Hollywood [Smooth] Style or Dean Collins LindyHop
A fact many aren't aware of is that most of the 40's/50's black & white dance films such as 'Rock Around The Clock' were dancing Hollywood style because the style leant itself to the wide Panavision screens.
How Lindy Hop Moved to the West Coast
Lindy Hop did not stay in Harlem. Dancers travelled for work, contests, theatre tours, military service, and film opportunities. Hollywood wanted swing energy on screen, and Los Angeles already had its own active dance culture, including Balboa and other regional swing dances. When Lindy Hop reached Southern California, it entered a different ecology: crowded ballrooms, film choreography, camera angles, studio rehearsal, and a dance community shaped by both local tastes and the national swing craze.
The most important name in this migration is Dean Collins. Collins had danced in New York, including at the Savoy, before moving west in the 1930s. In Los Angeles he became a prominent dancer, teacher, and choreographer. He appeared in many films and helped make a smoother, more linear version of Lindy Hop visible on screen. His best-known partner, Jewel McGowan, is still studied by dancers for her swivels, precision, posture, and extraordinary control.
This West Coast version is often called Hollywood-style Lindy Hop, Smooth style, or sometimes Dean Collins style. The labels are not always used consistently. In broad terms, Hollywood-style Lindy often looks more upright, smoother, and more slotted than the rounder, more explosive image many dancers associate with Savoy performance Lindy. The follower may travel more clearly along a line, and the dance can feel especially polished in filmed routines.
It is tempting to draw a straight line from Dean Collins to modern West Coast Swing, but the truth is more nuanced. West Coast Swing does share roots with Lindy Hop and Southern California swing dancing, and Collins is part of that ancestry. But Hollywood-style Lindy Hop is not simply modern West Coast Swing under an older name. It was still Lindy Hop: swing music, swingouts, rhythm changes, and jazz-era partner conversation, shaped by a different regional and cinematic environment.
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Savoy Style vs. Hollywood Style
The phrase “Savoy style” can be useful, but it can also oversimplify. Frankie Manning himself emphasized that dancers at the Savoy had individual styles. Some were comic, some athletic, some smooth, some rhythmically dense, some flashy. There was no single official Savoy syllabus.
Still, dancers often use “Savoy style” to point toward a grounded, rhythmically charged, circular or rotational look associated with Harlem social dancing and Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers. “Hollywood style” usually points toward the smoother, slotted, film-visible line associated with Dean Collins, Jewel McGowan, Jean Veloz, and the Southern California scene. The difference is not that one is authentic and the other is fake. Both are historical. Both are selective. Both are shaped by who was filmed, who was remembered, who taught the revival generation, and what modern dancers chose to reconstruct.
For modern dancers, the most useful question is not “Which style wins?” It is “What does this music ask for, what does my partner feel, and what lineage am I drawing from?” Lindy Hop has always rewarded dancers who listen.
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Who Was Dean Collins?
Dean Collins (dancer)
Dean Collins (May 29, 1917 – June 1, 1984) was an American dancer, choreographer, instructor, and innovator of swing dance, best known for introducing and popularizing the Lindy Hop on the West Coast of the United States during the swing era.
Born Solomon Ruddosky in Cleveland, Ohio, Collins adopted his stage name early in life and grew up in Newark, New Jersey, where he began learning swing dancing at age thirteen from his older sisters. By his late teens, he was performing at major venues including the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, New York, and earned recognition as "Dancer of the Year" from New Yorker magazine in 1935.
In 1936, Collins relocated to Los Angeles, California, bringing the energetic East Coast jitterbug style of Lindy Hop to a region dominated by local dances like the Balboa and Camel Hop; his smoother, slotted variation quickly gained prominence at ballrooms such as Casino Gardens. Over the next decades, he appeared in more than thirty Hollywood films, including Hellzapoppin' (1941) and Buck Privates (1941), and choreographed dance sequences in numerous others, such as Let's Make Music (1939), helping to embed swing dance in American popular culture. Collins's long-term partner, Jewel McGowan, collaborated with him for eleven years, and together they were dubbed the "Fred and Ginger of Lindy Hop" for their polished performances; his style, often called Hollywood-style or Dean Collins-style Lindy Hop, emphasized smooth movements, tension in connections, and adaptability to various tempos, influencing later forms like West Coast Swing. In the 1950s and 1960s, he taught swing to celebrities including Shirley Temple, Joan Crawford, and the Andrews Sisters, as well as instructors like Sylvia Sykes, shaping generations of dancers in Southern California. He was inducted into the World Swing Dance Council Hall of Fame in 1989 and remains credited with teaching Hollywood how to swing.