Still Reaping ‘Dirty Dancing’ Windfall, Virginia Mulls Film Incentives

A “Dirty Dancing” fan wears a movie-themed T-shirt at the lodge in 2022.
15:55 JST, February 2, 2025
RICHMOND – The 1987 cult movie classic “Dirty Dancing,” though set in New York’s Catskills, draws fans every year to the southwest Virginia lodge where it actually was filmed.
“We do seven ‘Dirty Dancing’ weekends a year,” said Heidi Stone, president and chief executive of Mountain Lake Lodge, which offers dance lessons and movie screenings, though no guaranteed summer flings with Patrick Swayze-level heartthrobs. The themed weekends sell out a year in advance.
Boosters of the state’s movie and television industry point to that enduring windfall as they try to persuade the General Assembly to increase state film incentives.
“ ‘Dirty Dancing,’ 38 years later, still produces over $1 million [a year] in revenue for Mountain Lake Lodge,” said Stone, who recently traveled to Richmond with a pitch meant to woo hard-nosed economic-development types as much as swooning Swayze fans: The movie has been a boon to all of Giles County, a scenic but poor corner of the state where the lodge is among the 10 largest employers.
Virginia has two film incentive funds: The Motion Picture Opportunity Fund, which provides grants; and the Virginia Motion Picture Tax Credit Fund, which offers refundable tax credits. Between the two, state incentives add up to $10.5 million a year. That money – already committed to projects through next year – is less than what most states with similar programs offer.
Of the 40 states with film incentives, Virginia ranks 35th. Regionally, Virginia lags behind Georgia and West Virginia, which have no limit on incentives; Pennsylvania and New Jersey, which cap theirs at $100 million a year; Kentucky ($75 million), North Carolina ($31 million), Maryland ($20 million), South Carolina ($17 million) and Tennessee ($13 million), according to International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Local 487, which is advocating for a boost.
A proposed budget amendment before the state Senate Finance Committee would add $5 million to the grant fund. Separately, two bills making their way through the Capitol call for increasing the money available for the tax credit, by $5 million a year in the Senate version and $2 million a year in the House.
The House version, sponsored by House Majority Leader Charniele L. Herring (D-Alexandria), advanced Wednesday from one House committee to another. The Senate bill, brought by Sen. Ghazala F. Hashmi (D-Chesterfield), has been in limbo since a subcommittee voted last week to ask state auditors how long it would take to study incentives.
Hashmi also sponsored the budget amendment, which the Finance Committee must act on by Sunday to include in its budget plan.
While their prospects are uncertain, the proposals are getting a warmer reception than those advanced last year, which sought to hike incentives by $40 million a year.
“Any time you have a film locating or filming in Virginia, everyone benefits, from your local dry cleaners to your local restaurants, even car dealers and things of that nature,” said Del. Terry G. Kilgore (R-Scott), who represents a district in far-southwest Virginia and had a bit part in “Big Stone Gap,” a 2014 comedy-romance filmed in that part of the state. “If you look at what Georgia and other states are doing, they are eating our lunch because they have a better tax credit system than we do. So we’ve got to get in the game.”
Still, skeptics remain. Not long after Steven Spielberg wrapped up filming “Lincoln” on the grounds of Virginia’s Capitol in late 2011, then-Del. Scott A. Surovell (D-Fairfax) took to the House floor to criticize the incentives provided to the film. Surovell did so decked out like his idea of a Hollywood movie producer – fedora, feather boa, diamond cane and phony Academy Award.
Despite some confusion about his costume – “Some people thought I looked like a pimp,” Surovell recalls – his message was clear.
“It wasn’t clear to me why a billionaire needed another $4 million in taxpayer dollars,” he said this past week. Surovell, now state Senate majority leader, still sees it that way.
“There are better ways to spend that to produce returns to the taxpayer, like paying teachers better salaries or other things,” he said. “And so to me, it’s just never been a priority.”
Those arguing for the incentives say they more than pay off, citing a 2022 report by Fletcher Mangum, past president of the Virginia Association of Economists, who found that in Virginia, every dollar of film incentives generated $13 in economic activity. The state does not provide the tax credit or grant until a third party audits the project’s spending.
The “Lincoln” production directly spent $32.3 million in the state and had a total economic impact of $68.6 million, based on its broader ripple effects, according the Virginia Film Office, a state agency. Among more recent movie and television projects, the office puts the total impact at $185.6 million for “Swagger” (2019-2022), $171 million for “Walking Dead: World Beyond” (2019-2021), $85.2 million for “Dopesick” (2021), $29.2 million for “Harriet” (2018), $45.3 million for “Wonder Woman 1984” (2018) and $217.2 million for “Turn” (2014-2017).
More than 5,000 creative professionals work in Virginia’s film industry, but hotels, caterers and other local businesses also profit, said Beau Cribbs, a spokesman for the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Local 487.
A flurry of lunch orders from the “Lincoln” crew, as it shot scenes in central Virginia’s Powhatan County for several weeks, helped keep the Cafe at Maidens afloat in its first, rocky year of operation, Roslyn Ryan, the restaurant’s co-owner, wrote in a December letter to legislators.
“The next few weeks were a whirlwind as we scrambled to figure out how to get the daily orders completed and delivered to the set on time,” she wrote. “The influx of capital didn’t just allow us to keep the doors open. It bought us enough time to course correct, to figure out what we had been doing wrong, where we could make adjustments and what steps we could take to bring in more business. In short, it saved us.”
John D. Bert of Shenandoah County, who oversees movie props departments, said he bought “well over $1 million” in rough-hewn lumber in Virginia for “John Adams,” an HBO miniseries filmed in 2007 in and around Colonial Williamsburg.
“You’ve got to film the project first, and after the audit you get your money,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post. “It’s not being given willy-nilly. It’s for an industry that’s giving back to the community and small towns.”
At Mountain Lake Lodge, the “Dirty Dancing” dividends extend beyond the themed weekends that draw the movie’s (mostly middle-aged) superfans. Two “Dirty Dancing”-themed reality shows have filmed there over the years, and the lodge hosts an annual “Dirty Dancing” festival, a ticketed event open to people who are not staying at the lodge, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, about 20 miles southwest of Virginia Tech.
Stone, the lodge’s chief executive, also markets the scenic 2,600-acre property for projects wholly unrelated to Baby and Johnny. It was the setting for “Wish You Well,” a 2013 movie based on a David Baldacci novel.
“I’m the poster child that film matters for my county,” she said. “It’s a game changer for us.”
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