In show business, dancing without pants on isn’t
just a last-ditch option for the broke and sexy—
sometimes, it can actually help launch a career.
Just ask Channing Tatum ([ 1 ] Magic Mike),
Salma Hayek ([ 2 ] From Dusk Till Dawn),
and for one brief notorious moment at least,
Elizabeth Berkley (oh, [ 3 ] Showgirls).
At their best, these movies don’t just
showcase miles of shimmery, be-thonged
skin; they get under it. Take 1997’s [ 4 ] The
Full Monty, a sweetly scrappy indie about
unemployed British steelworkers who find
redemption in a DIY-style Chippendales act;
it went on to garner four Oscar nominations,
including Best Picture, and earn nearly
$260 million worldwide. Or [ 5 ] Flashdance,
the story of an aspiring ballerina who also toils
by day in a Pittsburgh steel mill (welding is
the gateway drug, apparently?) and by night
on stage at a local club. Its 1983 release made
Jennifer Beals the girl with the most famous
off-the-shoulder sweatshirt in the world, and
spawned a soundtrack so massive it knocked
Michael Jackson’s Thriller from the top of
the charts. More important, the movie offered
a sensitive (if not exactly reality-based) por-
trait of a young woman finding her way in the
world, one pull-cord water bucket at a time.
Sometimes—see Demi Moore in 1996’s
[ 6 ] Striptease, or the wiggy 2010 Christina
Aguilera/Cher vehicle Burlesque—it’s just
camp coated in a thin, shiny veneer of third-
wave feminism. But filmmakers with serious
clout have helped lend the genre legitimacy,
and gratifying shades of moral gray. Steven
Soderbergh already had a rarefied career
when he turned Magic Mike’s well-oiled tale
of an all-male Tampa revue into an improbable
critical smash; EGOT winner Mike Nichols
directed Natalie Portman as an exotic dancer
with a memorable pink wig and secret in
the 2004 drama [ 7 ] Closer, earning her her
first Oscar nod (she took home the Golden
Globe instead). Not that every stripper’s story
is noble, or even notable, of course; but if
the higher aim of cinema is to tell universal
human stories, it helps, maybe, to start with
the naked truth.
says Lopez. “My shoulder and back are still recovering.”
Says Sapakie: “Jennifer definitely got some bumps and
bruises—we affectionately call them pole kisses. But she
wanted to look like an absolute master.”
Wu took pole-dancing classes on weekends between
shooting ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat, and found a legit tutor
in costar (and ex-stripper) Cardi B. “[We filmed] a scene
where she’s teaching me how to give a lap dance,” Wu
says. “She’s like, ‘Show me what you’ve got!’ So I try. She’s
like, ‘Honey, no! This is terrible!’ ” Now all that’s left is for
audiences to judge whether Scafaria’s tale of women on
the edge is, as they say in the trade, a moneymaker. “I
hope women see it and love it; I hope men watch it and
enjoy it,” says the director. In the end, Lopez wants peo-
ple to not just ogle but empathize with the Hustlers crew.
“Men weren’t interested in getting to know who these
women were,” she says of the strippers who inspired the
movie. “That would ruin the fantasy.” �
HEART
POLE
TO STRIP, PERCHANCE TO DREAM
A
N
D 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
By Leah Greenblatt
HUSTLER
: BARBARA NITKE/STXFILMS (3);
MAGIC MIKE
: CLAUDETTE BARIUS;
FROM DUSK TIL
DAWN
: JOYCE PODELL;
SHOWGIRLS
: MURRAY CLOSE;
THE FULL MONTY
: TOM HILTON;
FLASH-
DANCE
: STRIPTEASE
: EVERETT COLLECTION (2);
CLOSER
: STEPHEN GOLDBLATT
