"Those Swinging Beach Movies," by Richard Warren Lewis, ran in the July 31, 1965, issue of the Saturday Evening Post. I present it here in full. It's going to eat up 15 or 20 minutes of your day, but if you appreciate vintage East Coast shade-throwing, this is a Hollywood motherlode. Lewis skillfully puts the blade to everything in sight—except for surfing itself, which I don't believe is spared out of kindness or appreciation, the man just ran out of column inches. Frankie Avalon's paternity suit, Annette Funicello's BMI and shotgun wedding, Tommy Kirk's pot bust, John Ashley's towering self-regard—who has time to poke fun at wave-riding?

The line of cars on Highway 69 leading to the Pine Drive-in, in Waterbury Conn., stood bumper-to-bumper for nearly three miles. The owner of the theater had long since abandoned selling tickets. He merely circulated from car to car, collecting dollar bills in a big cardboard box, before waving the patrons through. When the black-topped grounds were filled to capacity, eager teenagers parked their cars where they could and raced inside on foot. They fidgeted as they waited, in silence. Just after twilight a chauffeur-driven convertible slowly made its entrance. Propped on the back seat, a diminutive five-foot-nine actor with a baby face grinned and waved like Hubert Humphrey on the stump. As his car snaked along the aisles, he heard the frightening sound of 1,000 horns, all of them honking at once. Hollywood’s own John Ashley was receiving a hero’s welcome on one of many stops on a grinding New England personal-appearance tour. 

 As every squealing adolescent knows, Ashley was one of the stars of 

, the first of a seemingly endless series of teen-oriented sand-surf-and-sex musicals which have emerged as the most successful California export since the orange. Ashley is the husband of Deborah Walley, a wide-eyed, five-foot-two-inch, 95-pound, redheaded veteran of teen movies, who married him at the age of 20. They are the Lunt and Fontanne of the nation’s adolescents.

In Dallas, screaming teenagers trampled down an airport fence to get a better look at Deborah and Frankie Avalon, the stars of 

. Annette Funicello has been carried over the heads of policemen to evade clutching fans while publicizing films like 

. A department store in the Pacific Northwest reported $2,000 worth of damage in its record department after cheering adherents bowled over police and mobbed one of the leads in 

But more important to Hollywood filmmakers, these adolescents have paid their way into theaters to watch their idols dance the Watusi, to ogle girls in bikini bathing suits, and to hoot at knockabout comedy. Because teenagers buy records, watch television and patronize drive-in movie theaters, they have become a potent economic force in show business (an estimated 20-million teenagers spend $1.5 billion annually on entertainment). One generation will have its Sinatra, another its Beatles and beaches.

Originating the beach-movie craze, and still riding its billowing crest, is a smallish, 11-year-old company with an imposing logotype. American International Pictures is headed by James H. Nicholson, 48, a natty dresser who has recently taken to lifting weights in an effort to control his increasing midriff. Two of his three daughters toil in minor beach-film roles. “A.I.P. is the happiest company in Hollywood,” Nicholson is fond of saying. His partner and vice president of A.I.P. is portly Samuel Z. Arkoff, a former attorney who chews on as many as 18 oversize cigars a day in desperate imitation of Darryl F. Zanuck. Both partners maintain projection rooms in their homes, where they hold periodic screenings for teenagers as a way of keeping tab on their tastes.

[Samuel Arkoff, left, and James Nicholson, of AIP]

Nicholson made his first appeal to adolescent appetites in the ’50’s, with a series of cheaply made delinquency films titled 

. With the grubstake earned in these enterprises, he then cashed in on a sequence of horror movies with titles such as 

. This cycle was followed by “adaptations” from Edgar Allan Poe stories, including 

. Then, two years ago, A.I.P. stumbled on the most surefire recipe since the pizzaburger. 

