by Stephen Vagg
In honour of summertime, Stephen Vagg revisits the movie that spawned the beach party genre, 1963’s Beach Party.
I remember when I first heard about the phenomena that was the beach party movie. I had a book by Joel Hirschhorn called Rating the Movie Stars, which included entries for the two big names of the genre – Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. Both rated lowly and were mocked in the text. “Most actors have more memorable highlights in their careers than looking out at the waves and yelling “Kowabunga!’,” quipped the author, a little meanly.
I’d never heard of the beach party films, as the genre had died out by the time I was getting into film – there were plenty of teen comedies in the ‘90s, but they were of the raunchy kind (Porky’s, Hot Dog, and my all-time favourite, Up the Creek) and musicals were pretty much dead. Yet, I saw that they were running some Frankie and Annette movies in the early hours of the morning (remember when TV guides mattered?), so I decided to tape a few. I wouldn’t say I was hooked, because even at eleven I recognised the flaws: overcast skies, second-rate beaches (Australians are very snobby when it comes to beaches), bad surfing back projection, dodgy plots, and the fact that everyone seemed to be sucking in a gut.
Yet the films had a charm that was endearing. They were colourful and cartoony, full of songs and sight gags, and the performers always seemed totally committed. I loved, especially, how they had a “house” feel – years before the MCU, American International Pictures (the studio that invented the genre and made most of them) would distinctively brand these movies as coming from their company: the same credit font and introductory logo, a stock company of recurring actors, in-gags about other American International movies. It made you feel part of the gang. I also loved how there was so much “stuff” in them – not just surfing, singing and dancing, but drag racing, sky diving, mermaids, bikers, haunted houses, bands, old horror stars, silent film references, gorillas, aliens.
And it all started with Beach Party.
First, a brief history about American International Pictures (AIP). This studio was formed in the mid 1950s by two men, James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff (who both generally had a “presents” credit at the top of their films). The more established studios were panicking at the time due to the impact of television and the anti-Trust decree that meant that they had to divest from their cinema chains. But within every crisis there’s an opportunity, as AIP proved when it started making low budget exploitation films aimed at teenagers, a segment of the population that was still going to the movies and didn’t get much respect from the major studios. With the considerable help of their ace producer-director, Roger Corman, AIP carved out a niche making double bills like Girls in Prison and Hot Rod Girl, eventually graduating to bigger budgeted pictures like The House of Usher.
AIP ran on basic principles: keep overheads down (i.e. no permanent studio space), keep all costs down, use fading stars (eg Ray Milland) or its own up-and-coming names (eg John Ashley), use cheap directors, go for genre (horror, sci fi, action, peplum), follow the trends, abandon the trends when audience enthusiasm lessens, give audiences something they can’t get from a regular studio picture, build your own franchises.
There have been differing stories as to how Beach Party came about, but I think that what follows is the accepted version. In 1962, Arkoff and Nicholson were watching Italian films in Rome with a view to purchasing some for release in the US (they did this periodically, mostly horror and peplums eg Black Sunday). One such movie was a drama about a middle-aged man who falls in love with a young woman who spends all her time at a beach resort. They disliked the movie but were attracted by the setting, and commissioned Lou Rusoff, their regular screenwriter (he was Arkoff’s brother-in-law) to pen a film about young people set at the beach.
This wasn’t the most original idea in the world, as beach films featuring teenagers had been prevalent in Hollywood – if not hugely prevalent – since the release of Gidget in 1959 and Where the Boys Are in 1960. Rusoff’s script was shown to director William Asher, who mostly worked in television. Asher says that he agreed to make Beach Party if it became more of a musical comedy about teenagers having a good time. Even though big Hollywood musicals had been in overall decline since the mid ‘50s, low budget teen musicals were very popular in the early sixties: it was almost mandatory for a good looking pop star (or group) to appear in one eg. Elvis Presley, Tommy Sands, Fabian, Cliff Richard, Frankie Avalon, Pat Boone, Connie Stevens, Connie Francis, Annette Funicello, Bobby Rydell.
