You could have seen “Psycho Seashore Celebration,” director Robert Lee King and author Charles Busch’s wickedly humorous send-up of traditional Hollywood, whereas browsing on late-night cable channels within the early aughts. Based mostly on Busch’s personal play from 1987, which was itself impressed by Frederick Kohner’s late-’50s Gidget character and her initiation into surf tradition, “Psycho Seashore Celebration” is strictly because the title sounds: half slasher, half seaside film, and all pastiche and split-personality.
That’s apropos, as a then little-known, pre-“Six Toes Below” Lauren Ambrose performs Florence, aka Chicklet, a schizoid who turns into the prime suspect in a collection of comically mounting beachside murders. She performs the position as a careening cross between Tallulah Bankhead and Sandra Dee — who in fact originated Gidget, the unique wannabe surf woman, onscreen in 1959. Screenwriter Busch, who, homosexual and in his 30s, performed the 16-year-old teenage woman Gidget — sorry, Chicklet — in his unique off-Broadway stage present right here performs the detective-in-drag investigating the murders.
The fizzy, gee-whiz humor clashing with the melodramatic camp makes for one of many principally wildly unpredictable tones of any candy-colored camp film — and one which additionally had an early eye for starlets, together with a then still-indie-actress Amy Adams, “Buffy” breakout Nicholas Brendon, “Prison Minds” star Thomas Gibson, and extra. (“Psycho Seashore Celebration,” additionally, is stacked with shirtless male surfers, and subsequently homoerotic stress breaks via like a tidal wave.)
“Psycho Seashore Celebration” celebrates its twenty fifth anniversary this month with Q&A screenings (that includes Ambrose, Busch, and director King) on July 30 and 31 on the IFC Heart in New York Metropolis. The movie can even obtain a bodily media launch at a later date, with assist from the movie’s unique producer/distributor, Strand Releasing. IndieWire caught up with Charles Busch, who lives in New York, over the cellphone forward of the upcoming screenings.
This interview has been condensed and edited for size.
IndieWire: The film, which you started as a type of midnight-movie play, is about within the early ’60s, but it surely’s extra attuned to ’50s motion pictures but with a postmodern, perverted twist.
Charles Busch: The slasher movie, too, which was very ’70s. The play was considerably plotless, actually. No person was being killed. I believe the primary factor was that anyone was operating round shaving individuals’s pubic hair off. I believe that was the crime. There’s actually not a lot occurring. So when Strand wished to supply the film, and so they teamed me with Bob King, who was a younger director/screenwriter who had finished a brief topic that [Strand] had launched, and so they wished to do a function with him. We have been teamed up, and at that time, I had by no means written a screenplay. Bob was terribly useful, and he had an awesome fondness for ’70s slasher motion pictures and thought that if we added that component, that will give us a melodrama plot.
That additionally solved the second drawback, which was, “Who was I going to play?” I’d initially performed the lead within the stage play, a younger 16-year-old woman. All of us simply knew we didn’t need the film to be that stylized. I used to be in my 40s at that time, and even when I wasn’t at that time, we wished it to be extra naturalistic… Having an precise killer advised we additionally needed to have a detective, and that actually match my stage persona, a Susan Hayward, powerful, glamorous girl.
The casting director, Laura Schiff, is a revered TV casting director now who did “Mad Males,” “Shogun,” “The West Wing,” and all these collection. She found Lauren Ambrose for this film.
I don’t suppose I had any clue who was taking part in the elements. With Lauren, it was between her and one other actress, and so they confirmed me each display screen exams, and Lauren is who I most popular, and all of us felt she was essentially the most suited.
How did Strand uncover the play?
The precise story is that I had this excellent supervisor named Jeff Melnick who died a couple of years in the past. He was an eccentric, fabulous particular person, and he simply cherished me. I don’t know too many individuals who can say that their agent or supervisor thought extra of their abilities than they did themselves, however Jeff was that. He saved insisting that “Psycho Seashore Celebration” needs to be a film, and I didn’t actually get it. To me, there didn’t appear to have a lot plot. It was a campy theater piece. However he saved pursuing it for years, and each every so often, he would name me and say, “Oh, so and so handed.” I stated, “I didn’t know they have been taking a look at it!” Then, he took on as a shopper Bob King [the director of the film].
What do you consider the film is value discovering for youthful audiences now? There’s a lot extra movie literacy now between Letterboxd and Criterion that youthful audiences would possibly really get the references at this level.
It’s humorous, it began off as a spoof of seaside celebration motion pictures, and the extra I labored on it, I believed there was just a little extra to it. That possibly it’s a little bit private about how, while you’re younger, and also you don’t fairly know who you’re, and you are feeling such as you’re a unique particular person along with your mother and father, your folks, at your faculty, it’s a little bit of a metaphor for that.
I imagine the Criterion Assortment has taken on the film. I used to be simply wanting via their catalogue and, my god, to consider it… [to be] in the identical assortment as the best movies by Fellini and Kurosawa and Truffaut. It’s type of wild. These motion pictures can type of disappear, and I’m hoping this can result in Criterion taking up my follow-up image, “Die, Mommie, Die!,” which I’m very pleased with.
“Psycho Seashore Celebration” performs at IFC Heart on July 30 and July 31.
