During the mid-1960s, one of cinema's most successful kind of film was the beach-movie genre. These low-budget, hastily produced features celebrated California's beaches, surfing, and teen culture. One series of films starred Frankie Avalon (1940–) and Annette Funicello (1942–) as "Frankie" and "Dee Dee"—two wholesome teens who descended upon the beach with dozens of their friends every summer. The group lived free from the interference of parents and without financial worries. They spent their days surfing, partying, dancing, skydiving, and enjoying other innocent entertainments. In Andrew Edelstein's The Pop Sixties, William Asher (1921–), the director of several of the beach movies, described the premise of the series: "It's all good clean fun. No hearts are broken, and virginity prevails."

American International Pictures (AIP), which had profited during the 1950s with low-budget horror and juvenile delinquent films like Reform School Girls (1957) and I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), produced...