Leaves were turning orange and red, and temperatures were dropping fast. Second, the movie was filmed in the fall of 1986. First, it’s all but impossible to jump from a muddy lake bottom, so a wooden platform was built underwater. Only the floor of the gym was salvaged it’s now the floor of the lobby of Chimney Rock’s Esmeralda Inn.įirefly Cove, too, is where Baby and Johnny perfect their lift. The large gymnasium that was here also burned down that was where the movie’s pivotal dancing scenes were filmed – Johnny’s mambo with his dance partner, Penny, at the beginning, and the iconic finale, where Johnny and Baby dance together. The cabins are gone today, having burned in a fire (and first having been picked at by rabid fans, who even carried away rocks from the foundations). Its red cabins served as the staff housing of Kellerman’s. At “Dirty Dancing cove”, the guide pointed out the hill above us, where an old boys’ camp once sprawled. On an October day, I signed on for a Lake Lure boat tour. It also remains deeply connected to the movie: in 2009, locals even launched the Dirty Dancing Festival, which draws about 2,000 participants each summer with activities including lift competitions and watermelon-carrying races. And, as I found one weekend, the second lake used is just as wet – and lovely – as ever. Luckily for fans, though, the movie was filmed in two main locations. But the lake outside the lodge, which features as a frequent backdrop in Dirty Dancing, has dried up its disappearance baffles even experts. The lodge’s rambling stone face, shown frequently in the movie, hasn’t changed much since the film was shot here. Mountain Lake Lodge, a 2,600-acre resort in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia, just north of Blacksburg, was chosen as the Kellerman’s stand-in. She should know: like Baby (in fact, her family called her by the same name), she had spent summers at an upstate New York resort with her family. When screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein was driving through the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and North Carolina, she noticed that they looked just like the Catskills. The entire film is supposed to take place in a single location, so the setting was key. It’s that it all seems to be ending,” the resort’s owner says to the bandleader – who, in another telling nod to the era, is the only black person with a line in the movie. Or from America’s angst, for that matter: although Baby alludes to the summer of 1963 as a kind of age of innocence before events such as President Kennedy’s assassination, the country was already in turmoil more than 978 civil rights demonstrations had taken place in 109 cities in the first six months of 1963 alone. The decades-old Kellerman’s Resort, lush mountains and placid lake couldn't seem further removed from Baby’s angst. ![]() ![]() She also helps a new friend get an abortion, solves a minor crime, stands up to her father, sheds her nickname and, as in any classic coming-of-age movie, learns that her family didn’t prepare her for life’s complications, and that how she responds defines who she will become.Īgainst so much turbulence (even turbulence sweetened with an implausible romantic arc, fun dance scenes and a catchy soundtrack), the film’s peaceful setting stands out. Johnny helps her see her own value (“Nobody,” he tells her father in the film, grabbing Baby to come dance on stage, “puts Baby in a corner”). She falls in love with Johnny, the resort’s dance instructor from the other side of the tracks. In that safest-seeming of places, Baby’s life changes. That’s where 17-year-old Baby, played by Jennifer Grey – who is bound for Mt Holyoke, the Peace Corps and, it seems, a lifetime of being a daddy’s girl – vacations with her family in the summer of 1963. While it was actually filmed in Virginia and North Carolina, the movie that launched a million slumber-party fantasies was set in a scenic family resort in New York’s Catskill Mountains. I’d come here on a quest to see the locations where Dirty Dancing was shot. It’s her ticket to the staff party that introduces her to a world of dancing beyond the foxtrot – and, of course, to Johnny Castle, played by Patrick Swayze. And the staircase, which we could clearly see as we bobbed in the water, is where Frances “Baby” Houseman, the protagonist of the 1987 film, carries a watermelon. But this quiet corner of the lake is better known by its nickname: “Dirty Dancing cove”. Our boat tour of Lake Lure, at the edge of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, had just pulled into Firefly Cove.
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