Wikipedia describes it as a 1987 American romantic drama dance film written by Eleanor Bergstein, produced by Linda Gottlieb, and directed by Emile Ardolino. The Cambridge Dictionary of English describes it as ‘marked with dirt, mud, etc., or containing something such as pollution or bacteria’, and ‘to move the body and feet to music’.

But to a generation of young women and men who were dragged along too – it was the movie that introduced them to anachronistic exercise wear, dancing on logs, and the Borscht Belt. Most of all – it was the movie that introduced them to gyrating hunkmarket Patrick ‘The Swayze’ Swayze.

What many self-described ‘Dirty Dancelets’ don’t know is that Patrick Swayze – the ‘Baron of Bachata’ – was utterly unable to dance.

Filming had already wrapped on Dirty Dancing before this glaring continuity error was spotted. Every scene in which Swayze danced was identified as “mercilessly unwatchable” by industry legend and Dirty Dancing executive producer Allan Pepof.

“Swayze was a nightmare. He pranced around like a demented mantis. People were worried he had scurvy,” Pepof told me, “We got a warning from the MPA because the test audiences got motion sickness. If we wanted to recover the $4 million we’d already splurged, and more importantly finance my new conservatory – we knew we had to save the thing in the edit”.

So Pepof brought in the best talent in the industry – special effect titans Gerry Andersen, Ralph Bakshi and Ray Harryhausen. The harem put their legendary noggins together and threw everything they had at the project.

“Swayze himself only appears for 12 seconds of actual screen time,” Pepof explained. The ‘Johnny Castle’ we know and love was mostly mocked up with a combination of stop motion claymation and supermarionation – an artificial Patrick Swayze that the crew affectionately nicknamed ‘Bruce’ .”It took a team of four hundred Vietnamese teenagers to carefully rotoscope Bruce into the pivotal scene,” Pepof elaborated.

Despite the setbacks – Dirty Dancing went on to be a box office bonanza, and Pepof was able to add three convervatories to his Hollywood Hills palazzo. What wisdom does Pepof have for would-be filmmakers? “If your picture has two left feet: you can always fix it in post!” I’ll tango to that!!