The Venue

In 1922, George Wilson and Bertram Lackey purchased 350 acres near Cornell with the goal of establishing a secluded residential community around a lake; later formed/named the ‘Malibou Lake Club’. By 1924, they had built the Malibou Lake Clubhouse, featuring 24 bedrooms, a lounge, a dining room, a stage, locker rooms, a trading post, a tennis court, rowboats, and swimming facilities.

After the original clubhouse burned down in 1936, it was replaced by a smaller structure designed by the early Los Angeles architectural firm Russell and Alpaugh. This clubhouse still stands today!! (Yup, where' we’ll be!). For over 80 years, The Lodge has been a venue for weddings, meetings, dances, and various parties.

Hello Hollywood!

Since 1925, Malibou Lake has been a popular location for the film and television industry. Its scenic waters have served as a stand-in for various locations, including an alpine lake in Switzerland, Bavaria, and the Canadian Rockies, a naval academy, the Mississippi River, a summer camp in Maine, a Philippine island during World War I, an Italian forest in World War II, and Lake Scranton, Pennsylvania, among many others.

In 1931, Malibou Lake was featured in the film Frankenstein, where Frankenstein's monster accidentally drowns a little girl named Maria in a lake set in the “Bavarian Alps in Europe.” (Maybeeee shouldn’t have included this particular ‘fun fact’ in the blurb, but it’s one of Molly’s favorite novels/films… eh, we digress. Just go with it). The lake also appeared in the 1956 Oscar-nominated film The Bad Seed (… no pun intended in these ‘selected’ film references, we promise). In the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the heroes famously jumped from a cliff into the lake (here we go! Fun times?). Similarly, James Coburn performed a stunt jumping into the lake for the film Our Man Flint. The Malibou Lake Mountain Club clubhouse even portrayed the Havenhurst Motel in a 1961 episode of Perry Mason titled “The Case of the Angry Dead Man.”

Malibou Lake has accumulated more than 100 film credits over the years!