Debut author Kate Gersten had an actress in mind to play the heroine of The Last Showgirl: Pamela Anderson. The problem was that Anderson’s agent at the time didn’t bother passing on the script about a 50-year-old struggling Vegas dancer to move on to their next act.

“He threw it in the trash within an hour and never called me,” Anderson says of her former representative. “It wasn’t an agent. He was just someone who got me work for money.”

Undeterred, the film’s director, Gia Coppola, tracked down Anderson’s son Brandon through mutual friends and promised to pass the script on to his mother, who had largely given up acting and moved to British Columbia.

“I remember coming out of my yard, getting a message from Brandon, sitting at my computer and reading it. And I thought, ‘This is it,'” Anderson recalls. “This is my opportunity to pour all of my life experience into something, a woman so well-written, well-rounded, flawed, interesting and complex.” It was just a stunning piece of work. I’ve never had this feeling before.”

Less than a year later, Anderson made the film, which puts her right in the heart of the awards season conversation for the first time in her legendary career and garnered Golden Globe and SAG Best Actress nominations. Much of the credit for this unexpected metamorphosis goes to Gersten, who broke into a subgenre—topless temptation—that was once dominated by men. From Joe Eszterhas’ Showgirls to Andrew Bergman’s Striptease, these films offered little insight into the inner lives of objectified dancers. But Gersten — whose family includes a modern dancer mother, a Broadway stage manager father and an uncle of the Public Theater founder — was determined to humanize her experience.

Sitting behind a cluttered desk in her Los Angeles home, where a cold cup of ramen noodles sits next to her laptop, the mother of two young sons offers a glimpse into her own psyche and the origins of her escape efforts.

“Having these people as an influence was extremely formative for me as a child,” she explains. “The first Broadway show I ever saw was the 10th anniversary production of ‘A Chorus Line’ when I was 4 years old. That was the first backstage look at dancers I’ve ever seen.”

That kernel of an idea stuck and eventually gave birth to “Last Showgirl.” As she grew older, she filled her own gaps as a dancer, performing for years in The Nutcracker at the Joffrey Ballet before combining stage experience with writing as a Juilliard student.

“Dance is an incredible way to express yourself,” she says. “Money isn’t really a (motivator). You’ll never be rich or famous as a dancer, no matter how brilliant you are.”

And her professors at Juilliard—notably renowned playwrights Marsha Norman and Christopher Durang—taught her the importance of drawing on the personal.

After graduating from Juilliard, Gersten landed a job writing in Las Vegas for a popular one-woman show that shared a theater with the famous “Jubilee!” Review of her last days. Gersten watched the old-fashioned spectacle with a cast of 85 women and a crew of 45 people and was shocked to see only 15 people in the audience.

“I was really impressed. What is her life? I could see the writing on the wall that her show was coming to an end,” she recalls. “And all these workers who had been doing the same thing since they were 18 and suddenly no longer had the training and skills to advance in the industry were sent away and laid off. So I really saw this story as a story about job losses in the United States. These are stories from women, and we usually see stories like these from men – the workers in the coal or auto industries. This was really about aging as a woman.”

Like a reporter, she interviewed the “anniversary!” Dancers and company managers begin to outline their lives at a social turning point. She then compiled their stories and her own experiences into a stage play centered on an idealistic single mother named Shelly whose career path drives a wedge between her and her daughter. Gersten developed it for a year at the Roundabout Theater in New York. Bigger players took notice and The Last Showgirl seemed headed to Broadway or the West End until COVID hit. She put the piece in a drawer and began reading until Coppola read it and asked her to make it into a feature film.

“We set out to find Shelly, and it just so happened that Pamela’s documentary Pamela, A Love Story had just been released on Netflix and she had that openness, that vulnerability and that sense of wonder that Shelly had. These two (women) felt really connected in many ways. And Pamela felt so connected to Shelly when she first read the script.”

For Anderson, who had just finished a Broadway run as Roxy in “Chicago,” the fact that the story’s genesis could be traced back to the stage was a key selling point.

“It felt like a play to me,” notes the “Baywatch” actress, who is now represented by a top CAA team led by Kevin Huvane. “And I felt like I was going to approach this like a play.”

The film was shot in 2023 in 18 days with a budget of just under $2 million. In its award-winning debut weekend, the film “Roadside Attractions” grossed $50,300 on a single screen. The film opens in 860 theaters today, and the “Last Showgirl” team hopes to build momentum as Anderson’s comeback moment becomes the feel-good story of 2024.

In fact, Anderson’s reclaiming of her career parallels a key scene in the film. In the middle of a humiliating audition, Shelly realizes she has no chance of getting hired. With nothing to lose, she tells the bored male producer, “I’m 57 and I’m beautiful, you son of a bitch.”

Gersten says, “In this casting scene, society says, ‘Woman, go away.’ “Your time is up.” And a woman said, “No, no, no, no, no, that’s not right. ‘Go fuck yourself.'”

This paradigm has implications far beyond Shelly and even Anderson. Gersten adds: “This is a moment where women will hold back. I don’t think we’re just going to accept all of this.”