#Pamela gray writer movie#
The world of the bungalow colony was very different than the hotel world, and I thought that that movie was lacking in authentic ethnic identity. I cannot remember the year when “Dirty Dancing” came out, but that movie was partly an inspiration to tell my own story, which I thought was quite different. I started the script in 1991 and I had probably been thinking about it a couple of years. When did you get the idea to write the script? And how long did it take? I think that when I was a teenager I was embarrassed that we were still going there and that my friends could afford sleep-away camp or that I had friends going to Europe for the whole summer and this was all that we could have! So it was so idyllic when I was a child, but as a teenager, it felt to me like everyone had more money than we did. I really did not feel nostalgic for it until I was in my thirties. And there was a sense that an era was coming to an end and people just were not going to be there any more. You know, we would look around and more and more of the bungalow colonies around us were becoming Hassidic. By the time it was my last year in the Catskills it felt like it was over. I have a younger brother and my family went a couple of more years after I stopped.
My last summer I was fifteen and I had had enough. And how long did you go there? Did it last till teenage life or after? My parents had certain friends that they had made in the bungalow colonies and then we would all as a group go to the same bungalow colony. My parents recently said that it was something like $250 for a bungalow for a whole summer. In general we associated the hotels with the people who had more money. My father had worked as a stand-up comic in the Borsht belt before he married my mother, so the Catskills had been part of his life for many years. In the early years my father was selling storm windows, he sold encyclopedias he eventually settled into selling funeral supplies. My father was a salesman and my mother went back to school when I was a child and eventually became a New York City schoolteacher. Did your parents ever talk about why colonies instead of hotels? Always in bungalow colonies?Īlways in bungalow colonies. We were in Mountaindale for a few summers, Woodbourne for a couple of summers, and the last summer I spent in the Catskills was in South Fallsburg. Then we were at a place in Swan Lake called Tommy’s Lodge. And I remember being there at least until I was about nine. Pamela Gray: I was three years old when I started going to Silverstein’s Bungalow Colony in Swan Lake. What was your life experience in the Catskills? Phil Brown: This wonderful film feels like it could only come from a Catskills veteran. Phil Brown conducted this interview with Pamela Gray shortly before the conference. Pamela brought her marvelous film to the Fifth Annual History of the Catskills Conference where we showed it, and where Pamela spoke eloquently about the process of making it. The film has brought back so many important memories for Catskills veterans, and has shown this amazing world to many who never knew it. Pamela Gray’s film, “A Walk on the Moon,” was released in 1999, to much critical acclaim.
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