, made in the summer of 1963, was the creation of director William Asher, who also launched the 

The prime ingredient was a fast-rising teenage fad called surfing, in which bathers ride into shore perched on polyethylene surfboards. William Asher happened to be adept at the sport. Surfing came with its own liturgy of hippy dances and heavy-beat music, a galvanizing offshoot of the rock ’n’ roll which had already captivated youthful record buyers.

A.I.P. recruited such singers as Little Stevie Wonder, Candy Johnson and the Exciters, and The Hondells to heat up the scripts. “You keep hitting the kids with this kind of music,” says one producer, “and they can’t help but get excited, no matter what’s happening on the screen.”

Even a high-school dropout could follow the plots. The good guys were always clean-shaven, well-mannered surfing buffs. The bad guys were alternately black-jacketed motorcycle riders or predatory adults trying to invade the surfers’ cozy little society, a fantasy of life-without-chaperones in a beachhouse, where the sun-tanned beach boys slept in one room and the beach girls in another.

, for instance, Frankie Avalon is summoned to Naval Reserve duty on a remote Pacific island. There, a friendly witch doctor (Buster Keaton) transforms him into a pelican so he can fly back to the beach, where he fears his girl, Annette Funicello, may succumb to the blandishments of another surfer. As the pelican hovers over the beach, the head of an ad agency (Mickey Rooney) is searching for the perfect American girl with which to stuff the perfect bikini he is merchandising.

After the first film, actors were forbidden to drink or smoke on camera, an ingenuous palliative for parents whose offspring already were puffing a pack a day. Gooey love scenes were bypassed in favor of tentative pecks on the lips and cheek.

Plot sequences included pie throwing, paint throwing, pillow fights, and fist-swinging skirmishes between the surfers and the motorcycle gangs. Whenever a lull occurred in the script, someone would yell “Surf’s up,” whereupon everybody ran across the beach and paddled surfboards into the ocean. Chimpanzees on motorbikes and Martians descending from outer-space provided comic relief. To beef up marquee value, producers hired such stars as Bob Cummings, Dorothy Malone, Buddy Hackett, Keenan Wynn, Martha Hyer and Dorothy Lamour.

Once A.I.P. makes a movie, A.I.P. promotes it. Typical was an appearance John Ashley recently made in Calgary, Canada. Stepping off a plane, he received a thunderous, prearranged welcome from thousands of fans, most of them girls with their hair up in curlers. Following suggestions in hundreds of radio spot announcements and newspaper ads, they carried banners reading "We Love John." Ashley autographed textbooks, pieces of paper, hands, arms and legs. Photographers shot pictures of him and the two local girls who had won “A Date with John Ashley.”

Four motorcycle policemen, their sirens blaring as they ran through red lights, escorted him into town. They headed a caravan of hot-rods, jalopies and sports cars that carried 30 young girls, clad in bikinis, and a live band, the yellow-jacketed Calgary Echoes, playing 

. Ashley sat in a shiny convertible and waved enthusiastically at curious citizens who lined the streets. “Anytime I get depressed and feel I’m not doing as well as I should,” says Ashley, “I go on the road for a week. I come back to my wife thinking I’m Rock Hudson."

As soon as he checked into the hotel, Ashley began playing Hollywood star. “I tipped like it was going out of style,” he explains. “When I walked through the door, I looked at the bellhops and said: ‘OK, boys, line up.’ I gave them all a ten. And I said: ‘Be there when I need you.’ And man, they followed me into the restroom. You’ve got to play the role, they expect it of you. I got a shine and a manicure every day I was there. Every day I left five for the maid.”

Ashley also dressed like Hollywood’s concept of a goodwill ambassador. His beige gabardine trousers were tapered and cuffless. He wore dark-brown suede shoes and a muted gold shirt with French cuffs and a roll collar. He smoked an expensive panatela as he played host to a press conference in his suite. “There’s always a couple of bottles of Scotch in the room when I arrive,” reports Ashley. “When I’m on tour, I drink a lot to keep my energy going. But I never go to an appearance with liquor on my breath, or stoned, and I never say anything derogatory about the business. It’s kind of I-love-everybody-and-everybody’s-my-friend-and-they’re-all-great.”

