Screen Ages by John Alberti

Author:John Alberti
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317650270
Publisher: Routledge

Fig 5.4

The former Disney Mouseketeer Annette Funicello and the teer pop idol Frankie Avalon in Beach Party, a screen experience meant to appeal to as well as define youth culture in the early 1960s.

Fig 5.5

This poster advertising a double bill of/Was a Teenage Werewolf and Dragstrip Girl captures the low-budget excitement that American International Pictures targeted towards a moble teenage adience.

Beach Party began the first of a series of surfing movies for AIP, films that featured teenage characters (even if the actors playing them were in their twenties) and fed into the early 1960s idea of California as a land of eternal sunshine and youthful optimism. The movies, including Beach Blanket Bingo (William Asher 1965) and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (William Asher 1965) made a teen star of Funicello and walked a fine line between innocence and sexuality, between the promise of sexual pleasure and the ultimate reminder that Funicello, in the end, was always a “good girl.” That both teens and families might be attracted to Beach Party also speaks to the last days of the Production Code and the idea that a movie should provide screen experiences appropriate for audiences of all ages. As we will see in the next chapter, by the end of the 1960s movies like Beach Party would come to seem quaint throwbacks to a more conformist era, even though that era was only a few years in the past.

With the rise of real estate values, uncertainty of weather conditions, and the emergence of cable television and VHS cassettes in the 1980s, the drive-in disappeared as an important form of screen experience, even though a few theaters remain in operation. Recently, however, the development of digital technology has created the “guerilla drive-in” movement, where just about anyone with a DVD player, digital projector, and low power FM transmitter can stage quick drive-in experiences anywhere there is an empty parking lot and a building with a large blank wall.

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