THE FANS' LOVE STORY: How The Movie 'DIRTY DANCING' Captured The Hearts Of Millions! (8 page)

Were they staying in a hotel there—some of them, some of the time?

Some of them. They didn’t stay there all of the time but most of the time.

Kenny Ortega was there. Patrick Swayze did not stay there all the time.

For the most part, Patrick stayed at Mountain Lake. We did have rooms in Blacksburg if he wanted to go to town and hang out at the college town there. He ate dinner there at a restaurant that is very popular that I worked in . . . and everybody else worked in at one point in time. The name of the restaurant was Maxwells’ . . . It was well known for its cuisine and that’s what those people were used to if they wanted real good food. They also ate at Charlos.

I remember Matthew Broderick was dating Jennifer Grey then. He came there and he stayed for a couple of days with her. The little girls in the dining room were taking everything he touched—silver, saucer, coffee cup, anything he touched, they took.

What about Buddy?

You gotta remember these were all young kids. What they had just seen was
Ferris Bueller’s
Day Off
. They didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to
Red Dawn
. They were just little girls. Patrick Swayze did attract a lot of attention there. He did without a doubt. There were a lot of people who definitely would want to see him, but all the younguns were more impressed with Matthew Broderick.

Anything else about Buddy?

He was just a real down-to-earth nice guy. I don’t think a whole lot more needs to be said than that. He was very pleasant to be around. He didn’t turn his nose up to you, which quite a few other people did. It is nice that he was that way. That is what people remember and appreciate.

What about anything else about any of the other people?

Well, other than talking with Buddy quite often, and Miranda, Jack Weston, Jerry Orbach.

Those were the only people . . .

Did you think the movie would be successful?

Quite frankly—no. I had no idea it would be as successful as it turned out to be.

Probably most people didn’t—right?

Well, number one, although we know it is a feel-good movie—very popular these days—when I watched it, I kind of thought well you know that’s a chick-flick. It’s pretty well done. It’s OK. I would probably watch Chuck Norris before I would watch
Dirty Dancing
. Granted, I did want to see it because I was just curious. It was nothing like what I imagined while they were filming. I even have one of the original scripts before they changed it to
Dirty Dancing
.

So why do you think
Dirty Dancing
is so popular?

That’s a good question. Other than the fact it is a real feel-good movie—the guy gets the girl in the end. I really don’t know. I didn’t think it was going to happen. When it came out, it was popular there for awhile. It seems like it’s been within the, I don’t know, the past eight years, you see it on satellite TV on about four different channels all the time. I was impressed by this time. I was gone from Mountain Lake for awhile. I spent ten years there, and I left for ten years, and I’ve been back for eight. I really noticed the influx in the past eight years of people coming up there for
Dirty Dancing
.

An increase, more people . . .

It’s really unreal to me. Buzz and I comment on that every time we’re done with a tour. Can you believe that people are coming here for this thing? And it’s a good thing for us.

Where do people come from? Which countries and states?

They seem to come from all over, from everywhere. I’ve talked to people there from Germany—who came there for that particular reason, and of course there’s been a fair amount of people from the UK there. But people from all over the country. Our regular based guest is generally from Northern Virginia, Maryland area. That’s our core of guests. I mean we have people from all over, but that is the main core. These people that are coming for the
Dirty Dancing
thing are from everywhere—Tennessee, North Carolina, Michigan . . . They’re coming from everywhere.

There are stories . . . The leaves were spray painted green? That’s true, isn’t it?

Yes, indeed. There are rhododendron bushes all the way around there. They have a really dark green leaf and in the fall, they’re turning brown and falling off. They came and spray painted them all green. They put a lot of cutsie stuff in there. They put little lanterns all over the place. They put in the little fence that we have there now. Awnings on the buildings. Fake rock was placed into the windows on the kitchen so you couldn’t tell there were windows there. Just a lot of neat little stuff like that, which was beneficial to us too. Other than that, they were fairly unintrusive. It was weird just to be around there because they had these huge, big screens to direct the light this way and that . . . It was quite a production. When we didn’t have business to do, we were out there watching this stuff. They would run us off when the filming began. You gotta remember we were the only guys who could come in there, as the police kept everybody else away.

What about those kerosene heaters?

They had kerosene heaters down under the tables (at the beach) because it was quite cold.

OK. So some guys were paid to have their ’57 Chevies sit in the parking lot all day?

Uh-huh.

Do you know how much they were paid?

I only knew one person who actually had a vehicle out there . . . There were other people who did. There was one guy who lived there. He was a waiter and he had a ’57 Chevy station wagon. You did not see it in the movie anywhere. But they did pay him. I think they gave him $20.00 a day, which was actually more than they gave to any of the extras.

What did the extras get?

$10.00 a day and lunch.

Note: Extras were expected to be available 12–14 hours a day per multiple sources.

They were all from Blacksburg?

