‘The Last Showgirl’ Writer Kate Gersten’s Intimate Story Was Built for the Stage — but Made for the Big Screen

Ten years ago, playwright Kate Gersten had a problem. She had a wonderful new script — about Shelly, a showgirl in Las Vegas dealing with the closing of her long-time gig — but nothing was quite coming together. The Roundabout Theater, which had developed some of her other plays, was developing this one, “A Body of Work,” but something was missing. A star.

A decade later, Gersten got that, and more. The script became a screenplay. The play became a film. And Pamela Anderson became the star of “The Last Showgirl.”

“I could never have imagined Pamela Anderson being Shelly, in all my years in New York and trying to figure it out for Broadway, for London, it was like, ‘We need a brilliant actress for this role who can transform into this character who has this degree of vulnerability and this degree of bravery and this openness. Who is this going to be?'” Gersten said in a recent interview with IndieWire. “We could never find the right actress, never. And that’s why it never happened [before now].”

And now? The film, directed by Gersten’s cousin-in-law Gia Coppola, has not only reoriented the entertainment world’s understanding of what Anderson is capable of as a performer, but it has also established Gersten as a screenwriter to watch. Someone uniquely skilled at bringing intimate character studies — the kind we typically expect to see on the stage — to a much bigger venue.

“It’s completely insane,” Gersten said. “Basically, every day when I wake up, I think, ‘Is this really happening?’ It’s been the most amazing, fulfilling experience of my life artistically. My life is so normal otherwise. I’m a mom, and I live in the suburbs of L.A., I have kids, and I’m just dropping them off at school and then going to write, and then picking them up at school and going grocery shopping and doing all the boring things that we all do as normal human beings in the world. And then this outrageously unique, special experience keeps popping up.”

Gersten is no stranger to special experiences. She grew up in New York City — “before it was anything, the ‘80s and the ‘90s when Tribeca was just a bunch of loading docks” — the daughter of a dancer mom (who later moved into advertising) and a stage manager dad. Both of her parents tended to work late, so young latchkey kid Gersten “would come home and entertain myself with my dolls and writing little stories and writing little playlists and things like that for us all to perform when my parents finally came home from work late at night.” She added with a laugh, “That was my childhood, it was just me making up shows with my dolls. That was it.”

The rest of her family was also creative: her sister is an actress, an uncle was a Broadway producer, another aunt was a dancer like her mom. “It was something that was in my blood to just be in this creative space,” she said. Naturally enough, when she headed out West to UCLA for her undergraduate degree, she was focused on theater, with an eye toward becoming an actress. But she loved all the other parts of production, too, from helping with costumes to hanging lights, and often found herself writing “privately.”

Gia Coppola, Kate Gersten, Brenda Song, and Pamela Anderson at the IndieWire Honors 2024 held at Citizen News on December 05, 2024 in Los Angeles, CaliforniaIndieWire via Getty Images

“I always wrote, I just wrote for myself,” Gersten said. “I felt like writing was too personal to share for a really long time.” She spent most her twenties acting, particularly in the theater, and slowly started to write her own plays. In 2008, her play “Exposed! The Curious Case of Shiloh & Zahara,” was performed by Stage 13 at New York’s Main Stage Theater. Things changed after that.

“I won this tiny little playwriting award from that, and a friend of mine was like, ‘You should apply to Juilliard,’ and I said, ‘I’m never going to get in there. They only take four people a year,’” Gersten recalled. She applied, and she was rejected, but she tried again the next year. Bingo!

“I just was like, ‘I’m going to get into this goddamn school,’” she said. “And I did! I got in the second year I applied, which felt like a miracle, and that really changed my path. They said to me, ‘If you ever miss a class for an acting job, we’ll kick you out,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, my God. OK, well, alright.’ I really put my acting self aside and just focused on my writing. In my third year there I wrote [the play] ‘A Body of Work,’ which [became] ‘The Last Showgirl,’ and that really changed everything.”

Gersten’s interest in Las Vegas was a residual obsession from her first stint in Los Angeles as an undergraduate. “Going to school at UCLA, we would go to Vegas, and it was just your average Strip experience for twentysomethings in Las Vegas,” she said. “But I was always intrigued by the shows, the shows were what drew me in. I liked the spectacle of Cirque du Soleil, I like the weirdness of some other things. It wasn’t until I saw ‘Jubilee’ in 2013 that I was captivated by the idea of the performers behind the shows and what life was like in Vegas.”

At Julliard, the Vegas connection continued. “I had this funny little job where I was writing the patter between the songs for this one-woman show, and we were taking over the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night performances of ‘Jubilee,’” Gersten said.

Gersten’s initial inspiration for the play that would become “The Last Showgirl” was multifaceted. “It was that experience of recognizing this thing that I knew, which was the backstage experience, the camaraderie between performers and the sisterhood between female performers, and the thing that I didn’t know, which was the lives of people in Las Vegas,” she said. “I really saw the same hope and desires for performers in Vegas that I recognized so well from performers in New York and in Los Angeles, and the love of the game.”

‘The Last Showgirl’©Roadside Attractions/Courtesy Everett Collection

But she was also obsessed with learning more about not just Las Vegas, but what it really feels like to live there. “It’s hard to recognize that the years are passing because the sun is always shining,” she said. “That’s something very intrinsic to who Shelly is. She doesn’t even recognize how old she is, because she has been doing the thing that she loves every single day. It doesn’t occur to her that time has passed, that the world has evolved. She is somebody who lives in her own fantasy life a bit. Her life in Las Vegas has been charmed, from when she was so young getting cast in this show and becoming a celebrated figure in Las Vegas and an icon of America in general, and that makes Shelly want to live in that space forever.”

