Kenny Ortega Comes Full Circle To Direct 'Dirty Dancing' Reboot

Story by Mike Fleming on

http://www.deadline.com/2011/08/kenny-ortega-comes-full-circle-to-direct-dirty-dancing-reboot/



EARLIER EXCLUSIVE: Lionsgate has set Kenny Ortega to direct Dirty Dancing, the remake of the 1987 Emile Ardolino-directed film about a pampered young girl who summers with her upscale family at an establishment in the Catskills and falls in love with the resident dance instructor. It brings Ortega full circle, since he choreographed and came up with the grinding "dirty dancing" that made the original sleeper hit one of the most profitable independent films ever made to that point. The original, made by Vestron Pictures w, cost $6 million and grossed $213.95 million worldwide, and went on to be a big video title. Unbelievably, Vestron took so long to work out a sequel (some of it was cast salary and I recall Patrick Swayze asking $5 million and Jennifer Grey a comparable amount), that Vestron folded before the movie could be mobilized. Lionsgate first got involved when it released Artisan's 2004 sequel: Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, but it didn't feature the same cast and it tanked. Lionsgate is starting over.



Ortega, meanwhile, went from choreographing to becoming the director of TV series (he did two episodes of a Dirty Dancing TV series) before helming two hit TV installments of High School Musical before the third film was done as a feature film. He followed with the hit Michael Jackson tribute documentary This Is It. After that, he'd been set to direct Footloose before dropping out of that project and into a movie version of the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical In The Heights, only to see the latter film get dropped by Universal.



Dirty Dancing is a high priority for Lionsgate, and this one should move quickly. Ortega is repped by Paradigm.