the Stars' Grey's daughter, Jennifer, not only won season 11 last fall of ABC's "Dancing With the Stars," she also was nominated for a Golden Globe as Frances "Baby" Houseman in the 1987 favorite, "Dirty Dancing. " Mickey Katz Grey's father, Mickey Katz, was a renowned clarinetist but was best loved for his musical parodies, such as "Duvid Crockett," "Borscht Riders in the Sky" and "Barber of Schlemiel.

What was it about Eleanor Bergstein's pitch for "Dirty Dancing" that got producer Linda Gottlieb's attention? What was it about the script that convinced director Emile Ardolino he had to do it? What is it about the finished movie that has convinced so many film goers that they had to see it? The answer is right up there on the marquee. It's the dirty dancing itself.

David Fishof, the man who put together the "Dirty Dancing" concert tour, didn't care for the movie. "It didn't do anything for me," said the New York concert producer. Fishof said the only reason he even saw "Dirty Dancing," which grossed more than $60 million at the box office last year, was because it was set in the Catskills, the Upstate New York resort area where he once worked as a waiter.

It's hard to have much compassion for a couple of guys dealing heroin. Therein lies the biggest problem for "Dadah Is Death," the interesting, but curiously flat and ultimately deficient two-part CBS drama airing at 9 p.m. Sunday and Monday on Channels 2 and 8. Dadah is the word for drugs in Malaysia, where two young Australians are awaiting execution for smuggling heroin, as one of their mothers mounts an international campaign to have her son freed.

Sometimes a show-biz enterprise that has little to do with the creative impulse but everything to do with the love of a buck can throw off a spark of life. Welcome to the "Dirty Dancing" tour, put together by the man who repackaged the Monkees. The shrewd calculation here is that there is a ready-made audience for a song-and-dance show derived from a hit movie and its two mega-hit sound-track albums.

Patrick Swayze has discovered that with huge success comes the feeling "everything is designed to help you sell out." He doesn't like the feeling. For years, the Houston-born actor with the Adonis body and good ol' guy face has been talking a true believer's line when it comes to the subject of artistic integrity.

A few hundred shrieking Patrick Swayze fans crammed Planet Hollywood at South Coast Plaza Village on Tuesday night to watch the star surrender his Size 9 1/2 "Dirty Dancing" shoes to the restaurant's movie-memorabilia wall of fame. Waiting for Swayze Fans chomped gum, guzzled beer, tapped their fingers, flicked their tresses, rehearsed screams and eyed excerpts from "Dirty Dancing" while waiting for the star to be limoed from John Wayne Airport to the restaurant. He was 45 minutes late.

There was a time in 1965 when Joel Grey thought he would throw in the towel on show business. He wanted to be Laurence Olivier but instead he was doing a dreadful musical in Jones Beach, Long Island, called " Mardi Gras" with the June Taylor Dancers. "It was out in the open air with water surrounding the stage," recalled Grey, 78, recently over lunch at one of his favorite eateries in Venice. " Louis Armstrong did 20 minutes in the middle. I played a comedy pirate. It was awful.

When Zac Propersi was 8 years old, his mom enrolled him in dancing school so when he grew up he would dance beautifully at his wedding. To everyone's astonishment, he loved the classes — and went on to become an amateur jazz, hip-hop and break dancer. Propersi met his future wedding dance partner, Taryn Livingston, in 2002 when they were students at Loyola Marymount University. "I had a huge crush on him," she said, "and one of my girlfriends gave him the word. " Propersi asked Livingston to the West L.A. school's 2003 Charter Ball and invited her to dinner first.

There is a four-minute clip on YouTube of the 1993 screen test of Romain Duris, one of France's most versatile, charismatic actors. He was all of 18, a student at art school who also was a drummer in a band and a pizza delivery boy. He was discovered by a casting agent standing outside his school one day. With his wild hair, snaggle-toothed grin and je ne sais quoi attitude, Duris already had star quality. Now 36, Duris remains disarmingly disheveled. He's earned three Cesar nominations, including one for Jacques Audiard's award-winning 2005 drama, "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," in which he played a real estate tough torn between his criminal life and his wish to fulfill a lifelong dream of becoming a concert pianist.

The residents of a North Carolina community where much of "Dirty Dancing" was filmed are planning a memorial service for Patrick Swayze, who died Monday evening of pancreatic cancer. The town of Lake Lure will remember the 57-year-old actor during a memorial service at 7 p.m. Saturday at Firefly Cove, a housing development that was Camp Chimney Rock when "Dirty Dancing" was filmed. Many of the film's outdoor scenes were filmed there, as was the cabin of Johnny Castle, Swayze's character.

Patrick Swayze, the actor and classically trained dancer whose role in the enduringly popular "Dirty Dancing" made him a movie star, one who struggled with the alienation of fame and against being typecast as a leading man, died Monday. He was 57. Swayze, who also starred in the blockbuster film "Ghost," died in Los Angeles with his family at his side, his publicist, Annett Wolf, said. Early last year, Swayze learned he had pancreatic cancer, a diagnosis that came two weeks after production wrapped on the pilot of "The Beast," an A&E series in which he starred as an unorthodox FBI agent.

As an original cast member of "Dirty Dancing -- The Classic Story on Stage," Josef Brown is no stranger to receiving what he calls an "ecstatic reaction" from theatergoers. Even if that reaction is, in effect, a borderline hysterical outpouring of audience adulation more in line with a Jonas Brothers gig than a musical theater production that has been running on London's West End since 2006.

After turning over its flagship venue, the Pantages Theatre, for two years to the popular musical "Wicked," the Broadway/L.A. theater series will seek to reconnect with subscribers with an ambitious 2009 season that will include the West Coast premiere of Broadway's "Dirty Dancing -- The Classic Story on Stage" (April 28-June 14, 2009) and the Los Angeles premieres of Broadway's "Legally Blonde the Musical" (Aug. 12-Sept. 6, 2009), "Grease" (March 10-22, 2009) and "Dr.

"Here's looking at you, kid," "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" and "Rosebud" are among the many memorable movie lines uttered through the years. But to countless women -- and perhaps more than a few good men -- they don't hold a candle to "Nobody puts Baby in a corner," which was delivered with swaggering perfection by Patrick Swayze in the 1987 romantic musical "Dirty Dancing."