In the summer of 1987, two of the nation’s oldest film franchises went toe-to-toe at the box office: it was Bond vs. Beach Party.
The Living Daylights, released two years after A View to a Kill, re-introduced the world to Agent 007 in the person of newly Bonded Timothy Dalton. Back to the Beach, released 22 years after How to Stuff a Wild Bikini—on August 7, 1987—reunited Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. Frankie and Annette became as inseparable and indelible a screen duo in the public’s eye as Fred and Ginger or Tracy and Hepburn.
Through all those Beach Party films, Frankie chased while Annette remained chaste. “Are we the corniest couple in the world, or what?” Funicello said, breaking the fourth wall at the conclusion of Back to the Beach.
Corny wasn’t made for those times; this was, after all, the age of Madonna and the New Wave. But Back to the Beach was the movie America didn’t know it needed. “I don’t know what I was expecting,” Roger Ebert wrote in his three-and-a-half-star review, “but it certainly wasn’t the funniest, quirkiest musical comedy since The Little Shop of Horrors.”
Ultimately, Bond buried Beach at the box office. But 30 years on, Daylights is ranked among the least of the Bonds. Meanwhile, Back to the Beach still shines as a fitting swan song to the Old Wave Beach Party films, and a heartfelt valentine to Funicello, who passed away in 2013 at the age of 70 after a long battle with multiple sclerosis—a condition she had kept secret during filming, even from Avalon.
From top to bottom: the films BEACH PARTY, 1963, MUSCLE BEACH PARTY, 1964, BEACH BLANKET BINGO, 1965, and BACK TO THE BEACH, 1987.
As Bobby (a scene-stealing Demian Slade), Frankie and Annette’s needling punk-wannabe son, reminds us in Back to the Beach, Avalon and Funicello were once teen (and pre-teen) idols; he a chart-topping recording star, she the most identifiable Mouseketeer on The Mickey Mouse Club. Jack Gilardi, Avalon’s agent, originally pitched American International Pictures on pairing them in a teenage version of the Our Gang comedies. They told him to come up with a story: “I went to the beach and realized that surfing was popular with kids from all over the country,” he tells Vanity Fair. “I’m not a writer, but I came up with an outline and said to get Frankie Avalon and that girl from Disney.”
Why Annette? “She had a clean public image,” Gilardi said. He had to ask Walt Disney for permission for her to be in the movie; “she was told not to wear a two-piece bathing suit, and she agreed to that.”
(Later, before proposing to Funicello, Gilardi asked not only her father’s permission, but Disney’s as well. What if Walt had said no? “I would have said, ‘Screw you,’” Gilardi says with a laugh. The couple was married in 1965; their marriage lasted 18 years, and produced three children and four grandchildren.)
More than two decades later, Back to the Beach was not as easy a pitch, Frankie Avalon says. Orion, the company that owned the rights to the Beach films, “looked at it and said, ‘We don’t understand this kind of a film.’ So they put it in turnaround, and I kept banging on doors.”
The film’s fortunes changed over a dinner with Avalon and his wife, Kay, at Nicky Blair’s, a famed, now shuttered, Sunset Boulevard celebrity haunt. Dining across the room were Frank Mancuso, then the head of production at Paramount, and his wife, Faye—who, as it turns out, Avalon had brought on stage at a concert when she was a teenager. “She loved Frankie,” Gilardi says. “We went over and I said to Faye, ‘You [and Frankie] haven’t been formally introduced. She asked Frankie what he was up to, and he said, ‘We’re trying to negotiate with Paramount for Back to the Beach. She said to Frank, ‘You’ve got to make this picture.’”
Another Gilardi client, James Komack—he created the TV series Welcome Back, Kotter and Chico and the Man—was originally signed on to write and direct the film. But he departed the project over creative differences with the studio: “They wanted to camp it up and I felt it wasn’t necessary,” he told The Los Angeles Times prior to the film’s release. According to the same article, 17 writers contributed to the script.
“The funny thing is that with all the scriptwriters we had, the first day of shooting we only had four pages of script,” Avalon says. “We had new pages every single day.”
That was just one of the challenges facing director Lyndall Hobbs, an Australian transplant with music videos and a Saturday Night Liveshort film to her credit. Another was filming in Malibu in the more unseasonable February and March. Yet another was finding a balance between the camp silliness of the original films and the new mid-life crisis story line. She also insisted it be a musical in the spirit of the original films. “Comedy is incredibly difficult, and to add the music side onto it was incredibly challenging,” she says. “I’m proud that I pulled it off . . . with just three weeks of pre-production on time and on budget.”
She also retains treasured memories of working with Avalon and Funicello (“absolutely as sweet as can be”). But behind the scenes, the shoot was no day at the beach as her working relationship with producer Frank Mancuso, Jr. deteriorated. There was “massive sexism that was at play, which hasn’t changed all that much,” Hobbs says. Mancuso, Jr. was a “very unsupportive producer who then trashed me for the next five years, thus ending my career.” (Attempts to contact Mancuso, Jr. were unsuccessful).
