You may have seen ”Psycho Beach Party“Director Robert Lee King and Writer Charles Busch’s Wickedly Funny Send of Classic Hollywood, While Surfing on Late-Night Cable Channels in the Early Aghts. Based on Busch’s Own Play from 1987, Which Was Itself Inspired by Freder. Surf Culture, “Psycho Beach Party” is Exactly as the Title Sounds: Part Slasher, Part Beach Movie, and All Pastiche and Shared Personality.
It is apropos, which one then a little known, before “six feet under” Lauren Ambrose plays Florence, alias Chicklet, a schizoid that becomes the main suspect in a series of comically mounted beach murder. She plays the role of a nourishing intersection between Tallulah Bankhead and Sandra Dee-which, of course, originated in Gidget, the original Wannabe Surf Girl, on the insert in 1959. Screenwriter Busch, who, gay and in the 30s, played the 16-year-old teenage girl Gidget- Sorry, chicklet -In its original stage exhibition here plays the detective-in-draw that examines the murders.
The fizzy, gee-whiz humor that collides with the melodramatic camp makes for one of the mostly very unpredictable tones in any candy-colored camp film-and one who also had an early eye for starlets, including an then still-person Amy Adams, “Buffy” Breakor Nicholas Bendon, “” (“Psycho Beach Party”, is also stacked with shirt -free surfers, and therefore homoerotic tension breaks like a tidal wave.)
“Psycho Beach Party” celebrates the 25th anniversary this month with Q&A shows (with Ambrose, Busch and Director King) on July 30 and 31 and 31 At IFC Center in New York City. The film will also receive a physical media edition at a later date, with support from the film’s original producer/distributor, Strict free. Indiewire picked up Charles Busch, who lives in New York, by phone before the upcoming shows.
This interview has been condensed and edited for length.
Indiewire: The movie, which you started as a kind of midnight movie game, is located in the early 60s, but it is more adapted to 50s films yet with a postmodern, perverted twist.
Charles Busch: Slasher movie too, which was very 70. The game was something plotless, really. No one was killed. I think the most important thing was that someone ran around shaving people’s shame. I think it was the crime. It really doesn’t happen much. So when Strand wanted to produce the film, and they collaborated with Bob King, who was a young director/screenwriter who had made a short topic that (Strand) had released, and they wanted to make a function with him. We gathered, and at that time I had never written a script. Bob was extremely helpful, and he had a great love for the 70s Slasher movies and thought that if we add that element it would give us a melodrama -like.
It also solved the other problem, which was: “Who would I play?” I had originally played the lead in the stage game, a young 16-year-old girl. We just knew we didn’t want the movie to be to stylized. I was in the 40s at that point, and although I was not at that time we wanted it to be more naturalistic … With a real killer, we also suggested that we also have to have a detective, and it really suited my stage person, a Susan Hayward, tough, glamorous lady.
Casting director, Laura Schiff, is a revered TV -casting director now who made “Mad Men”, “Shogun”, “The West Wing” and all these series. She discovered Lauren Ambrose for this movie.
I don’t think I had any idea playing the parts. With Lauren it was between her and another actress, and they showed me both screen tests, and Lauren is the one I preferred, and we all felt she was the most suitable.
How did Strand discovered the game?
The actual story is that I had this wonderful boss named Jeff Melnick who died a few years ago. He was an eccentric, amazing person, and he just loved me. I do not know for many people who can say that their agent or manager thought more about their talents than they did themselves, but Jeff was. He continued to insist that the “Psycho Beach Party” would be a movie, and I didn’t really get it. For me it didn’t seem to have much plot. It was a Campy theater piece. But he continued to persecute it for several years, and every now and then he would call me and say, “Oh, so and so passed.” I said, “I didn’t know they were looking at it!” Then he took on as a client Bob King (the film director).
What do you think about the movie is worth discovering for younger audiences now? There is so much more film knowledge now between the letter box and the criterion that younger audiences can actually get the references at this time.
It’s fun, it started as a forgery of the Beach Party movies, and the more I worked on it, I thought it was a little more about it. That it might be a little personal about how, when you are young, and you don’t really know who you are, and you feel that you are another person with your parents, your friends, at your school, it is a bit of a metaphor for it.
I think Criterion Collection has taken on the movie. I just looked through their catalog and, my God, to think about it … (to be) in the same collection as the biggest films by Fellini and Kurosawa and Truffaut. It’s a little wild. These films can somehow disappear, and I hope this will lead to the criterion taking on my follow -up image, “Die, Mommie, Die!”, Which I am very proud of.
“Psycho Beach Party” plays at IFC Center on July 30 and July 31.
