Горы 40 лет назад: как курорт Mountain Lake стал съемочной площадкой хита «Грязный танец»

PEMBROKE, Va. (WDBJ) - Forty years ago this month, cameras rolled at Mountain Lake. Most of the movie “Dirty Dancing” was filmed at the Giles County resort. In this week’s visit to the WDBJ7 Archive, we recall our coverage of “Dirty Dancing,” and Mountain Lake’s enduring connection to the movie classic. The movie would become a blockbuster, grossing more than $200 million, propelling the careers of Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey, and entertaining generations of fans. But when filming started on September 5, 1986 it was a low-budget production with modest prospects. “What we’re doing is recreating the summer of 1963 at a Catskills resort,” a representative of the production company told WDBJ7. “It’s a coming-of-age story of a girl, and she learns how to dance.” Our cameras visited Mountain Lake during the six-week shooting schedule. We saw some of the period cars and the beach that was created for the fictional Kellerman’s resort, but we never got a glimpse of any actors in action. Mountain Lake was chosen, in part, because of its isolated location, and much of what we learned about the production would come from extras and hotel staffers, including Mountain Lake Chef Mike Porterfield who gave Patrick Swayze a ride to Blacksburg on the back of his 1983 Suzuki motorcycle. “He was a very congenial person. Didn’t put on any airs at all,” Porterfield told us in 2008. “But the funny thing was, he hopped on the back and grabbed a hold of these bars. Very manly. At three curves down, he got (grabbed) me. It was very funny.” Swayze, by all accounts, was friendly, interacting with extras, members of the film crew and the hotel staff. “And he went in the kitchen a lot,” Mountain Lake Resort General Manager Buzz Scanland said. “And in fact, he bought beer for them and so forth. And so they’d sit out back and drink beer.” Many had fond memories of his visit, and were saddened by the news of his cancer diagnosis in 2008, and his death in September 2009. “His nickname was buddy and he’s just the epitome of that,” Porterfield said. “We felt like he was our buddy while he was here.” A year after Swayze’s death, songwriter Franke Previte, who co-wrote “Time of My Life” for the movie, visited Mountain Lake. He donated handwritten lyrics of the Academy Award winning song to raise money for pancreatic cancer research. The cast and crew filmed the final scene first. “Time of My Life” was a late addition. And Previte told our reporter what Patrick Swayze said to him on the night the song won an Academy Award. “We all knew at that moment that was our song,” Previte paraphrased his conversation with Swayze. “And when we filmed that scene, at the end of the day, we looked at each other and went, oh my God, what just happened? Let’s go make this movie.” In the years since the movie was filmed at Mountain Lake, anniversary celebrations tied to the film’s release and theme weekends have kept guests coming back. “Everybody thought it was going to be one of these after two months, nobody would ever think of dirty dancing again and that’d be the end of it,” Scanland said. “And it was just a phenomenon that happened.” In 2019, an Australian television company staged a dance competition at the resort. A Fox TV reality show followed in 2020. And as the legend surrounding the film continued to grow, we also covered ups and downs of the water level in Mountain Lake, where the underlying geology has created some major fluctuations over the years. “But most of the guests that return year in, year out and say, they’re fine with it and they know it’s nature taking its course,” Scanland said. And 40 years after the filming began, the deep connection between a scenic Virginia resort and the popular movie that was filmed there continues to resonate in Giles County and beyond.