During a fact-gathering trip to Las Vegas, Gersten made getting to know the showgirl world her mission. She spoke to actual dancers and performers, including the iconic Diane Palm (at the time, the company manager of “Jubilee”). Little details stuck with her, like how even on days when there were only 15 audience members in attendance, “There were still 85 women on stage, 45 people on the crew, and $1 million worth of feathers on stage,” she recounted.

“I went home after that experience and I wrote the play in a week, and Shelly’s voice just came to me,” Gersten said. “This is a decade before Pamela came into the picture, a decade before I could have even imagined her in the role. I didn’t even have her on my mental radar when I wrote the play, but the voice of Shelly really was the voice of Pamela, that it had that wonder to it and that innocence and that sweetness. I really like to think that characters just knock on the back of my head. It’s like, ‘Oh, hi, I’m right here, and I have a lot to say, and I’d like to come in and tell you everything. Can you get your computer out?’ That really was my process with this project.”

“A Body of Work” had been in various stages of development for years when COVID hit in early 2020. “I put the play in a drawer because it was COVID and all the options for Broadway and for the West End had dried up,” Gersten said. “And I was like, ‘Gosh, I think this is a worthy story, and I sure hope that somebody sees it one day, but I don’t know if that’ll ever happen, and that’s too bad. I am going to move on to whatever’s next.’”

But Gersten’s husband — fellow writer Matthew Shire, whom she met while they were both staff writers on “Mozart in the Jungle” — couldn’t let it go so easily. Knowing that his cousin, filmmaker Gia Coppola, also had an interest in Las Vegas, Shire recommended that Coppola read Gersten’s play. (Shire is also a credited co-executive producer on the film, which was produced by his half-brother Robert Schwartzman; it’s always a family affair with the Coppola clan.)

“She said, ‘Hey, have you ever thought about adapting this play into a feature? I really love this play. I love the characters. I love the mother-daughter relationship, that resonates with me a lot,’” Gersten recalled.

She had thought about that. She’d more than thought about it. “And I said, ‘You know what? I actually have a film script that I have in another drawer that I was saving until after I saw the play come to life.’ And she was like, ‘Well, can I read it?'” she said.

‘The Last Showgirl’Utopia

Coppola’s reaction to Gersten’s own early screenplay was somewhat unexpected: she missed how intimate the play was. “I had really adapted the play into a screenplay that felt more like a movie, it was just a big movie or a larger movie than the play was,” Gersten said. “But she really wanted something super-intimate and the play was that, and so I reexamined the adaptation and was able to bring back more of the scenes from the play. Our process of envisioning it as a feature came so deeply from character and the characters that were written in the play.”

That reverting the story to its more intimate roots was Coppola’s big ask still makes Gersten emotional. “As a playwright, for a film director to say, ‘Can you make it more like your play?’ It’s insane. It’s like the thing that any playwright would ever love to hear,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I already love you because you’re my cousin-in-law, but I love you even more now because I feel like you witnessed my artist soul.’”

And Coppola, who previously co-wrote her features “Palo Alto” and “Mainstream,” was all too happy to let Gersten’s artistic soul shine through, long after other directors would have asked other screenwriters to let go.

“I said to her, ‘My only thing that I really want out of this is that I don’t want anyone else to touch the script ever. I want to write all the ADR lines. I want to write everything,’ and she was like, ‘Oh, no, that is great. I just want you to touch the script, too,'” Gersten said. “We really had that kind of a collaboration that was so fulfilling for everybody involved. I think everyone in the whole movie was working at the best of their abilities in every way and bringing so much to the table. It was just such a personal endeavor for everybody involved.”

She’s not kidding. During production, the entire cast and crew lived together (and shot together) at the Rio Hotel and Casino. “We were living and working together in a way that [reminded me more of] theater, it really was a special experience for everyone,” she said. “Everyone related to the story in some way, from Pamela to Dave [Bautista] and Jamie [Lee Curtis], and people recognizing people that they knew in real life. All of our PAs were from Las Vegas and they were really moved that there was a story about people in Las Vegas that they hadn’t seen before. Most stories about Las Vegas are about people gambling in the casino or not people who are actually from there, or stories that are real, the human experience in Las Vegas.”

When the film premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, it instantly launched Anderson into the kind of awards conversation she’d never previously been part of (so far, she’s been nominated at the Golden Globes and the Gothams, while also picking up a pile of awards from various critics’ groups). That’s been most thrilling for Gersten.

‘The Last Showgirl’Courtesy of Roadside Attractions

“It’s the ultimate validation as a writer who is somebody who is driven by character,” she said. “Shelly is a role that I’ve always known was a really great character, and I always hoped that whoever played this role would be recognized in some way because I believed in this character and her messiness and her openness.”

Even now, Gersten draws inspiration from both Shelly and the actress who finally brought her to vivid life. “Pamela has this incredible saying: ‘Staying soft through it all is the real rebel move,'” Gersten said. “I feel like Shelly is someone who will ultimately stay soft through all the challenges that life is throwing at her, and that life will continue to throw at her, that’s just who she is, and it’s staying open and emotionally not hardening, not becoming calcified by life as a protective shell. That is something that I’ve always felt was indicative of Shelly’s character. And so for her to be recognized in this role means the world to me. … It means everything I could have ever hoped.”

Gersten is keeping busy, with plenty of irons in the fire. She’s working on a film about growing up in New York City in the ’80s, plus another feature she co-wrote with Shire, a pair of television shows she’s pitching this month, and something “small” she’s noodling on. She isn’t sure if anything will match the wonder of “The Last Showgirl,” but she’s eager to find out. “This is such a magical experience, I don’t know if it’ll ever happen again, but I am excited to write more features,” she said. “I love television, but I do love features so much and can’t wait to make another one.”

Roadside Attractions will release “The Last Showgirl” in theaters on Friday, January 10.