Creative on Her Own Terms: How 'The Last Showgirl' Screenwriter Kate Gersten Finds Discipline Through Dance

Before she’d ever met a real-life Vegas performer, screenwriter Kate Gersten of The Last Showgirl approached writing with the same discipline a dancer brings to the studio.

“I always approached writing as a practice,” she said. A trained dancer in her youth, Gersten worked in plays and musicals in New York City and around the country in her twenties but would carve out time daily to write, just feeling through her words on the page.

Even now, after writing for TV series such as The Good Place and Lost Ollie, she still sits at her desk or in a favorite café each day and writes. “It’s what I do,” she said. “Even when I was not a professional writer, I just knew that I wanted to be creative every day on my own terms.”

That dedication found its way into The Last Showgirl, Gersten’s first feature film credit. Directed by Gia Coppola, the indie drama in theaters this month follows Shelly (Pamela Anderson), a longtime Vegas showgirl forced to evaluate her life and career after management closes her show, Le Razzle Dazzle. She, her coworkers (Brenda Song and Kiernan Shipka), and friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis) deal with changing tastes that demand raunchier fare in a town and industry that treats women as disposable, especially as they age.

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Meanwhile, Shelly navigates everyday life in the casinos’ shadow and delicate relationships with her stage manager ex (Dave Bautista) and daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd). Critics have called it “a poignant film of resilience, rhinestones and feathers” that “pays homage to the working class of Las Vegas with a superb collection of performances.”

Anderson, a former Playboy playmate who shot to fame in the 1990s as a sex symbol and Baywatch icon, earned a Golden Globe nomination, with The Hollywood Reporter calling her “transformative performance … undeniably affecting.”

Here, Gersten shares how inspiration for The Last Showgirl struck more than a decade ago and how the film explores what qualifies as art.

“A Giant Spectacle”

An alumna of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and Juilliard, where she studied playwriting, Gersten grew up surrounded by dance and theater. Her mother was a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company. Her father was a stage manager, and her aunt and her cousin performed as modern and ballet dancers, respectively.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the lives of dancers and what it takes to be a dancer spiritually...Everything is geared toward your dancing,” said Gersten, who trained in ballet, jazz, and tap. “The careers come to an end at a certain point, but you still love dancing.”

In 2013, while studying at Julliard and balancing various day jobs, Gersten landed a writing gig for a French-Canadian vocal impersonator who needed stage patter between the songs in her one-woman show. Celine Dion produced the show, which rehearsed in New York and opened in Las Vegas.

Gersten accompanied the show to Vegas, where she learned it had been booked to take over the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night performances of Jubilee!, a showgirl revue that had been running since 1981. Before it closed in 2016, Jubilee! was a local legend, featuring costumes designed by Bob Mackie and massive sets and production numbers, including one about the sinking of the Titanic.

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“It was very old-fashioned, but it was a giant spectacle,” Gersten said. “There were eighty-five women on stage, forty-five people in the crew and, like, fifteen people in the audience. It was really kind of a sad scene…but I was so struck by the women in the show, and I just knew there was a story there.”

Gersten talked with the company manager and several dancers. Some had performed in Jubilee! for decades and had just as much reverence for the production as when it was in its heyday. At one point, there were 160 dancers in each show, some of whom appeared in scenes in the Rocky franchise and flanked Frank Sinatra in promotional photos.

In The Last Showgirl, Shelly alludes to this history, describing a real-life American Express campaign that would fly showgirls around the world to photograph them in iconic places. She’s proud of the glamour and the costumes, including glittery chokers, sparkling pushup bras, feather headdresses, and billowy wings that keep snagging on the management’s cheap door handles.

Jubilee! and The Last Showgirl’s revue include topless performances (none seen onscreen), yet Shelly believes in this as an art form. The real women Gersten interviewed were adamant about that as well, noting this type of theater has roots in the 1800s Lido culture in France.

“It was this symbol of grace and beauty and stature and elegance,” Gersten said. “It really isn’t about the sort of sexy titillation that is anything like burlesque.”

Complicated Camaraderie

The Last Showgirl weaves in other threads from the Jubilee! dancers, such as the “out with the old, in with the new” mindset they felt was pushing them aside.

“They would tell me about the other shows that they had auditioned for and that they were very much hypersexualized,” something that Shelly’s younger coworkers experience. One in her thirties is dejected to learn she’s “not young enough or stacked enough,” to quote one bit of dialogue.

They also opened up about life offstage, which the film renders through chatty, profanity-filled scenes at the supermarket and Shelly’s modest apartment.

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“I love that backstage camaraderie and that family that you build when you’re in a show that’s unlike any other experience because you get very, very deep and very personal with people very fast,” Gersten said. “I really wanted to learn more about the people behind the performers in Las Vegas, and these people who’d been in Vegas for decades and made their lives there, lived in a very suburban sort of setting. The Strip is its own thing, but beyond the Strip is something that we just don’t know very much about if we’re not from there. People live there. They don’t just go to sleep when the lights go out, not that lights ever go out in Vegas.”

The film incorporates other parts of Gersten’s life through Shelly’s relationship with her daughter, Hannah. Gersten’s mother worked as an advertising executive after her dancing career ended, and while she and Gersten are close today, “she would go to Los Angeles or to London for weeks at a time when I was a little kid. And I did feel like I was second to her career a lot.”

Those feelings come out in Hannah, an aspiring photographer, who confronts Shelly about whether this “spectacle nudie show” was worth all the times her single mom left her with a Gameboy while she had to work onstage.

“If You’re An Artist in Your Soul … Be One”

The Last Showgirl began as a play that was “workshopped a million times and under option for Broadway, for the West End, for years and years and years” before finding traction with Coppola (Mainstream) and Anderson.

“It was amazing because it was, like, eleven years after I wrote the role, and she [Anderson] sounded exactly the way I heard it in my head,” Gersten said. “It was really wild to be able to experience hearing that character come to life. A lot of actresses that were reading the role had too much of a sense of a reality about them, or a hardness about them. But Pamela is vulnerable. She’s open. She has a wonder about her that was baked in and written into the character, and so that was just a match made in heaven.”

People might underestimate Shelly, but by the end of the film, viewers understand how she sees the show as creative expression. It’s never just a job to Shelly, who has a poster for 1948’s The Red Shoes in her apartment and watches films like 2013’s Afternoon of a Faun, a documentary about ballet dancer Tanaquil Le Clercq, who contracted polio in the 1950s. She urges Hannah to follow her dreams, too.

“I really believe, if you’re an artist in your soul, if you think of yourself as an artist, you’re an artist, and you should be one,” Gersten said.

That means honoring your craft. If you write, “make it a practice, even if it’s only twenty minutes a day, whatever you can make it.”

She once heard how we know what good writing sounds like and looks like; so even if you feel like you’re not at that level, “you will close that gap if you just write and write and write.”

Also, give yourself the freedom to find your characters. Gersten said she always loved what playwright Christopher Durang, one Julliard instructor, would say: “Don’t go backwards. Don’t edit yourself. Don’t analyze what you’ve done. Just write. Let your characters talk to you.”

The Last Showgirl is now in Theaters nationwide.