Australian director Lyndall-Hobbs has a single feature length film to her credit, the 1987 comedy "Back to the Beach," but she appears to have pulled off a feat of alchemy with it.
Her movie was a reunion for crooner Frankie Avalon and former Mouseketeer Annette Funicello, who had starred in a long series of cheap comedies in the 1960s like "Beach Party" and "Beach Blanket Bingo" that drew hordes of fans and critical derision. When thumbing through Leonard Maltin's video guide, I came across this expression of sorrow for the 1965 Avalon musical "Sergeant Deadhead": "Bungling Army sergeant goes into space with a chimpanzee and undergoes personality change. Oh, that poor monkey."
When Hobbs made her own movie with the now middle-aged sun- and surf-loving duo, however, Roger Ebert gushed, "This movie absolutely blind-sided me. I don't know what I was expecting from 'Back to the Beach,' but it certainly wasn't the funniest, quirkiest musical comedy since 'Little Shop of Horrors.' Who would have thought Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello would make their best beach party movie 25 years after the others?"
Paramount is now releasing a deluxe 35th anniversary edition Blu-Ray of "Back to the Beach" that comes with a featurette where Hobbs giddily and sometimes candidly recalls making it.
In some ways, the new package atones for some earlier neglect. Hobbs explains over Zoom last week, "It did not have a press screening. They did a publicity blackout. (Gene) Siskel and Ebert managed to sneak in and see it. It didn't get any push."
Asked if she grew up with Avalon and Funicello's previous films, she says, "I did not. I did not grow up in Australia watching them. This film just sort of came out of left field. I'd been doing some music videos, and I'd been developing a couple of rather serious scripts. I was in London with my baby Lola Rose Thompson (who appears in the movie wearing punk regalia). My then-husband Chris Thompson, who was a very funny comedy guy -- he created "Bosom Buddies" and discovered Tom Hanks -- did a big rewrite and apparently suggested me."
If there is anything evergreen about "Back to the Beach," it's that Hobbs and company fill the screen with musical combinations we never knew we needed and now can't live without. One sequence pairs surf guitar king Dick Dale and the late-great Stevie Ray Vaughan on "Pipeline," while Funicello leads a ska conga line with Fishbone.
Who knew that Funicello had a hidden funk goddess hiding inside her?
"There were some combos. The Fishbone one with Annette is the one I was most proud of," Hobbs says. "At the time, Fishbone were like, 'You want us to do what?' They were sort of gobsmacked but were intrigued enough to want to do it. That was a fun day of shooting, but it was difficult because there were a ton of extras as you saw with Annette and the (lifeguard station), and it was tough to get it right. It was winter, so we'd lose the light by 5 o'clock instead of gorgeous summer nights at 8 or 9. At one point, somebody said, 'Let's cut that number. We don't have the time.' I said, 'No. We'll pull it off,' and we did it in a few hours."
The scene seems even more poignant in retrospect because Funicello was just starting to experience symptoms of multiple sclerosis but pulled off the sequence flawlessly.
"Back to the Beach" is loaded with supporting roles and cameos from '60s stars like Bob Denver, Don Adams and Connie Stevens, but the movie pokes fun at the '80s as well. Avalon is now a car dealer in Ohio with a literal punk for a son (Demian Slade), and Funicello is eerily obsessed with consumerism.
"Don't forget, we were in the '60s," she says. The movie also featured Jerry Mathers and the late Tony Dow as surf judges. "When I saw it recently, it made me sad kind of in a funny way because I had grown up watching ('Leave It to Beaver'). That was big in Australia. It was just a tiny part of them, I felt bad. I don't think they felt bad. I wish they had been more aligned, but you can only do so much."
Hobbs may only have a lone feature to her name, but her career has still been eventful. She started as a journalist in Australia and the UK and then gravitated to making short films, TV episodes and music videos, and she's still trying to launch new TV projects. She also helmed an episode of "Parker Lewis Can't Lose," which starred Arkansas' Corin Nemec.
"It's not easy as a woman if you don't have that one hit out of the gate, you don't have people supporting you," she says. She also says "loudmouth women" have more difficulty.
"With 'Back to the Beach,' I insisted on my own first AD (assistant director), which the producers thought was criminal, even though it was a director's guild rule," she says.
Nonetheless, YouTube is loaded with samples of her work that hold up remarkably well. The Chaka Kahn video, "This Is My Night," which features Wallace Shawn and Carol Kane and gorgeous black-and-white photography from German master Michael Ballhaus ("GoodFellas").
She also produced and directed the hysterically funny short "Dead on Time" starring a pre-"Blackadder" and "Mr. Bean" Rowan Atkinson as a man with a mere 30 minutes to live. The short also features future Oscar winner Jim Broadbent and actor knight Nigel Hawthorne.
For someone who describes herself as a loudmouth, Hobbs is also strikingly generous with credit. She credits her ex-husband for much of the wit in "Back to the Beach" and points out that her brother designed the film's surfboards.
Over the phone she often seems more grateful than pushy. When complimented on the delicate tone balance in "Dead on Time," she says, "It was funny, but Richard Curtis ("Notting Hill") wrote it. I didn't write that. I did a good job. We shot that in six or seven days, but that was like running around London like crazy people."