Tom Lisanti

Happy Birthday to actor-turned-producer Bart Patton. Tall and lanky, handsome Bart Patton played a surfing college boy on vacation in Waikiki in Gidget Goes Hawaiian but it is his work behind the camera that he is best remembered for.  An association with Roger Corman led the actor to become a twenty-four old producer of the beach-party movies, Beach Ball (1965), Wild Wild Winter (1966), and Out of Sight (1966).

At age ten, Bart played Scampy the Clown for four years on the ABC children’s program, Super Circus. While attending UCLA in the late fifties he met his future wife, pretty blonde actress Mary Mitchel, and became close friends with an aspiring filmmaker named Francis Coppola. Patton made his film debut playing a high school student in Because They’re Young (1960), which began his four-year relationship with Columbia Pictures though he never signed a contract. He would go on to work for the studio in Strangers When We Meet (1960) before joining Joby Baker and Don Edmonds as partying college boys in Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961) starring Deborah Walley in the title role. Bart also began working on TV and guest starred on such varied series as 77 Sunset Strip, Father Knows Best, Thriller and General Electric Theatre.  His next film role was as an ax murderer in Dementia 13 (1963) directed by Francis Coppola.  This eerie black-and-white horror movie is set in an Irish castle also starred William Campbell, Luana Anders, Mary Mitchel, and Patrick Magee. It was on Dementia 13 where Bart Patton began to get involved with the production side of making movies. Producer Roger Corman was impressed with the young man and he began working as a production manager for his company. He helped put the cult horror movie Spider Baby (1964) together before Corman offered him a chance to produce Beach Ball (1965) one of the most blatant and successful knockoffs of AIP’s Beach Party. This began his short partnership with director Lennie Weinrib. The success of Beach Ball landed the duo a seven-year contract at Universal Pictures. The studio was late into getting in on the beach movie craze and hired them. First up was Wild Wild Winter (1965), a beach party in the snow starring Gary Clarke and Chris Noel, and then the combination beach and spy spoof Out of Sight (1966) with Jonathan Daly and Karen Jensen.

In between producing assignments Patton continued accepting roles on such TV sitcoms as Petticoat Junction and Hank. At Universal, he and Weinrib had a number of projects in development but were let go before any could come to fruition. Bart Patton went on to produce the trouble-laden production The Rain People (1969) directed by his friend Francis Coppola. The movie starred Shirley Knight as a pregnant Long Island housewife who abandons her husband and hits the road and picks up hitchhiker James Caan as a mentally challenged former football star.  Frustrated with film making, Patton began making commercials for John Urie & Associates. The one later film that Patton produced was The Further Adventures of the Wilderness Family (1978) starring Robert Logan of Beach Ball.  Patton also began working steadily as an assistant director on a number of projects.

You can read anecdotes from Bart Patton about his beach movies and career in my book Hollywood Surf & Beach Movies: The First Wave, 1959-1969.

The late Tura Satana was one of the most exotic actresses of the sixties who always seemed to be cast as voracious man-eaters in low-budget films and fantasy television shows. Her on-screen persona was so powerful that you could not help but be transfixed by her as exemplified when cast as the vile Varla in Russ Meyer’s drive-in cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Dancer Tura Satana’s acting career began was spotted by director Billy Wilder while performing at the Pink Pussycat Club and he cast her as Suzette Wong, an Asian hooker in Irma La Douce (1963).  Satana got noticed in her small role and kept busy for the next three years playing minor exotic roles on film and TV. Her dancing prowess got her cast as a stripper in Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed? (1964) and later as a go-go girl in Our Man Flint (1966). After more TV gigs, she was cast in the role of a lifetime—the man-hating viper Varla in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966).The movie was ahead of its time and possibly made audiences especially men squirm in their seats as buxom Satana, Haji, and Lori Williams physically and verbally abused the males in the movie. To make the gals even more Amazonian, Russ Meyer brilliantly positioned the camera close to the ground so he could film the girls from an angle looking up.  Clad in a black cat suit with her cleavage prominently displayed, Satana was the trio’s depraved leader who after breaking the neck of her teenage male opponent in a car race takes his nubile prissy girlfriend hostage. The terrified teen is dragged along as the vixens plot to rip off the fortune of a crippled old man despite the presence of his two sons—one beefy and dumb and the other weak but suspicious.  Satana oozes a sort of evil sexiness as the angry Varla and menaces, karate chops, and kills her way into B-movie infamy though the film was a box office disappointment when released. Shockingly, Hollywood never took advantage of Satana’s talent properly. In 1968 she turned up in director Ted V. Mikel’s grade-Z horror movie The Astro-Zombies playing a wicked Chinese dragon lady named “Satana” who works for a foreign power that covets mad doctor John Carradine’s knowledge of turning lawmen into programmable robots. Mikels then hired her for a supporting role in The Doll Squad (1973) She deserved much better. Tura then disappeared from show business only to be resurrected in the nineties due to Faster Pussycat‘s cult followers. She was a fave on the celebrity autograph convention circuit until her death in 2011. You can read more about Tura Satana in my and Louis Paul’s book Film Fatales: Women in Espionage Films & Television, 1962-1973 and my book Glamour Girls of Sixties Hollywood.

