Saved by the Bell, Showgirls
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$6 Million
"No movie influenced me more to go after my dreams than Flashdance. After seeing it, I took fifteen dance lessons a week. I cut all my sweatshirts. I did the 'Maniac' thing."
Anyone who grew up in the 80s or 90s will know Elizabeth Berkley as Jessie Spano from Saved by the Bell (1989-93). In fact, there's a good chance that she was either your first TV crush or your first fashion role model. The cast of Saved by the Bell defined American youth culture in their time, showing us how to dress, how to speak, and how to be cool. Looking back on the show you might find the early-nineties acid-washed jeans and neon tank tops to be a little dated, but at the time, Berkley was basically the middle-school version of Kardashian for her influence on fashion and style.
Always A Dancer
"I was raised really, really healthy, pretty much vegetarian and a very clean lifestyle, I don't smoke, I don't drink. I'm more addicted to the things that make me feel good, like endorphins after working out."
Elizabeth Berkley was born in the northern Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills to father Fred Berkley, a lawyer, and mother Jere Berkley, the owner of a gift basket business. Berkley took to dancing at a young age, auditioning to play the lead in Annie (1982), but ultimately losing the part to Aileen Quinn. Not to be dissuaded, she would travel to New York to train with choreographers and dancers in pursuit of her dream, featuring in a stage production of Swan Lake and other musicals before she was even twelve years old.
"No one can hand you anything as a dancer. You have to earn it."
Right away Berkley's devotion to her craft would pay off. She would become a model for Elite, the Paris-based modeling magazine, and win a part in the TV movie Frog (1987), followed by one guest appearance after another on various television shows. She would eventually find her way to the auditions being held for Saved by the Bell, the hip rebranding of Good Morning, Miss Bliss (1988-89). She was actually auditioning for the role of Kelly Kapowski, which she would lose to Tiffani-Amber Thiessen. But the showrunners liked Berkley so much that they didn't want to turn her away, and would actually write the character of Jessie Spano just to make sure that she had a place on the show.
Miss Bliss had been primarily focused on its titular character and aimed at an adult audience, and in its original incarnation never quite set the ratings on fire. However, NBC president Brandon Tartikoff felt that the show still held some promise, suspecting that it could be a hit with a new time slot and a new approach. First, he would put the focus primarily on the teen characters, and second he would air the show on Saturday mornings, attracting the ten-to-twelve cartoon-viewing audience. Finally they would move the setting of the snow from Indianapolis to the fictional Los Angeles neighborhood of "the Palisades," and replacing Miss Bliss would be Principal Belding, less of a sage guide to the young cast but an inept authoritarian and foil to the mischievous Zack Morris.
Tartikoff's rebranding of the series paid off, and before long the cast would be bona-fide TV stars. The show had four successful seasons plus multiple spin-offs.
Showgirls and Later Work
"Showgirls was a critical point in my life. I had my head handed to me. At 21 years old, I had to find my self-esteem again. It was a very hard time."
After Saved by the Bell, each cast member would find varying degrees of success in film and television. Mario Lopez, who had played the hunky AC Slater, found success on the USA cop drama Pacific Blue (1996-2000), Mark-Paul Gosselaar would also make his way to a police procedural, playing detective John Clark Jr. on NYPD Blue (2001-05), and Berkley would devote herself to a film career.
Her first major role following Saved by the Bell would be Showgirls (1995). On paper, the movie sounded perfect. A daring, big-budget NC17 film, willing to take a frank look at sexuality. It was to be directed by Paul Verhoeven, the maestro behind films like RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990), pairing him again with writer Joe Eszterhas, hopefully repeating the success of Basic Instinct (1992). She would be co-starring with Kyle MacLachlan, fresh off the hit series Twin Peaks (1990-91). It seemed like just the thing to make the young Berkley's career as a film star.
That would turn out not to be the case. The movie would turn out to be perhaps the biggest professional disappointment in the careers of nearly everyone involved. Eszterhas told an interviewer "Paul and I were coming off of Basic Instinct, which defied the critics and was a huge success. Maybe there was a certain hubris involved." He'd call the film "a terrible mistake." Kyle MacLachlan's reflections on the film weren't much more favorable, "You somehow try to convince yourself that it's going to get better... and it just gets worse." The film was a commercial failure, and today stands at a rating of 22% on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert gave the most glowing review of the film, suggesting that it "wasn't completely terrible," and giving it two out of four stars.
The good news is that the film has found a second life as a cult favorite along with movies like The Room (2003) and Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), with fans celebrating the movie for how tonally strange it is, how confused the character motivations seem to be, and the general absurdity of its plot. The worst outcome is to produce a film that is simply mediocre and forgettable, and while Berkley's big screen debut would not turn out to be the greatest film ever made, it is frequently cited as one of the worst, which is better than not being remembered at all.
Fortunately, Berkley bounced back. Her next role would be dubbing the lead character in the English language version of the anime film Armitage III: Poly-Matrix (1996), co-starring with Kiefer Sutherland. Throughout the rest of the 90s she would feature in The First Wives Club (1996) and Any Given Sunday (1999). Throughout the 2000s and 2010s she's remained busy largely in television, appearing in two episodes of NYPD Blue in 2000 with Saved by the Bell co-star Mark-Paul Gosselaar, and four episodes of The L Word in 2009. In 2015 she would be featured in a satirical Saved by the Bell cast reunion on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, reprising her role as Jessie Spano and poking fun at Showgirls, proving that, while it may not have been easy back in 1995, Berkley has since learned to laugh at the legendary flop.
"I don't think people have seen yet what I can really do. Only appetizers!"
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