Synopsis: a scholarly anthropologist goes to the Southern Californian
beach environment to study the "analogies" between teen
surfers and primitive tribal culture. He ends
up entangled in an Annette/Frankie love triangle
and has to face cycle gang leader Eric Von Zipper.
A small but
auspicious musical
start
It was an efficient
production, even by the standards of AIP (a studio infamous for
grinding ‘em out cheap and fast). Primary scene shooting was
completed in just a little over three weeks, and the entire budget
for the film came in at less than $300,000 (which even back in 1963
was minuscule by Hollywood standards). One is left wondering
whether James Nickolson and Sam Arkoff (the partners running AIP)
had any idea that their latest little cheapo production was
going to kick off a major new Hollywood genre.
In fact,
they originally hadn't even planned on making it: they'd
sat down in late 1962 with Director William Asher, asking him
to help them produce yet another juvenile delinquent feature (a
then fading genre, but one AIP had been involved with
since it had started in the mid 1950s). In the meeting, Asher
basically said "why not try something different? Let's do
a movie about kids not in trouble, maybe ones at
the beach having fun." Since Asher had dabbled in surfing
himself, he recommended that as a focus. And then somehow --
no one is quite sure who suggested this -- the notion of
putting songs into the film was
developed.
And that last
part was critical, for it's what led to the new genre.
How so? By adding pop music to a
themed comedy, ergo, creating a new form of
musical.
Back in the late 1950s there had been some previous “rock n”
roll” movies (“Rock around the Clock,” “Don’t Knock the
Rock,” some even produced by AIP) but none of them had used that
music the way Beach
Party
did. The prior efforts
were set in studios and television stations, with pretentious
dramatic storylines primarily focused on adult musicians and
producers. The music
that appeared in them was almost always set as a formal production
on a stage or in a recording
studio.
The new AIP effort was completely different. It took pop music and worked
it into a comedy, which was set within a fun, “provocative”
theme (unchaperoned “kids” at the beach,
running wild and wearing very little). This new stew may have
been shallow and quirky, but it worked: within
weeks of release Beach Party had made back
its investment and went on to become one of the more successful
films of 1963. In fact, during its first week of release it
beat several major competing films at the box office, including the
Jerry Lewis comedy The Nutty Professor and Alfred
Hitchcock's The
Birds.
As a musical, the first entry in the series is intriguing
and ambitious but a little rough. Les Baxter used songs from a
bunch of writers, but used only three cast members to do all the
performing: Annette, Frankie and Dick Dale. Since the director and
producers were still working out the formula, the music is limited
and in many cases employed as an add-on or background, rather
than being tied to the storyline. But that doesn’t mean there
isn’t anything of interest here. Two of
Annette’s best pieces of the entire series appear, and early in the
show Dick Dale gets to really rock out several times,
establishing landmark sequence stereotypes that would be
continually repeated throughout the
series.
The Score of
Beach
Party
