During those evening drives, Kathy dazzled her father with the surfing slang she had learned from her older companions. In the evenings, he would pick her up and drive her home. In the summer of 1956, Kathy’s father drove her from Brentwood to Malibu every day, where she would spend hours surfing with her new friends. Kathy was only five feet tall, so the surfers, who nicknamed practically everyone in their circle, nicknamed her Gidget (a portmanteau of “girl” and “midget”). 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. 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.

Francoise sagan a certain smile