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Save the Last Dance
After the death of her mother, Sara moves to the South Side of Chicago to live with her father and gets transferred to a majority-black school. Her life takes a turn for the better when befriends Chenille and her brother Derek, who helps her with her dancing skills.
2001 · Directed by Thomas Carter · 113 min · Drama · Family · Romance · Music · Screenplay in the scene database · 13 frames
Tagline
The only person you need to be is yourself.
Plot
17-year-old Sara Johnson, a promising ballet dancer in suburban Chicago, hopes to be admitted to the Juilliard School and implores her mother to attend the audition. She fails the audition and soon learns that her mother was killed in a car accident on her way to get to it.
Sara is wracked with guilt and gives up ballet. She moves to the South Side to live with her estranged father Roy, a relatively unsuccessful jazz musician, who plays the trumpet at nightclubs. Sara transfers to a majority-black high school, where she is one of a handful of white students. She quickly befriends Chenille Reynolds, a teenage single mother who is having relationship problems with her ex-boyfriend Kenny.
Chenille invites Sara to a dance club called Stepps, where she has her first experience dancing to hip hop rhythms. At Stepps, she dances with Derek, Chenille's brother. Derek is studious and responsible, something rare in his community. He dreams of attending Georgetown University and eventually becoming a pediatrician. Derek likes Sara, and decides to help her develop her dancing abilities by incorporating more hip hop into her style.
Plot summary from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA.
Crew
- Screenplay: Duane Adler, Cheryl Edwards
- Cinematography: Robbie Greenberg
- Edited by: Jeff Canavan, Fritz Feick, Peter E. Berger
- Music: Mark Isham
- Production design: Paul Eads
- Produced by: David Madden, Marie Cantin, Scarlett Lacey, Robert W. Cort
Cast
- Julia Stiles as Sara Johnson
- Sean Patrick Thomas as Derek Reynolds
- Kerry Washington as Chenille Reynolds
- Fredro Starr as Malakai
- Terry Kinney as Roy Johnson
- Bianca Lawson as Nikki
- Vince Green as Snookie
- Garland Whitt as Kenny
- Elisabeth Oas as Diggy
- Artel Great as Arvel
Production
- Country: United States of America
- Language: English
- Studios: MTV Films, Cort/Madden Productions
- Budget: $13,000,000
- Box office: $131,706,809
- Themes: ballet dancer, musical, ballet
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