BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., July 18, 2000 — It is the goal of many aspiring actors to expand their repertoire by choosing different genres and playing a variety of characters. Very few get the chance to do so in one film.
So when Lauren Ambrose came across the script for “Psycho Beach Party,” she knew it was one of those chances and promptly snatched up the chance.
“I read the script for it. It had a big picture of a go-go dancer on the cover. And I remembered I’d read the play by Charles Busch and I went, ‘Oh my God, they’re making a movie out of this — I must be in it,'” Ambrose says. “And I auditioned a few times and eventually convinced them that I was the gal for the job.”
But why was it such a find?
Because no other film quite has “Psycho Beach Party’s” elements. It combines beach-party movies with slasher films and murder mysteries. Then there’s the issue of Ambrose’s character, a Sandra Dee-esque high school girl named Florence (nicknamed Chicklet). Not far into the film, she begins to develop multiple personalities — a dominatrix named Ann Bowman, a tough urban girl named Tylene among them. (Think Sally Field’s “Gidget” crossed with Sally Field’s “Sybil.”)
And when classmate after classmate winds up dead, Chicklet (and her many personalities) becomes a suspect since she can’t remember her experiences in the other personas.
In the meantime, she wins new friendships with a cool group of surfers (Nicholas Brendon, Buddy Quaid, Nick Cornish and Andrew Levitas) as well as an expert beach bum (“Dharma & Greg’s” Thomas Gibson).
“I thought for sure this was my opportunity to learn to surf, but no,” Ambrose muses. “That was a great day. Actually I was on a mattress, with two guys going like that [pushing up and down] on either side, and a prop guy hosing me down with a hose as Bob [Lee King, the director] was yelling ‘Look scared! Now fall!’
“And I was running to change into a different hideous cotton bathing suit from the ’60s.”
Still, Ambrose’s charm won over the play’s writer Busch, who originally played Chicklet on stage. For the film version, Busch decided to cast a young actress instead.
“Movies are really a more realistic form,” Busch explains. “It’s a hard part to cast because she has to seem like she really is a kid, but she also has to play this bizarre dominatrix and all the other characters that spring out of her.”
But don’t worry about Busch; he found himself another character to play.
“There’s a storyline we actually invented for the movie, this thriller/slasher plot. And it also provided me with a new part, because you need a sleuth. So I invented myself the character of Capt. Monica Stark, LAPD, who’s a very glamorous, briskly efficient policewoman out of Chanel.”
“Psycho Beach Party” opens in New York on Aug. 4.
