We have here the trailer for The Beach Girls and the Monster, a 1965 movie that was shot in about six days for less than what some producers now spend for six minutes of filming. It was originally released as Monster From The Surf but I guess that title didn't make it clear that there were girls in bikinis in it. Since that was about the only thing the film had to offer, it's probably wise that they renamed it.
The trailer is entertaining enough just from the sheer campiness but there are a number of things about this film that will interest the kind of person who visits this site. One is the narration, which was done by Art Gilmore, who did voiceovers for something like two-thirds of all the movie trailers made in Hollywood in the sixties. Doesn't he sound way too enthusiastic to be selling us what is probably the worst movie he ever had to sell us? Moviegoers of that era learned, or should have learned, that the more excited Art Gilmore was, the likelier the film was to suck Raisinets. He's almost giddy about this one.
Secondly: You see those two cops on the beach? Well, I think the one on the left is Clyde Adler, who was the foil for Soupy Sales then and the voice of White Fang and Black Tooth and Pookie and all those guys at the door. He doesn't cream anyone with a pie but I think that's Clyde.
Thirdly: Another great local kids show host of the sixties and a fine actor and cartoon voice person is Walker Edmiston. Walker is one of those guys who was on every damn TV show of the fifties, sixties and seventies at one time or another, and when he wasn't on screen, he was often dubbing the voices of actors who were. I worked with him on some of the Sid and Marty Krofft shows and he's a wonderful, wonderful man. In the fifties and sixties, he hosted brilliant shows in Los Angeles with his puppets, one of which was Kingsley the Lion. You don't really see Walker in the trailer but he had a large, particularly embarrassing role in the movie and even wrote its title song from when it was called Monster in the Surf. You do see a few moments of Kingsley singing that tune…to the lion's eternal shame.
And lastly, I have a story about this picture…not a happy one, I'm afraid. It was directed by a man named Jon Hall, who also starred in it. Mr. Hall was once a film star of some magnitude but by the time he made this, he was really touching bottom. In fact, I think it was the last thing he did. (He took his own life in 1979.)
Around 1971, Hall was broke and owed Uncle Sam a lot more money in back taxes than he would ever be able to pay. It became the sad duty of one Internal Revenue Agent to try and work out some sort of settlement deal. The agent kept negotiating payment plans that would let Hall off the hook for much of the debt but the way the I.R.S. worked (and probably still does), the agent then had to get his superiors to bless any settlement…and in this case, they wouldn't. They kept sending the agent back to demand more payment from Hall and it eventually came down to a complete seizure of Mr. Hall's assets, including the negative and all his rights to The Beach Girls and the Monster.
How do I know this? Because the I.R.S. agent was a man named Bernard Evanier. My father.
As I've explained elsewhere, my father hated his job and one of the reasons he hated it was cases like this one. He'd work out a payment plan to let Hall off by paying ten cents on the dollar over an extended period, which seemed reasonable given the man's financial condition. Then he'd go to his bosses for their approval and they'd say, "No, get more out of him and get it now." These were the same bosses who were then completely tearing up the tax bills of very wealthy, solvent men who were friends of President Richard M. Nixon.
It was a great deal for those friends. If you'd given $50,000 to Nixon's re-election campaign, you could get out of two million dollars or more of delinquent taxes. A few months ago when I met John W. Dean, I thanked him for his role in exposing these shenanigans. My father, by the way, did not even like the whole idea of taxes but he felt that if we had to have them, a guy making $20 million a year should at least pay as much as a divorced mother with a large family to feed.
I'm a little fuzzy on how the Jon Hall case was finally resolved but I know that Mr. Hall finally got off the hook with the Revenuers. He even called my father — who was retired by then — and thanked him for being compassionate and understanding about it, which would not surprise anyone who knew my father. I'm pretty sure the I.R.S. auctioned off the rights Hall had in The Beach Girls and the Monster but I don't know what they got for them. If it was more than twenty bucks, someone overpaid. Watch the trailer and you'll see why.
