Dirty Dancing may take place during a summer vacation, but the shoot was hard work. For Patrick Swayze, the obstacles were physical: the actor had long had knee problems, ever since a football injury forced him to abandon athletics for acting. And, after the log-balance dance scene—for which Grey used a stunt double—he found that the injury had been aggravated. Fluid was drained from his knee and he was told to stay off it, but he didn’t listen. Not only was the shoot not a vacation, but it also wasn’t even summer. As the leaves changed from green to brown, set decorators went around painting them back to summer colors, according to the Swayze bio One Last Dance, by Wendy Leigh. But they couldn’t keep the actors’ lips from turning blue during their swimming scenes, filmed in a 40-degree lake, so there are no close-ups of their wet faces.
