“Last year I managed to scratch off Singapore, India and Taiwan in one weekend,” he said.įor some fans, passion for the film leads to petty crime. Richardson keeps a list of the different countries fans have come from, and it grows every summer. “I cannot believe I am here, in this place,” someone from Chile wrote recently. A quiet reminder that time passes and carries everything along with it. To sit in the gazebo and stare out at the lake bed when it’s shrouded in early morning fog is profound somehow, and humbling. The boathouse and pier leading to the now-dry ground where the lake lift was filmed is off to the right. Swayze, who died in 2009 of pancreatic cancer at the age of 57. Today, beside the gazebo is a stone memorial to Mr. Several scenes were shot there, overlooking the water.
#Mountain lake dirty dancing location movie#
There’s a gazebo on the grounds that locals say was built for the movie by engineering students from Virginia Tech. That is certainly not the sight “Dirty Dancing” fans expect to see, but it’s eerily beautiful. Now experts are trying to nudge it gently back to life, but when I was there in early April it was about as empty as a lake can be. Mountain Lake is a rare geological specimen that, a video on the lodge’s website explains, drains itself once in a long while as a sort of purifying exercise, eventually refilling naturally. Now, though, the lodge overlooks a dry lake bed. In the movie, when you see “Kellerman’s,” you see a lovely lake in front of the lodge, vacationers enjoying the water. But you get a consolation prize: Anyone who wants to re-create that scene on hallowed ground associated with the movie, as many fans do, is going to have to go to Lake Lure.
The defining scene was shot at Mountain Lake in Virginia. Bergstein’s recollection was correct: a sketch from his collection of story boards for the movie, labeled “Baby Does Lift in Water.” A doodle on the left side of that drawing indicates the pier at the Virginia lake, and a tiny symbol shows the placement of the camera, aimed at the spot where the actors stood on wooden platforms that had been sunk into the water and were held down with concrete blocks. And after some digging he came up with what he said was definitive proof that Ms. But 30-year-old memories can be squishy, so she had me seek confirmation from David Chapman, the production designer for the film. Bergstein said she was quite sure the lake lift was shot at the Virginia location.
So which state’s version of events is accurate? Ms. That was provided by a dilapidated former boys camp in Lake Lure, N.C., where there was no active resort business to get in the way of filming. Moviemaking, though, is a disruptive process, so she also needed a second location where the crew could have more time and latitude. Bergstein wanted a setting that conveyed the grandeur that Catskill resorts were known for in the middle of the last century, and the Mountain Lake Lodge certainly did that. The current lodge was built in the 1930s, and the property also has an assortment of cabins and other buildings. Eleanor Bergstein, who wrote the movie and was one of its producers, told me that the reasons were partly monetary: “Dirty Dancing” was made on a shoestring and New York State’s work rules would have made it expensive to film there.Īnd so the first sight of “Kellerman’s,” an impressive stone building, is actually the Mountain Lake Lodge, which sits six miles up one of the most winding roads you’ll ever drive in Pembroke, Va., about 60 miles west of Roanoke. ‘The Mountain Lake basin is absolutely unique, not only in Appalachia but in the entire world.The fictional resort of the film, Kellerman’s, is inspired by Grossinger’s, the long-gone Catskill destination, but the movie was actually shot at two locations hundreds of miles south, at Mountain Lake Lodge in southwest Virginia and Lake Lure in western North Carolina. ‘When the lake drains – when it actually empties out – it cleans itself by moving sediment that has accrued in the bottom of the lake down through that rather complex plumbing system to actually make the lake bigger, deeper, and keep it clean. Jon Cawley, a Roanoke College professor, says on the hotel’s website: ‘This lake basin is the only one on the planet that goes through this sort of cyclicity and has this sort of plumbing system and sometimes mysteriously disappears to “self-clean.” The UK’s tallest Christmas tree is coming to Sussex and we’re so ready
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