All around . . . quite a large area, people from Beckley, West Virginia . . . lot of people from Roanoke. They were there from several surrounding areas.

That scene where it is pouring rain, and then Buddy breaks the car window so they can get in the car. So it really wasn’t raining?

No.

I didn’t know that. Honest to goodness.

They can do that stuff pretty well . . . we were watching . . . The hoses were on top of the porte cochere. That is the actual entrance to the hotel lobby. It is a covered drive thru—right off the dining room. Johnny was actually driving the wrong way as we use it today. So we were in the dining room just watching the whole thing.

What about other little stories?

I was in the kitchen when they filmed that scene. It was myself, with the chef and two other guys that worked there with us . . .

Baby and the nephew were going along there and they’re opening the refrigerator and he says, “Well, what would you like? Some cabbage roll, some this and that, some lime sherbet?” Well, right there is where the chef’s office is . . .

So we all said cut. And they stopped the whole thing and they actually weren’t happy about it but they re-wrote it right then and there and changed it so he no longer says lime sherbet because it was a refrigerator—wasn’t a freezer. That was our point. Plus, we were there for a reason. We had to cut off all the equipment in there. So we had to be in there to make sure nothing caught on fire or anything bad happened. Of course, we were in the chef’s office and it is full of liquor. So we’re imbibing a little bit. We had a few cocktails while we watched this transpire. They were filming at night because we had to cook in the morning. They had built fake walls in there, so it looked really black. We walked through the walls because we weren’t used to walls being there. They probably weren’t real happy by the time that night’s filming was done, but what can you say.

So did you see it when Penny was kneeling on the floor?

Oh, yes.

She doesn’t get a lot of attention.

Yeah, she doesn’t but that corner does.

Well, I had my picture taken there. I admit it.

That’s the most photographed place on Mountain Lake.

Are you serious?

I kid you not. Constantly, we’re bringing people in there to have their picture taken. When we do the tour, we turn the lights down in that section of the kitchen. And I put one of my carbon lamps up on the line so it’s pointing right down to where she would be hunkered down so everybody can get a picture just like it looked in the movie. That’s just kind of neat. A lot of people enjoy that.

Buzz told me something about the guy who stepped on Jennifer’s foot—like in the beginning of the movie when Penny was having them do the line dance.

Bobbie’s dad. A real nice guy . . . He was in three shots so for three days’ work he got $30.00. He has them all framed with a
Dirty Dancing
handbill in there. A real nice guy—loves to talk about his part in it.

Was the entire lift scene in the water done at Mountain Lake?

Yes.

What was it like to go to the premiere at The Lyric?

We all naturally wanted to see how that was going to go. Everybody who went was pretty excited about going. It was interesting. I thought they did a pretty good job of it. But I did not know that it would be what it is today.

Did they have the premier there the same time it was premiering around the country?

It was January or February . . .

So what do you think about the stage show? Have you seen it? If not, are you going to see it?

I’ve only seen the information that Buzz has brought back. It looks pretty interesting. If it gets a little closer, I probably will go see it. I would like to see it come really close by . . . I think it would help us a whole lot.

It would make sense to have it come close . . . wouldn’t it? It’s in Boston now, going to LA, and then maybe Broadway.

Actually, New York and Chicago are the closest.

So I think someone had to go buy stuff to put on the shelves in the kitchen to make it look like Kellerman’s.

We had to get everything of ours off all shelves because they put their own props up there—matzah flour, gefilte fish. We did sneak some things in there.

What did you sneak in there?

There is a can of Old Bay sitting on the shelf. There’s a set of ear plugs hanging where utensils would hang. I think A1. We were very mischievous in those days . . .

Do you have a favorite scene or a favorite character?

Naturally, my favorite scene is the kitchen part. That’s just because I was there. It’s one of the number one scenes as far as people want to see at Mountain Lake. They like to go down to Virginia Cottage and look around or they want to know what room Patrick Swayze stayed in and that corner in the kitchen . . .

So some of the people stayed at the hotel in Blacksburg. Was it a Marriott?

It was the Holiday Inn where you stayed in but at that time, it was a Marriott. Well, you know they had a lot of people. We just didn’t have enough rooms. That’s what it boiled down to.

That is really interesting. I never heard of that.

What about some of those other people—Eleanor Bergstein, Linda Gottlieb—sounds like you didn’t see them too much.

Most I saw them around is when they were filming in the kitchen. ’Cuz they were all in there. You know us kitchen guys were pretty much in the kitchen all the time.

I don’t know how many extras they had, but it sounds like you were cooking for a couple hundred people.

It was insane you see, because they would come in and say we need a walking dinner for three hundred people. Walking dinner means a sandwich—something you could pick up and walk away with. I didn’t have ten–fifteen cases of anything in there. We didn’t have three hundred hamburger patties. We were getting ready to close down in a month. We didn’t have a lot of stuff here. The best I could do was make big batches of soup.