His whirlwind Calgary visit lasted three days. During that period he visited three theaters, dropped into every pop-music radio station, taped two television shows, toured newspaper offices and autographed arm and leg casts at a children’s hospital. “We sell ’em and keep selling ’em the whole time I’m in town,” he says.

The effect of such deliberate campaigning is reflected in American International’s fat box-office receipts. The movie which launched the fad. 

, was filmed in two weeks for under $500,000 and had a promotional push of approximately the same cost. It returned an estimated six million dollars. A.I.P. officials are loath to reveal exact figures, but Bikini Beach, budgeted at $600,000, should ultimately gross about 10 times its cost. Since an actor’s status in Hollywood traditionally is equated with the financial success of his last picture, the performers in A.I.P. films have also reaped some significant dividends. A motley new Establishment of movie royalty has emerged, composed in large part of pint-sized actors.

The queen of the beach is pudgy Annette Funicello (pronounced foona-sello), a graduate of television’s 

. Miss Funicello does not enjoy swimming, does not surf, and does not fit comfortably into a bikini. “The only part I don’t like about filming them is at the beach,” she admits in a squeaky voice. “I don’t really enjoy that.”

Yet Annette is a full-fledged living doll to millions of teenagers. They know all about her sequin-topped car that has 40 coats of purple lacquer baked on its body, plush purple carpeting and purple tuck-and-roll leather upholstery. They copy her wardrobe and devour articles written about her with provocative titles such as, “The Men in My Bedroom.” (The men were the stuffed animals she used to collect.) They have made her wealthy on royalties from Annette cutouts, makeup kits, dolls, coloring books, games, recordings and T-shirts, and solicit advice from her in as many as 5,000 letters a week. The most uncomplimentary criticism has not succeeded in dislodging her from her enviable perch. “Miss Funicello’s most noteworthy assets,” Dale Olson once wrote in a 

 review, “are the measurements she has developed since her Mickey Mouse Club days.”

Her figure has not been lost on A.I.P. cameraman Floyd Crosby, who has a habit of using her full-length profile to frame dull dialogue scenes. She also impressed 34-year-old Jack Gilardi, her Napoleonic five-foot-four-inch agent. He married his star client in Hollywood last January. Three months later, the week before she began shooting How to 

, Annette excitedly announced she was pregnant.

[Frankie Avalon, Stevie Wonder, Annette Funicello in Muscle Beach]

If Annette is the queen of the beach, the king is one-time teenage singing idol Frankie Avalon. He is now nearing 25. and most of the acne that once dotted his forehead is gone. So are a number of other reminders of his early career. The manager who guided Avalon from being a skinny, $75-a-week Philadelphia trumpeter to a $7,500-a- week nightclub heavyweight, and who served as best man at his wedding, was unceremoniously dumped last year. So was the press agent who constantly reminded the world that even with the $250,000 Frankie had accumulated in trust by age 21, he was still an unaffected, innocent boy.

The shy posture once adopted by Avalon—and perpetuated in most of his film roles—is also a thing of the past. Ten days before his marriage to a blonde former Miss Rheingold contestant in 1963, front-page headlines in a Los Angeles newspaper announced a paternity suit had been filed against Avalon. The suit charged that he was the father of a two-year-old daughter, born out of wedlock. The child, its mother claimed, had been conceived in a car parked outside Avalon’s Frank Lloyd Wright-built house. While the suit was quietly settled out of court, the two sons since legally born to Avalon have been loudly trumpeted. So have his newfound interests in scale-model trains, stamp and coin collecting, astronomy, landscape painting and dahlia raising.

Avalon recently signed for 10 pictures with American International, which has granted him a percentage of their profits and associate-producer billing in five of them. The company pays him roughly $35,000 a film to sing a couple of songs, to function as Miss Funicello’s boyfriend, and to simulate the form of a champion surfer.

