#Movie dirty dancing location movie

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.

#Movie dirty dancing location movie

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 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.