Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights - Production

Production

Havana Nights is based on an original screenplay by playwright and NPR host Peter Sagal, based on the real life experience of producer JoAnn Jansen, who lived in Cuba as a 15 year old in 1958-59. Sagal wrote the screenplay, which he titled Cuba Mine, about a young American woman who witnessed the Cuban revolution and had a romance with a young Cuban revolutionary. The screenplay was to be a serious political romance story, documenting, among other stories, how the Cuban revolution transformed from idealism to terror. It was commissioned in 1992 by Lawrence Bender, who was rising to fame with his production of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. The screenplay was bought by a film studio, which requested several rewrites before deciding not to produce the film. A decade later, Bender decided to make a Dirty Dancing sequel, and the film was very loosely adapted from Sagal's script. Not a single line from Sagal's original screenplay appears in the final film and Sagal says that the only remnants of the political theme that existed in his script is a scene wherein some people are executed.