Arkoff and Nicholson agreed, so Asher rewrote the script with Robert Dillon. They were asked not to take credit by Samuel Arkoff, who told them that Lou Rusoff was dying of brain cancer. Asher agreed and Rusoff has sole credit; he died in June 1963.
I haven’t read Rusoff’s original draft, so I don’t know exactly what he contributed. However, I will note that Rusoff had written and produced AIP’s Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959), which combined juvenile delinquent films with haunted house tropes and musical numbers, so he may have been the one originally responsible for Beach Party’s combination of music and genre mashing. However, Ghost is also a boring movie – Asher was clearly the one who took the teens on the beach idea and ran with it.
Beach Party concerns a young couple, Frankie and Dolores (aka Dee Dee), who head to the beach for a summer vacation (they drive their car on the beach) – he’s hoping to sleep with her, only to discover that she’s invited all their friends as well. They fight, sing and get involved with some comic bikers inspired by Marlon Brando in The Wild One… all the while unaware that they’re being studied by an anthropologist, Professor Sutwell, who is observing the mating habits of Californian teens. While Dolores develops a crush on Sutwell, Frankie flirts with Ava, a waitress at Big Daddy’s, a coffee shop where the kids hang out that is run by Cappy. There’s dancing, singing, surfing, kissing, slapstick, a little bit of cigarette smoking, a little bit of beer drinking, and (spoilers) it all ends happily after a brawl with the bikers.
According to Asher, the key change made by him and Dillon to the script – and I would call this a million dollar decision, it was so crucial – was that references to parents and the kids’ real world issues were removed. Gidget and Blue Hawaii featured parents and plots about maturing; Where the Boys Are had a key subplot about sexual assault. None of that is in Beach Party. The bulk of the plot is admittedly carried by the anthropologist and the kids coming to find that this middle-aged man is cool – I’m guessing that the writers had seen the Rock Hudson-Bobby Darin-Sandra Dee comedy, Come September – but this plot has little basis in reality and is played very broadly.
Arkoff wrote in his memoirs that he wanted the roles of the lead teens played by Fabian and Annette Funicello, both pop stars who could also act. Fabian was under contract to 20th Century Fox, who refused to loan him out, so instead Arkoff turned to Frankie Avalon, who’d just appeared in Panic in the Year Zero and Operation Bikini for AIP (I get the feeling the character was named “Frankie” after Avalon’s casting). Funicello was under contract to Walt Disney; according to her memoir, Avalon was already cast when she was approached by AIP to make Beach Party. While Disney had refused prior requests to “borrow” the services of Funicello, the actress says something about Beach Party appealed to him. She says Disney told her that the film was “good, clean fun” but asked her not to expose her navel. (Funicello insists that she stuck to this promise, but ever since Beach Party fans have made great sport of spotting Funicello naval shots, which did sneak into the films).
Frankie and Annette – as they became known – teamed together so well that it’s surprising that Avalon was the second choice for his role (assuming Arkoff remembered it correctly). Fabian was a very good actor, but he had a more pseudo-Elvis presence, which felt more serious – he was most comfortable playing characters with chips on their shoulders (eg A Lion Walks Among Us, Ride the Wild Surf, Thunder Alley); Avalon had a brighter, high-energy cartoon-ish vibe more suitable to Beach Party. I like Fabian, but don’t think that the film would have been as successful with him in it.
The two top-billed stars of Beach Party were Bob Cummings (the Professor) and Dorothy Malone (his assistant Marianne). Both were quite big names at the time: Cummings had been a quasi-star since the 1930s and was coming off a hit TV sitcom The Bob Cummings Show while Malone had won an Oscar only a few years earlier for Written on the Wind. The part of Marianne wasn’t much but Malone was never too choosy about her roles – she’d been in AIP’s first movies (The Fast and the Furious, Five Guns West), and probably needed the money (she was about to become a single mother, leaving husband Jacques Bergerac during the filming of Beach Party). Cummings was a huge TV star but hadn’t played the lead in a feature since the early 1950s. According to Asher, the actor was a little tricky to handle during filming – this has been attributed to Cummings’ drug addiction at the time, but also may have been due to the actor’s realisation that the film would inevitably skew towards the kids. Some things would have placated Cummings – like the fact that the Professor is a pilot (as Cummings was in real life), and is a bit of a superhero with all his skills; also, Dolores develops a genuine crush on him, which he nobly refuses – winding up with Marianne, a pretty good consolation prize.
