Peter Sagal is the last person you would expect to be an expert
on being bad. According to Will Doig, Sagal, host of the NPR news-quiz Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me, sounds like “a precise, well-informed newspaper reader
with an enviable vocabulary who doesn't do much of anything wrong.” Nonetheless
Sagal has written a book called The Book of
Vice: Very Naughty Things and How to Do Them. Will Doig spoke to
him about traveling to the dark side.
If you listen to Wait, Wait, reading this piece will be particularly fun because you
can imagine exactly how Segal sounds when he says things like “I had this, if you will, body
of knowledge about the porn industry that I found interesting, and
it left me, if you will, wanting more.”
In the interview Sagal confirms that he wrote the original screenplay
that became aforementioned film. The following anecdote, however, was not
included:
"Now this part is all third-hand, but my understanding is that Harvey Weinstein owned the rights to Dirty Dancing 2. People had tried to make this sequel for years, but always had failed for obvious reasons. Why would you want to see those characters together again? The whole appeal is that these people will never see each other again. But Harvey Weinstein said, "It's been so many years, make the sequel somehow." And somebody said to [Bender], "That script you have about Cuba, it's got some romance, it's got some dancing. Cuba's hot right now. Why don't you rewrite it into Dirty Dancing 2?" It was rewritten extensively.
If you've ever seen it, there's no reason you give a shit, but they recapitulated the plot of Dirty Dancing. And in fact, on IMDB.com, you'll see that I share the credit with a woman whose name I don't remember, and the reason I don't remember it is because it's a pseudonym for Eleanor Bergstein, who wrote Dirty Dancing, which was a heartfelt, autobiographical tale that she of course was very proud of. Eleanor Bergstein looked at [Havana Nights] and said, "I want nothing to do with this." So she used a pseudonym."
The penname was Kate
Gunzinger, which is also the name of the lead character of It’s My Turn,
a romantic comedy from 1980 starring Michael Douglas and Jill Clayburgh, leading
us to wonder, what would your romantic comedy pseudonym be?
