Ski Party

Ski Party (1965)

There's only one way to get warm!

Two college boys from SoCal attend a spring break vacation at a ski lodge in Idaho to get insider tips on how the president of the ski club manages to attract so many girls as a way to make amends to their girlfriends. Alongside this relatively simple endeavor are ice-skating polar bears, love triangles, musical numbers, and quick-switching in and out of drag to achieve the goal of discovering what went wrong in the boys' romantic lives.

Date of release
1965-06-30
TMDB
6.0 / 10 (12)
Runtime
1h 30m
Genres
Comedy, Music
Director
Alan Rafkin

Casting

Interesting facts

Ski Party is a 1965 American teen musical comedy film directed by Alan Rafkin and starring Frankie Avalon, Dwayne Hickman, Deborah Walley and Yvonne Craig. It was released by American International Pictures (AIP). Ski Party is considered as a beach party film spin-off, with a change of setting from the beach to the ski slopes – although the final scene places everyone back at the beach.

Production

In December 1964, AIP announced the film would follow Beach Blanket Bingo, then be followed by How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. James H. Nicholson and Sam Arkoff hired Gene Corman to produce after watching The Girls on the Beach. Corman hired the director, Alan Rafkin, and writer, Robert Kaufman, from television. Publicity called it the sixth in the series.

Dwayne Hickman made the film immediately after Cat Ballou and for the same salary. He later wrote "it may have seemed like a strange career decision to go from a classic comedy Western like Cat Ballou to an AIP date movie like Ski Party but at the time Cat was really just a B movie for Columbia." It was one of several films Deborah Walley made for AIP.

Hickman says he "hit it off immediately" with co star Avalon "and decided that we should play the characters like Hope and Crosby. Frankie would be the Crosby-like character, smart, in-charge and slick, while I would play the Hope role and be the bumbler. We added a lot of physical business which helped a not very imaginative script."

AIP wanted John Ashley to play Freddy, but Corman felt he looked too much like Avalon. The producer instead cast Aron Kincaid, who had been in Corman's previous two beach films.

Los Angeles City College (a two-year institution in East Hollywood) was the location used for the unnamed university in the film. The outdoor snow scenes were filmed in and around Sun Valley, Idaho over three weeks, and the film gives screen credit to Idaho's Sawtooth National Forest. Ski instructor Siegfried Engl has a cameo. There were also some scenes shot at the beach.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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