“Every kid thinks he can sing as well as Frankie, and they know they can surf as well as he can, even if it’s on a skateboard,” says one of his co-stars, actress Yvonne Craig. “When he doesn’t make out with the girl, teenagers think: ‘Hah, hah. I could make out with her.’ They don’t laugh with him, they laugh at him. It makes them feel superior, therefore they like him. The situation is completely different from that of two generations ago when stars were idolized because they were larger than life.”

“I don’t doubt that I will become one of the great matinee idols,” Avalon predicts. “Something has come over me where I have the confidence. Like, it’ll happen.”

Supporting Funicello and Avalon in many of the beach films are the team of the Ashleys. Both share loftier ambitions than beach movies. “I consider myself a fair-to-middling actress, and I’m not working as hard as I am just to be in these pictures for the rest of my life,” Deborah Walley explains. “I wouldn’t see these films if I wasn’t involved in them myself. But it’s better to do something and gain the experience, exposure and recognition than to do nothing and hope.”

Her husband agrees with her. “If you’re going to survive, you have to do mass-appeal films,” says Ashley, who holds a B.A. degree in economics from Oklahoma State University. “People forget that Cagney and Bogart and Wayne cranked out 15 or 20 pictures a year in the ’40s. They weren’t good films, but they gave them great exposure to the audience. I needed that kind of exposure. I can’t knock these films. They keep me in a high tax bracket. You have to stash it away while you can, and if someone important spots you in one of these pictures, you’re off. Then I can forget the tours, and those screaming girls.” The scream problem has not faced singing star Donna Loren (born Donna Zukor), the Nellie Melba of beach movies. ‘‘The other people on these pictures are screamed at and scratched apart,” she says. “But me, nobody grabs me. They just stand and wait and treat me with all the respect in the world. I’m on a little pedestal.”

Miss Loren’s self-analyzed uniqueness often extends to her activities on the set. She has committed the heresy of refusing to wear a bikini in 

 or any other films “I don’t believe in going up there and sticking a bikini on and shaking around,” she insists. Donna’s father, Morris Zukor, agrees: “If you have real talent, you don’t have to show your body.”

Either Zukor or his wife is in constant attendance when Donna is working, and so are the tutor and welfare worker required by California law for actors under 18, and they all provide Donna with a shield from some of the more unsavory elements of quickie filmmaking. “On one of these sets you can learn about life in three weeks,” Donna says. “Thank God, I have parents who are guiding me and helping me.”

Miss Loren’s superior singing voice has won her a contract with Capitol Records, and she, too, has plenty of upward motivation. “My 11-year-old brother can go to these shows and memorize the lines,” she says. “It’s always the same sort of dialogue, never anything fresh or new. I go for something more grabbing, more significant.”

Despite their obvious flaws, however, there is no doubt that beach films are grabbing a huge repeat audience of teenagers. “It’s the titling of these films that is really important for the kids,” says Director Asher, who now usually collaborates on the scripts. “It’s like a television series, in a sense, these sequels. You can’t call each one the same. But the similarity of titles identifies the product, and the teenagers go and see it.”

Clad in fox-head espadrilles, Asher spends the bulk of his time directing his wife, Elizabeth Montgomery, in her 

 episodes. But when working shoeless on a stretch of Pacific sand north of Malibu called Leo Carrillo Beach, Asher is more properly in his element. Bare-chested to display his stocky, heavily muscled torso, he prowls the sand in walking shorts or a bathing suit, puffing incessantly on cigarillos. To complete these assembly-line productions within their tight schedules and budgets, he rarely shoots more than one or two takes of the same scene.


Often, while directing, Asher must assume the added burdens of a combination den father and disciplinarian for many of the young beach boys and girls who serve as a human backdrop in every production. One older actor, 30-year-old Jody McCrea, at first caused some concern.

A strapping, six-foot-three-inch son of former Western actor Joel McCrea, Jody’s screen image is that of the clown prince of the beach. Early in his career he doubled on horseback for the elder McCrea and later worked on films his father produced. He is most always introduced and publicized by A.I.P. as the son of Joel McCrea.