The parts of Frankie’s friends were played by John Ashley, who’d made a number of juvenile delinquent films for AIP, and Jody McCrea, son of actor Joel. Ashley plays Ken, whose main function in the story seems to be to protect Frankie Avalon’s character – it’s Ken for instance who suggests Frankie dump Dolores and who is the really mean teenager to the professor. McCrea plays Deadhead, a moron. Both men would appear in many beach party movies, with Deadhead being the most popular.
Eva Six, a Zsa Zsa Gabor type who’d been in AIP’s Operation Bikini, played Ava, a Zsa Zsa Gabor type who tempts Frankie (foreign temptresses would become a staple of the series). Dee Dee’s man-hungry friend Rhonda was played by Valora Noland. The Beach Party films gathered a reputation for being squeaky clean but while Annette Funicello’s character didn’t want to have sex before marriage, there were plenty of characters like Ava and Rhonda who were clearly sexually active, and much of the movie’s dialogue is laced with innuendo. The break-out female performer was someone with no actual lines: dancer Candy Johnson whose shimmies would literally knock men over. This was very Looney Tunes style comedy which exemplified the tone that Asher was going for.
Key support roles went to two veteran stage comedians: Morey Amsterdam, as Cappy, and Harvey Lembeck, who played Eric Von Zipper, the head biker. No one much liked Cappy but Eric Von Zipper and his gang of idiots became an instant audience favourite.
Filming on Beach Party started in March 1963 and took three weeks. The crew was full of AIP veterans like Dan Haller (production design) and Les Baxter (music). The studio had a track record of making self-referential movies (eg How to Make a Monster Movie) but nothing on the scale of Beach Party, which is littered with AIP in-jokes: Marianne quips to Professor Sutwell that film rights to his thesis on the sex habits of teens could be sold to AIP; Vincent Price appeared at the end as Big Daddy, saying “The Pit… Bring me my pendulum, kiddies, I feel like swinging…” – a reference to AIP’s 1961 Price vehicle, The Pit and the Pendulum. During the end credits, AIP threw in a credit thanking Price and promoting his next film, The Haunted Palace.
There were plenty of songs, some quite good – the Frankie and Annette duet ‘Beach Party Tonight’ got things off to a great start, Dick Dale and the Del Tones play some banging tunes, and ‘Don’t Stop Now’ is a terrific rocker.
Funicello gets saddled with an average ballad – ‘Treat Him Nicely’ – but she has lots of screen time, particularly with Cummings. These two have a nice chemistry – Cummings was an excellent farceur and Funicello rises to meet him. There’s one scene where Annette mistakenly thinks he wants to sleep with her and she agrees, albeit reluctantly, which is surprising – Dolores is willing to put out. Mostly though, the film makes it clear that she just has a crush, and she teases Cummings about his age a lot (this factor may also have put the actor in a bad mood).
AIP would have known from rushes that they had something special, but the eventual success of Beach Party surprised even them – made for a reported $300,000, it ended up grossing over $3 million at the box office, the studio’s biggest success to date. AIP quickly greenlit a sequel and other producers jumped on the bandwagon. A genre had been launched. A relatively short-lived genre – it peaked commercially in 1964, plateaued in 1965 and was over by 1966 and has never come back. Yet it’s never been forgotten either.
In hindsight, I think Beach Party’s combination of sex, teens, surfing and music was always going to make money… but it became a phenomenon because AIP got lucky. There was some tragedy (the early death of Lou Rusoff) but the film was mostly blessed by the Movie Gods: Disney agreeing to Annette Funicello playing the lead; her being teamed with Frankie Avalon rather than Fabian; the presence of Cummings and Malone; the discoveries of Harvey Lembeck, Candy Johnson and Jody McCrea; the direction of William Asher. Sometimes a film just clicks. And AIP clicked with Beach Party.
