![]() ![]() In 1956, she began spending her days on the beach at Malibu, where she became an avid surfer and hung out with a gang of male surfers, all of whom were several years older than she was. He based Franzie on his younger daughter Kathy, who was born in Los Angeles in 1941. She was the creation of an Austrian-American novelist and screenwriter named Frederick Kohner, a Jew who fled Nazi Germany for Los Angeles in 1936. Wikipedia also notes that the genre owes a great deal to a fictional 15-year-old girl named Franziska “Franzie” Hofer. Although only the AIP entries are generally considered canonical, Wikipedia contends that the genre comprises over 30 films, including movies from other studios. Over the next five years or so, AIP released another 11 similarly-themed films- Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Party, Pajama Party, and so on-most of which also featured Avalon and Funicello. It was a surprise hit, bringing in $2.3 million at the box office, which was nearly 10 times its production budget. Appropriately titled Beach Party, it starred (among others) Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. It was similar to the reaction of the people crowding the beaches in Senegal and Ghana when Hynson and August paddled out and rode waves right in front of their villages - they were stoked! Brown, too, was stoked his $50,000 investment brought him millions.Sixty years ago this summer, American International Pictures released the first entry in a cinematic genre that would come to be known as the beach party film. The reaction of Kansans and New Yorkers was echoed by audiences around the country when the film finally went into distribution in 1966. Meanwhile, it was picked up by Cinema 5 for national (and then worldwide) distribution. The Endless Summer played the Kuyps Bay for a year. ![]() ![]() ![]() But nobody knew who I was, and maybe they felt it wasn’t worth criticizing, so they pretty much gave us good reviews and helped us out.” If they did a review and wrote, ‘Brown did a shitty movie,’ we’d have been dead. We weren’t one of them, so a lot of the media in New York were into helping us out, not hurting us. “For some reason,” says Brown, “the real entrenched film critics seemed to like it, maybe because it was different from what they were used to seeing. When that didn’t work, they took the film to Manhattan and booked it into the Kuyps Bay Theatre, where Brown charmed the bored Big Apple critics at a preview screening, telling them he’d paid a hundred bucks for the room, so he expected good reviews. So they booked a theater in Wichita, Kansas, and the film broke house records there for two solid weeks. heartland would be convincing, if it worked. With Brown’s easy, homespun narration woven into a nice soundtrack by the Sandals, they worked on trying to sell it, came up dry and finally decided a test run in the U.S. The Endless Summer was a big success on the circuit - so big that Brown and his promotions man, Paul Allen (who ran ahead arranging shows and coordinating publicity) thought they might be able to attract a national distributor. When the film was finished, Brown knew he had something good in the can. There are bigger, better, scarier and more exciting waves in lots of other surf flicks, but none pay off quite as satisfyingly as “Bruce’s Beauties.” There, in that sequence, was magic indeed. Francis in South Africa in one of the most revelatory and compelling moments in surf filmdom. So, a day late or not, everything turns out just as perfect as the wave they discover at Cape St. They’d meet someone (like future world champ Nat Young) and something happened. Somehow, even when they had no luck with the surf, something would happen. Things didn’t always go according to plan, but Brown wasn’t the kind of guy who did all that much planning anyway. Bruce Brown’s sixth film, The Endless Summer, is the archetypal tale of two California surfers, blond Mike Hynson and dark Robert August, hitting the road to follow summer and surf around the world.īrown filmed in Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawaii and California. ![]()
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