Kohner's bright, intrepid Franzie presents an appealing figure as she learns to surf and finds her place in the Kahoona's all-male gang. Within weeks Hollywood, too, was interested. Recounted in a lively first person somewhere between wide-eyed and wised-up, the novel Kohner knocked together in five weeks is largely forgotten today, but it hit a nerve with the mid-1950s American public, starring in a Life (1957) profile and selling a half million copies. Intrigued by daughter Kathy's stories of her beach adventures, clearly sensing both their entertainment value and their cultural significance, he was soon immersing himself systematically in the quirky details and savory jargon of the then-emerging surf culture. Gidget merits serious attention for its perceptive address of a postwar America bearing its burden of history while groping ahead toward new gender and social models.įrederick Kohner was an erudite Czech exile from Nazi Germany with a University of Vienna doctorate in film aesthetics and a successful Tinseltown career in script development and screenwriting that included an Oscar nomination. Source material for a cutely iconic film, yes, but this breezy August amusement collaboratively crafted by an author of fluidly heterogeneous personal identity and his spirited daughter is also a surprisingly postmodern textual space of disruption and juxtaposition. Affectionately recounting one kid's enchanted summer, Kohner implicitly highlights the immediate social changes it heralded, but not only that: in subtly decisive ways he intervenes allusively and intertextually in the narrative to anchor a buoyant personal history in the larger philosophical and political questions of often traumatic history, in a cosmopolitan resistance to American puritanical norms, and in knowing reflection on contemporary debates about representation and image. The bracing result is the story of a Little Girl that surprises at times in its willingness to entertain Big Ideas.
Just as interesting is the way its entertaining comic drama of feminist awakening and sharp social perception plays out through an intriguingly complex narrative voice, one often blurring distinctions between its California teen daughter-protagonist-narrator and the father-author, at once learned European exile and savvy Hollywood professional. Yet, pop culture touchstone that it remains, Gidget offers more than just the salty tang of Vair du temps.
Kohner clearly knew that in the 1950s far more than the Pacific Coast Highway lay between the upscale suburbs of Brentwood and the roughneck shacks on Surfrider Beach. For all its light-hearted sweetness, Frederick Kohner's empathetic, fictionalized account of his fifteen-year-old daughter's adventures with the original Malibu surf crew signals the emergence of a rebellious postwar youth culture and the stirrings of suburban feminist misbehavior.
#MALIBU SURFER 12 OZ. CANDLE MOVIE#
For the novel on which the movie was based, Gidget, The Little Girl with Big Ideas (1957), is a telling aesthetic and cultural document.
#MALIBU SURFER 12 OZ. CANDLE SERIES#
Most people who know Gidget only know-or, rather, faintly remember-the 1959 Hollywood film starring Sandra Dee or, perhaps, the Sally Field TV series it later inspired.
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