A New ‘Party’ Place

In “Psycho Beach Party,” Chicklet, a tomboyish surfer girl with multiple personalities, finds herself at the center of a serial murder mystery. Set on the Malibu beach circa 1962, the film is a veritable Sally Field hommage, combining elements from both “Gidget” and “Sybil” into a candy-colored psychological thriller-slasher movie spoof.

“All we needed was for Chicklet to be a union organizer,” says Charles Busch, who wrote the screenplay as well as the play on which it is based. An off-Broadway cult favorite, “Psycho Beach Party” was one of a series of movie-inspired plays Busch wrote and starred in during the late 1980s, including “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom” and “Red Scare on Sunset.”

The movie version of “Psycho Beach Party” debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and received a standing ovation at the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in June. The film, which is already playing in New York, opens Friday in Los Angeles, eventually bowing in additional markets this fall.

Busch says he originally thought it was a “terrible idea” to turn “Psycho Beach Party” into a feature film. “I’m so glad nobody listened to me,” Busch admits by telephone from his home in Manhattan. “I never thought it was a movie; there wasn’t much plot to it.”

Busch’s manager, Jeff Melnick, however, persisted in pushing the idea, eventually finding a receptive audience when Melnick began managing director Robert Lee King, who had a relationship with Strand/New Oz, the production arm of Strand Releasing. Searching for a project after the success of King’s short “Disco Years,” which Strand released as part of its compilation “Boys Life,” Melnick suggested King take on as his feature film debut “Psycho Beach Party,” which King had seen performed during a run in Los Angeles.

While the play’s plot points revolved around a series of ritual body shavings, King thought if he changed the shavings into murders, “Psycho Beach Party” could work as a movie. “So I phoned Charles and pitched him this notion of mine,” King recalls. “Luckily, he loved the idea, and by the end of the conversation we were finishing each other’s sentences and worked out a story that didn’t change throughout the drafts.”

Strand agreed to develop the film, eventually joining forces with Red Horse Films to make “Psycho Beach Party” on location in Malibu and at a drive-in movie theater in Azusa.

Inspired by the 1946 version of the thriller “The Spiral Staircase,” in which a killer stalks women with “afflictions,” Busch and King began to rewrite the play. They eventually added a new character for Busch--who, in drag, had originated the role of Chicklet--along with the murder mystery plot and the drive-in movie setting.

“You never know when you’re working with a writer--especially one who’s written something 12 years ago that’s been performed successfully all over the world--if he’s going to be stuck to his old ideas, or holding on to things that won’t work on film,” King says. “Of course I was a little concerned, but that was definitely not the case with Charles. He had tons of new ideas. I went to New York and we worked on an outline together, watching ‘The Spiral Staircase,’ ‘Marnie,’ ‘Friday the 13th’ and ‘Gidget’ to figure out what we ,wanted to lampoon that day.”

Campiness Meant for Sophisticated Audience

King notes that the film’s deliberate campiness is meant to appeal to a sophisticated audience well versed in the genres satirized in “Psycho Beach Party.” Meanwhile, Busch concedes that he “can’t sit through those Frankie and Annette beach party” movies, although he did agree with King that the film should resemble the genre stylistically.

“Mostly I wanted to emulate the look of those movies,” King says. “If you look at any single frame of ‘Psycho Beach Party,’ it looks like a frame out of a ‘60s beach movie.”

Indeed, myriad beach party movie elements are in place, from the luau musical number to the beachside Tiki hut inhabited by surf guru the Great Kanaka (played by Thomas Gibson, Greg of ABC’s “Dharma & Greg”).

There was one element that King wanted to look worse than the originals--the obligatory surf shots, which always looked fake in the Frankie and Annette films. King intentionally framed his surf shots to look absurd, shooting them on a soundstage against a green screen, with the ocean backdrops eventually added in post-production.

“They’re really on surfboards and air mattresses, with guys holding the mattresses to not only catch the actors, but also to bump the mattresses so they wiggle a little,” he explains.

The biggest challenge, however, in adapting the play to the screen was casting a woman to play Chicklet. “I always assumed the movie would be more realistic than the play, and it would be a very stylized movie if I played Chicklet this time around,” Busch says.

Still, the producers and King wanted Busch to be in “Psycho Beach Party,” although, as Busch points out, they had to build a character for him because his contract stipulated that he be in the film. “I really wanted to be in the movie. If it was going to be my movie, then I wanted a big part!” says Busch, who is perhaps best known to audiences for his role as Nat “Natalie” Ginsberg on the HBO prison series “Oz.”

“Considering it was a small-budget movie, why not?” Busch continues. “I mean, if it were Steven Spielberg throwing $20 million at me, I’d say, ‘Take the play, babe, see you at opening night.’ But it was nice that not only did they have to have me, they really wanted me. So I had to think of a new part for myself, and the women I tend to play in my plays are hard-boiled career gals with a soft side.”

When Busch realized that with a killer on the loose in the film version, there would also need to be a detective tracking him or her down, police officer Capt. Monica Stark was born. Capt. Monica, Busch says, is “about one-third Susan Hayward, one-third Joan Crawford and a little bit of Greer Garson,” clad in a tight policewoman uniform that’s always accessorized with a brightly hued scarf.

With Busch taken care of, the filmmakers next needed to find their Chicklet. Casting director Laura Schiff saw 300 actresses and King 150 before alighting upon Lauren Ambrose (“Can’t Hardly Wait”).

Before King began casting, Busch had advised him to look for an actress who could pull off Ann Bowman, one of Chicklet’s personalities, a Tallulah Bankhead-intoning dominatrix.

“What I discovered was that there were thousands of actresses who could play Chicklet, a few actresses who could play Chicklet and Ann Bowman, but there was only one who could play Chicklet, Ann Bowman and Tylene, Chicklet’s African American supermarket checkout worker personality,” King says. “And that actress was Lauren.”

King’s efforts paid off, as Ambrose went on to win this year’s outstanding actress award at Outfest for her roles in “Psycho Beach Party” and “Swimming.”

A Ladder, High Heels and a Tight Skirt

With casting complete, the film’s 21-day shoot began, sharing locations at Westward Beach in Malibu and the Foothill Drive-In in Azusa. While King concedes that 21 days is not a lot of time for a film replete with nude scenes, musical numbers and special effects, he says he not only survived but thrived within the hectic schedule that demanded necessity be the mother of invention.

For the film’s climactic scene, for instance, Busch and King had agreed that it would be funny to see Busch as Capt. Monica, climbing the rungs of a ladder alongside the drive-in’s marquee in her tight skirt and heels. But when Busch arrived on set done up as Capt. Monica, he realized that the first rung was 30 feet off the ground.

“I had to jump up, and I thought, ‘Oh God, what will I do?’ Because I wanted this really butch crew to think I was a real game gal, I didn’t want to be a wimp. It was awful, so thank God this big, burly stunt coordinator intervened and said, ‘Are you kidding? You can’t do that, you’ll break your leg!’ ”

Only trouble was there was no stunt double for Busch, and no time to find one, so the much daintier double for Ambrose was called to don Busch’s costume and get the scene on film that night.

Yet, despite the brevity of the shooting schedule, Busch, whose play “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife” opens on Broadway Nov. 2, says he loved making the movie.

“Maybe I was an old movie star in a previous life, because I thought being on a movie set was fascinating. It was a low-budget movie, but there was a large crew,” he says. “It was thrilling when I realized that all these people bustling around were there because of some idea I got over a cocktail in 1987.”