Yahoo Lifestyle Pamela Anderson’s Former Agent Tossed ‘The Last Showgirl’ Script in the Trash. Fortunately for Writer Kate Gersten, It Made Its Way to the Actress
First-time screenwriter Kate Gersten had one actress in mind to play the heroine of “The Last Showgirl”: Pamela Anderson. The problem was, Anderson’s then agent didn’t bother to forward the script about a 50-something Vegas dancer struggling to pivot to her next act.
“He threw it in the trash within the hour and never called me,” Anderson says of her former representative. “This was not an agent. He was just someone who brought me work for money.”
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Undeterred, the film’s director, Gia Coppola, tracked down Anderson’s son Brandon through mutual friends, and he promised to pass the screenplay along to his mother, who had largely given up on acting and moved to British Columbia.
“I remember coming out of my garden, getting a message from Brandon and sitting at my computer and reading it. And I thought, ‘This is it,’” Anderson recalls. “This is my opportunity to pour my entire life experience into something, a woman who is so well written, well rounded, flawed, interesting, complex. It was just a breathtaking piece of work. I’ve never had that feeling before.”
Less than a year later, Anderson was shooting the movie that finds her in the thick of the awards-season conversation for the first time in her iconic career, landing Golden Globes and SAG best actress nominations. Much of the credit for that unexpected metamorphosis goes to Gersten, who muscled her way into a subgenre — the topless temptation — once dominated by men. From Joe Eszterhas’ “Showgirls” to Andrew Bergman’s “Striptease,” those movies offered little insight into the inner life of objectified female dancers. But Gersten — whose family includes a modern dancer mother, a Broadway stage manager father and Public Theater founder uncle — was determined to humanize their experience.
Sitting behind a messy desk in her Los Angeles home, where a cold cup of ramen noodles shares space with her laptop, the mother of two young sons offers a glimpse into her own psyche and the origins for her breakout effort.
“Having those people as influences was completely formative as a kid,” she explains. “The first Broadway show I ever saw was the 10th anniversary production of ‘A Chorus Line’ when I was 4 years old. That was the first backstage look at dancers that I ever witnessed.”
That kernel of an idea lingered and eventually spawned “Last Showgirl.” As she matured, she filled in the blanks as a dancer herself, performing in the Joffrey Ballet’s “The Nutcracker” for years before bridging the stage experience with writing as a Juilliard grad student.
“Dancing feels like an incredible way of self-expression,” she says. “Money is not really a [motivator]. You’re never going to be rich or famous as a dancer no matter how brilliant you are.”
And her professors at Juilliard — particularly renowned playwrights Marsha Norman and Christopher Durang — drilled into her the importance of drawing on the personal.
After graduating from Juilliard, Gersten landed a writing gig in Las Vegas on a hip one-woman show that shared a theater with the famed “Jubilee!” revue in its final days. Gersten checked out the old-fashioned spectacular with a cast of 85 women and a crew of 45 people and was shocked to find only 15 people in the audience.
“I was really struck. What are their lives? I could see the writing on the wall that their show was going to close,” she remembers. “And all these workers who had been doing the same thing since they were 18 years old and suddenly didn’t have the education and the skills to have evolved in the industry were thus sent away and put out. So, I really saw this story as a story of American job loss. These are stories of women, and we usually are seeing stories like this of men — the coal or auto industry workers. This really was about aging as a woman.”
Like a reporter, she interviewed the “Jublilee!” dancers and company manager to begin sketching out their lives during a societal inflection point. She then synthesized their stories and her own lived experience into a stage play that centers on an idealistic single mother named Shelly, whose career path drives a wedge between her and her daughter. Gersten developed it for a year at the Roundabout Theatre in New York. Bigger players took notice, and “The Last Showgirl” appeared to be headed to Broadway or the West End until COVID hit. She put the play in a drawer and began to move on until Coppola read it and asked her to adapt it into a feature.
“We started searching for Shelly, and it was like kismet that Pamela’s documentary [‘Pamela, A Love Story’] had just been released on Netflix, and she had that openness and that vulnerability and that wonder that Shelly has. These two [women] really felt aligned in so many ways. And Pamela felt so connected to Shelly the first time she read the script.”
For Anderson, who had just ended a Broadway run playing Roxy in “Chicago,” the fact that the story’s genesis could be traced to the stage was a major selling point.
“It felt like a play to me,” notes the “Baywatch” actress, who is now represented by a top CAA team led by Kevin Huvane. “And I felt I’m going to tackle this like I would a play.”
The film shot in 18 days in 2023 on a budget just under $2 million. During its awards-qualifying debut weekend, the Roadside Attractions film made $50,300 on one screen. It opens today in 860 theaters, with the “Last Showgirl” team hoping to gain momentum as Anderson’s comeback moment has become the feel-good story of 2024.
In fact, Anderson’s reclamation of her career parallels a pivotal scene in the film. In the middle of a humiliating audition process, Shelly realizes she has zero chance of being hired. With nothing to lose, she tells the bored male producer: “I’m 57 and I’m beautiful, you son of a bitch.”
Says Gersten: “That audition scene is society saying, ‘Woman, go away. Your time is up.’ And a woman saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no, that’s not right. Go fuck yourself.’”
That paradigm reverberates well beyond Shelly and even Anderson. Adds Gersten: “This is a moment when women are going to bite back. I don’t think we’re going to take any of this lying down.”
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