Eleanor Bergstein - Shine Among the Others

Writer, producer and director Eleanor Bergstein got hooked early on writing and published short stories and novels. At the end of the 70’s she followed her passion for film and in 1980 her first script was realized: It’s My Turn with Michael Douglas and Jill Clayburgh, directed by Claudia Weill. Her biggest success followed seven years later with the script to Dirty Dancing, which she also co-produced. Among her many pictures she was a co-writer for Sister Act and directed her own script of Let it Be Me.

You started as a writer for short stories and published a novel before you began with script writing. Isn’t that quite a difference, writing a novel and writing for a visual set-in-scene?

Eleanor Bergstein: For me it’s a question of choosing my material. It’s a very natural transition; I always know when something is going to be a novel or a movie. I don’t make movies out of my novels and on the other hand I wouldn’t write about something I want to see and hear. So I don’t write about dancing in my novels, but I write many of pages of dance descriptions in my scripts, because I know exactly what I want to see.

You work as a writer, director and producer. What exactly is your artistic self-conception?

Eleanor Bergstein: Because I started out as a novelist where you are all that in one person, it seemed inherently unnatural to me, even if I had wonderful colleagues, to have somebody else in the middle of that process of telling the story to your audience. It just seemed to me that I had to be there for every central artistic decision. It makes you also much more open to the wonderful collaboration with all the people who know the things you don’t. You can be the person who accesses the best work that they can do and know that it’s in the service of the particular film that you are trying to make. So for me it’s just the more organic way to tell a story.

So it’s about not losing the authority of telling the story.

Eleanor Bergstein: Not authority so much as focus. It’s not about control or power. It’s about focus and being able to distill all the enormous talents of your colleagues into the narrative flow that will most circle back to your audience. That’s a very focussed particular experience.

One could think that scriptwriters are the most in demand people in film, because stories and good ideas are the capital of the film industry. Is this true? How would you describe the state of the scriptwriters in today’s industry?

Eleanor Bergstein: When I wrote my first screenplay for It’s My Turn, people said: "Eleanor, you’ll get on the A-List of writers with this." I wondered who they could be and then they gave me the names of about 20 writers I mostly never heard of. These were people who wrote scripts that didn’t get made, but after each script that was bought their price got higher and higher. For me that is like burying your work-time and stamping on it. It really doesn’t matter if they call you an "A-List-writer" - anything I write that doesn’t get out into the world is a sorrow to my heart.

But that’s one kind of screenwriter. Another kind is one who has gone to film school and is studying to see and to write exactly what everybody wants now. A third kind of screenwriter makes a lot of money for scripts that are made, but the minute they hand in the script, they disappear - and the script won’t be their anymore in the end. If you are talking about a writer who wants a work of the heart and spirit to get made, it’s not easier or harder than it ever has been. It will always be hard!

So for you the screenwriter is part of the whole creative process of the filmmaking?

Eleanor Bergstein: Yes, this is right for me, but it depends. I wouldn’t write a script unless I’m going to go with it until the end. But of course there are directors who take someone else’s script and make it into something wonderful.

What would be your advice to young writers who have good ideas and writing skills but no connections?

Eleanor Bergstein: I never had anybody who helped me just because we met. What you really need to do is find a story that is singularly yours, that only you can tell and nobody else and feel a great desire to share it with an audience. So when you write this very particular focussed film that is only yours, it will shine among the others. It will shine among the people who are just writing scripts to be famous or important. Next find the actors who could be wonderful for the main parts. Write them a letter; describe to them why you believe they could be wonderful in the roles. Start writing letters to filmmakers you admire. You will get an immensely better response than you think.

Many of your films are closely connected with "Sound and Music". What exactly does a script look like for a film like Dirty Dancing, where the music plays this important role?

Eleanor Bergstein: Starting with a script I really do begin with the music and do the music before I do everything else. Also with Dirty Dancing: I picked the whole soundtrack and then I dreamed my way through the story. The Wallace Stevens line behind Dirty Dancing is: “The greatest poverty is not to live in the physical world?. These are characters moving from outside to inside the physical world and there were two kinds of music, clean teen and dirty dancing, which is the deep sexual beat.

So it was inevitable to me that clean teen music, like "Big Girls Don’t Cry", is something that the character of Baby can’t feel in her body. It makes her awkward and convinces her she can’t dance. The first time she dances with Johnny, she begins to feel the rhythm & blues music and it’s her natural rhythm. And when you connect yourself to your natural rhythm, it becomes what you really are. All this happens through music and rhythm in the film.

So here music is not just a supporter of moods and emotions but part of storytelling concept.

Eleanor Bergstein: I don’t like a song to underline a mood. I know, what music costs and when I see something very expensive used badly, it upsets me. If you don’t put music and the scene into an odd relation to each other, so that it’s subtextually surprising, you are wasting musical and visual power. You have to keep yourself very honest when you use music to make sure, that you are not taking it to try to get an emotional effect the scene doesn’t deserve by itself.

Could you explain your role in the invention of the legendary dancing style in Dirty Dancing?

Eleanor Bergstein: I used to go to Dirty Dancing contests, I have Dirty Dancing trophies from those years, which, when you touch them with your hands, turn green because they corroded. The script itself has about 50 pages of dance descriptions. And every song is set with the lyrics against the dialogue. But even if there were these 50 pages, in pitches I had to get up on tables and dirty dance an uncountable number of times.