You may have seen “Psycho Beach Party,” director Robert Lee King and writer Charles Busch’s wickedly funny send-up of classic Hollywood, while surfing on late-night cable channels in the early aughts. Based on Busch’s own play from 1987, which was itself inspired by Frederick Kohner’s late-’50s Gidget character and her initiation into surf culture, “Psycho Beach Party” is exactly as the title sounds: part slasher, part beach movie, and all pastiche and split-personality.
That’s apropos, as a then little-known, pre-“Six Feet Under” Lauren Ambrose plays Florence, aka Chicklet, a schizoid who becomes the prime suspect in a series of comically mounting beachside murders. She plays the role as a careening cross between Tallulah Bankhead and Sandra Dee — who of course originated Gidget, the original wannabe surf girl, onscreen in 1959. Screenwriter Busch, who, gay and in his 30s, played the 16-year-old teenage girl Gidget — sorry, Chicklet — in his original off-Broadway stage show here plays the detective-in-drag investigating the murders.
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The fizzy, gee-whiz humor clashing with the melodramatic camp makes for one of the mostly wildly unpredictable tones of any candy-colored camp movie — and one that also had an early eye for starlets, including a then still-indie-actress Amy Adams, “Buffy” breakout Nicholas Brendon, “Criminal Minds” star Thomas Gibson, and more. (“Psycho Beach Party,” also, is stacked with shirtless male surfers, and therefore homoerotic tension breaks through like a tidal wave.)
“Psycho Beach Party” celebrates its 25th anniversary this month with Q&A screenings (featuring Ambrose, Busch, and director King) on July 30 and 31 at the IFC Center in New York City. The film will also receive a physical media release at a later date, with support from the film’s original producer/distributor, Strand Releasing. IndieWire caught up with Charles Busch, who lives in New York, over the phone ahead of the upcoming screenings.
This interview has been condensed and edited for length.
IndieWire: The movie, which you began as a kind of midnight-movie play, is set in the early ’60s, but it’s more attuned to ’50s movies yet with a postmodern, perverted twist.
Charles Busch: The slasher film, too, which was very ’70s. The play was somewhat plotless, really. Nobody was being killed. I think the main thing was that somebody was running around shaving people’s pubic hair off. I think that was the crime. There’s really not much going on. So when Strand wanted to produce the movie, and they teamed me with Bob King, who was a young director/screenwriter who had done a short subject that [Strand] had released, and they wanted to do a feature with him. We were teamed up, and at that point, I had never written a screenplay. Bob was extraordinarily helpful, and he had a great fondness for ’70s slasher movies and thought that if we added that element, that would give us a melodrama plot.
That also solved the second problem, which was, “Who was I going to play?” I’d originally played the lead in the stage play, a young 16-year-old girl. We all just knew we didn’t want the movie to be that stylized. I was in my 40s at that point, and even if I wasn’t at that point, we wanted it to be more naturalistic… Having an actual killer suggested we also had to have a detective, and that really fit my stage persona, a Susan Hayward, tough, glamorous lady.
The casting director, Laura Schiff, is a revered TV casting director now who did “Mad Men,” “Shogun,” “The West Wing,” and all these series. She discovered Lauren Ambrose for this movie.
I don’t think I had any clue who was playing the parts. With Lauren, it was between her and another actress, and they showed me both screen tests, and Lauren is who I preferred, and we all felt she was the most suited.
How did Strand discover the play?
The actual story is that I had this wonderful manager named Jeff Melnick who died a few years ago. He was an eccentric, fabulous person, and he just loved me. I don’t know too many people who can say that their agent or manager thought more of their talents than they did themselves, but Jeff was that. He kept insisting that “Psycho Beach Party” should be a movie, and I didn’t really get it. To me, there didn’t seem to have much plot. It was a campy theater piece. But he kept pursuing it for years, and every once in a while, 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 director of the film].
What do you think about the movie is worth discovering for younger audiences now? There is so much more film literacy now between Letterboxd and Criterion that younger audiences might actually get the references at this point.
It’s funny, it started off as a spoof of beach party movies, and the more I worked on it, I thought there was a little more to it. That maybe it is a little bit personal about how, when you’re young, and you don’t quite know who you are, and you feel like you’re a different person with your parents, your friends, at your school, it’s a bit of a metaphor for that.
I believe the Criterion Collection has taken on the movie. I was just looking through their catalogue and, my god, to think of it… [to be] in the same collection as the greatest films by Fellini and Kurosawa and Truffaut. It’s kind of wild. These movies can kind of disappear, and I’m hoping this will lead to Criterion taking on my follow-up picture, “Die, Mommie, Die!,” which I’m very proud of.
“Psycho Beach Party” plays at IFC Center on July 30 and July 31.
