BROADLY: Why did you choose to include an illegal abortion plotline in Dirty Dancing?
Eleanor Bergstein: When I made the movie in 1987, about 1963, I put in the illegal abortion and everyone said, "Why? There was Roe vs. Wade—what are you doing this for?" I said, "Well, I don't know that we will always have Roe vs. Wade," and I got a lot of pushback on that. Worse than that, there were also very young women then who didn't remember a time before Roe vs. Wade, so for them I was like Susan B. Anthony, saying, "Oh, just remember, remember, remember."
I left the abortion in [Dirty Dancing] 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. I had a doctor on set to make sure [the description of the illegal abortion] was right. 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 [the illegal abortion] was. So I put very, very graphic language in, and I worked very hard on shooting it to make sure it was shown realistically.
What kind of pushback did you get around including the abortion plot?
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. There was no sense that it was going to be anything other than a crappy little video release. The people who made it loved it, but we had no support at all. And then we got a national sponsor. 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 [the sponsor] said to take the abortion out. 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. There's no reason for Baby to help Penny, for her to dance or fall in love with Johnny. 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.
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. And if they can, it will go out. If it's in the corner of the frame, it will always go out.