When not on camera, McCrea has been known to roughhouse and frolic in the sand with some of the beach girls. On 

, for example, McCrea apparently took the title too literally. His constant target was Dorothy Malone, mother of two, who at the time was embroiled in a divorce action with actor Jacques Bergerac. He started making a play for her, John Ashley recalls. “She was too much of a lady to say anything,” says Ashley. “It got so bad, I threatened to punch him out.”

A.I.P. executives are said to have called McCrea on the carpet and threatened to cancel his contract. This prospect apparently has caused McCrea to reform. His conduct has been impeccable for more than a year. Perhaps to prove his turnabout, he wrote letters to the Duke of Edinburgh as well as to Washington agencies, offering himself for membership in the World Wildlife Fund, a group dedicated to the perpetuation of nearly extinct animals.

Twenty-four-year-old Tommy Kirk, another multiple-picture-contract A.I.P. actor, has not been as fortunate as McCrea. Shortly after he enjoyed top billing in 

, Kirk had the bad luck to be arrested on suspicion of possessing marijuana. He spent most of Christmas Day, 1964, in jail. The charge was dismissed, but the notoriety is believed to have cost him a plum role in a John Wayne film, 

. In the spring of 1965, he was cast as the lead in 

, only to be hastily relieved of this assignment on the first day of shooting. The studio gave no reason for its decision.

The most toothsome participants in the A.I.P. formula films are a dozen gum-chewing, physical specimens known as the Beach Girls. Most of them are sun- or bottle-bleached blond novices who were discovered surfing on the beaches at Malibu or stopping traffic on the Sunset Strip. Their sole specialty is the manner in which they fill a bikini.

In every beach film, for little more money than minimum union scale, they twist their torsos to lowdown music while alert cameramen focus on their sometimes spectacular anatomy.

One of the memorable figures in the beach group belongs to Susan Hart, a 23-year-old brunette of Indian-Scandinavian extraction who caused a minor stir in 

 by performing a scorching dance number in a heavily padded outfit. Before this debut, Miss Hart had signed a three-picture contract with A.I.P. Suddenly, she was released from her mundane beach chores and handed the lead in one of the company’s science- fiction films, 

. Her promotion was accompanied by propaganda describing her as the prototype of a plan in which A.I.P. was attempting to create its own new stars.

Perhaps more accurately, her overnight prominence reflected her romance with A.I.P. president, James Nicholson. Currently involved in a contested divorce action with his wife of 26 years, Nicholson has said he plans to marry Miss Hart. Nicholson’s wife, Sylvia, 43, meanwhile contents herself with $1,650 temporary monthly alimony payments and newspaper comment on the Hart-Nicholson romance, until her auditors are finished examining the A.I.P. books.

These findings should explode the well-guarded secret of exactly how many dollars the beach pictures are earning—and perhaps give some idea of the future for teenage movies.

"There's a great danger that too many of these movies are being made," says Len Weinrib, who directed 

 a competitive movie that cost $130,000. “Oversaturation makes you nervous, but it’s also very good for your creativity. It makes you ingenious. You have to find a new way to say something that’s been said over and over.”

That new way will take the bikini girls and Watusi dances away from the surf and transfer them to Alpine lodges and ski lifts. Already three independent filmmakers have shifted focus and are aiming films like 

 for fall bookings. Meanwhile A.I.P. has already released 

. Reno Carell, a bespectacled producer who a year ago labored as a Vic Tanny instructor, has conceived just the sort of gimmicks necessary for the $275,000-budgeted 

 to attract the existing audience. His film features girls skiing in bikinis and gliding through a new dance step he has dubbed “The Ski.” “These tight ski pants and sweaters,” Carell says happily, “they’re pretty sexy too."

"SEXY SURF MOVIES," SATURDAY EVENING POST THROWS A BEACH BLANKET OF SHADE ACROSS HOLLYWOOD (1965)

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