Also a quick happy birthday to Robert Pine star of the beach movie Out of Sight (1966) and the TV series CHiPs, but now more known as the dad of actor Chris Pine of the new Star Trek movies. And to blonde nymphet Sue Lyon of Lolita fame though I prefer her in The Night of the Iguana as the tease who turns on drunken minister Richard Burton and on-the-down-low Lesbian teacher Grayson Hall.

https://youtu.be/tiE4QWPDxus

The outrageous Edy Williams arguably had the most determination and drive of most sixties glamour girls to become another Raquel Welch. Standing 5-foot-7 with dark brown hair and brown-green eyes she had a curvaceous body measuring 39-26-37, breathy voice, and captivating personality that men drool over. Loving the camera, Edy posed bikini-clad for numerous cheesecake and pin-up photos. She turned every public appearance into a media event and undeniably became a popular sex goddess of the decade leading up to her most notorious role as porn star Ashley St. Ives in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970).

Edy began her acting career with bit roles in a few movies including For Love or Money (1963) before getting noticed playing call girls in A House Is Not a Home (1964) and more memorably in Sam Fuller’s film noir The Naked Kiss (1964). As with her contemporaries, she landed minor decorative roles on TV including episodes of Burke’s Law, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. The ravishing beauty then signed a contract with 20^th Century-Fox, ala Raquel Welch, but wherein Raquel landed big movie roles Edy continued to toil on television. Edy was voted a Hollywood Deb Star for 1965 but still was only landing bit parts on the big screen in Nevada Smith (1965), Red Line 7000 (1965), and Paradise, Hawaiian Style (1966). She finally got noticed and was simply delectable in The Pad (and How to Use It) (1966) playing one of playboy James Farentino’s girlfriends but went right back to bit parts in the awful Sonny and Cher musical Good Times (1967). It was at this point where Williams went blonde and had one of her best roles in The Secret Life of an American Wife (1968) as the “dumb but well-stacked” suburban neighbor of Anne Jackson who imagines Edy as this sexy siren who can seduce any man. After playing one of sailor Gardner McKay’s shapely shipmates in I Sailed to Tahiti with an All-Girl Crew (1969) and a Vegas showgirl who is sent by casino owner David Janssen to seduce his son Robert Drivas who he suspects of being gay in Where’s It At? (1969), Williams scored big with droll over-the-top performance in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) directed by Russ Meyer. She hit it off so well with her director that they wed shortly after and she co-starred in his next movie the underrated The Seven Minutes (1971) starring Wayne Maunder. You can read my homage to Edy in Beyond, with comments from actors who knew and worked with her, in my upcoming book from BearManor Media entitled Talking Sixties Drive-In Movies.

https://youtu.be/g7-7SOW152M

Lisa’s birthday almost sneaked by me. A sultry siren with impeccable cheekbones, long dark hair, and a curvaceous figure, Lisa Seagram started off in sophisticated roles before literally cutting her hair short and loosening up in a string of mid-Sixties fantasy and adventure films and TV shows usually cast as the duplicitous vixen or wanton woman. She made her acting debut as a college coed in the forgettable teenage comedy Love in a Goldfish Bowl (1961) with Tommy Sands and Fabian. More minor roles quickly followed in Man-Trap (1961), Bachelor in Paradise (1961), Too Late Blues (1962), and Come Blow Your Horn (1963), and The Thrill of It All (1963). Her early TV work included guest stints on The Gallant Men, McHale’s Navy, Gunsmoke, and six appearances on Burke’s Law.

With her dark sultry looks accentuated by elegant high cheek bones, Seagram was a natural for TV fantasy shows and appeared in a number of them most notably Bewitched as the bewitching “Miss Jasmine” a perfume spokes model and wicked witch who is determined to steal Darrin from Samantha in “It Takes One to Know One.” Back on the big screen, Seagram appeared as a fashion model who gets awaken from a deep sleep with a smack-on-the-behind from Richard Harris’ secret agent in the mod spy spoof Caprice (1967) and then played an ambitious secretary who plots with TV producer Pat Harrington to exploit an ancient Roman who materializes in the present in 2000 Years Later (1969). By the time of the satiric comedy’s release, Seagram had already packed it in and relocated to Rome joining the ranks of such female stars as Carroll Baker, Mimsy Farmer, and Pamela Tiffin who tried their luck in Italy.  Not finding much success there, she wound up in Hawaii where she opened a very successful acting school and even produced a few movies. You can read my interview with Lisa in my book Glamour Girls of Sixties Hollywood.

https://youtu.be/DfOJtVmrVfU