By Tom Lisanti
A
few years ago, actress-turned-playwright Carol Hollenbeck had a Zoom meeting
with a theatre group and mentioned this fabulous red-carpet premiere in her
hometown for a movie she made in the sixties. About a month later, the group
met again on Zoom and one of the group members said to Carol, “By the way, I
found your movie.’ She quickly asked, “What movie?’ “Eden Cried,” he replied.
Carol was flabbergasted. That film had been lost for almost fifty years and from
her perspective it should have remained lost.
Carol
Hollenbeck was a starstruck teenager who had been fascinated with Hollywood
from a young age. She candidly admitted, “I didn’t want to become an actress. I
wanted to be a movie star.”
Arriving
in Hollywood in the early 1960s, she unfortunately suffered the pitfalls many
naïve young women fell victim to. However, using the stage name of Carole
Holland, she did have some small successes greatly aided by the fact that she
was a beautiful, shapely, baby doll blonde.
Carol’s
looks and poise no doubt helped her land a job as a showgirl in a stage
production of Irma La Douce, starring Juliet Prowse at the Riviera Hotel
in Las Vegas. Carol recalls, “Juliet was engaged to Frank Sinatra at the time.
She was very outspoken and yelled a lot.” She donned bikinis for a few of the
non-AIP beach movies such as The Girls on the Beach. And her adoration
of Jean Harlow gave her an indirect connection to Joseph E. Levine’s Harlow
starring Carroll Baker and a direct connection to Bill Sargent’s rival Harlow
starring Carol Lynley. She actually met with Sargent to discuss her
possibly playing the thirties sex bomb. Alas, it did not come to be. [Carol
discusses her Harlow experiences in my upcoming book Dueling Harlows: The Race
to Bring the Actress’s Life to the Silver Screen from McFarland and Co.]
What
did materialize was the female lead in the low-budget oddity, Eden Cried,
which was also known as In the Fall of ’55 … Eden Cried. It was shot
in 1965 but not shown until 1967—two years after Frankie and Annette had hung
up their surfboards. It was a sort of adult, soap opera-ish Beach Party,
set in Malibu supposedly during the mid-1950s (but everything from the costumes
to the beach scenes to dance moves scream 1960s), that showed what life was
like for teenage beach denizens off the sand. There is a fair amount of surfing
footage and scenes of young people partying on the shore.
To
alleviate all the histrionics, there is narration (that was not in the movie
when it premiered) provided by a Jack Nicholson sound-alike who makes a lot of amusing,
sardonic remarks about the characters and put-downs about Southern California
living in general. It is done in a way that evokes those dead serious 1950s
documentaries where they warned viewers about juvenile delinquency or impending
bomb threats or predatory homosexuals. It also connects scenes due to missing or
excised footage.
Carol
has some good dramatic moments as rich girl Lorraine Parker (a sexy blonde with
a big bouffant and a bad reputation) new to her high school. She falls for
rebellious senior Skip Galloway (Tom P. Pace), a surfer and grease monkey with
a bitchin’ hot rod. Pace, who was in his thirties at the time but looked
forty-five, is so miscast that it is off-putting seeing him romance the more age-appropriate
Carole or confiding to Larry Reimer as his best friend Rich or just hanging on
the sand with the teenage beach and surfing crowd. Lorraine and Skip have a
tumultuous, up-and down-relationship fueled by a drag race that ends in tragedy;
her disapproving father (Victor Izay); infidelity (tired of taking it slow,
Lorraine has sex with Rich); a suicide attempt (Lorraine downs some dolls after
Skip leaves her) that leads to a quickie marriage, and an unwanted pregnancy
that breaks the couple up. This is where the film abruptly ends without the
requisite happy ending. It also promises a sequel that never came to be—thankfully.
After
its 1967 premiere in Newburgh, Eden Cried was not released theatrically.
Unbeknownst to Carol, it surfaced in January of 1972 (it is speculated the
narration was added at this point) and was screened in a few theaters in Los
Angeles. Then in April, it popped up in Atlanta before falling back into
obscurity. In both cities, the nostalgia appeal for the fifties/early sixties
was highlighted in its print ads to draw audiences. This was just ahead of the Broadway
stage musical Grease and George Lucas’ film American Graffiti—both
of which became box office hits.
As
far as Carol knows, after being shown in Atlanta, Eden Cried was never
televised and remained a lost film until a few years ago when it surfaced on
DVD (from Video Screams). It has now become a cult curio especially for fans of
1960s drive-in movies. Carol recently appeared at a screening of the movie and
is planning on attending more of them.
Cinema
Retro: How were you
cast in Eden Cried?
Carol
Hollenbeck: I blocked
it out regarding how I was cast. I really do not know. However, if I was to
venture a guess, it was because of all the publicity I was getting at the time.
My press agent was grooming me to be the next Marilyn Monroe. The media dubbed
me “Hollywood’s Mystery Girl” because I was being photographed at discotheques
and movie premieres. My face turned up in many newspapers.
CR: Do you know what the title means?
CH: It comes from the lyrics to the
movie’s theme song [written by John Bambridge, Jr. and sung by Walter Rowen]. I
felt that the title meant young love gone wrong...
CR:
What did you think of
the ridiculous casting of Tom P. Pace as your seventeen-year-old boyfriend?
CH:
Tom was almost
thirty-five. But it is Hollywood’s mentality. I will tell you why. Everybody
knew he was too old. Somebody—probably one of the producers—said, ‘I want him.
I don’t care how old he looks, I want him.’ And that was it. He was not
physically right for the part, but they wanted him anyway. With me I was a few
years older than seventeen but I did have an appropriate California blonde
beach look. The public is fixated on that American blonde image. It has always
fascinated me about the blonde myth, the blonde fantasy—the Marilyn
Monroe-type.
CR: What do you recall about the film’s
director and screenwriter, Fred Johnson?
CH: Fred was very young. We were all
young—well except for Tom Pace. I think Fred did the best he could and was a
good writer.
CR: How did it come about that Eden
Cried had its premiere in your hometown of Newburgh, New York?
CH:
I believe someone
from Walter Reade Distributors thought of it. Eden Cried had its
premiere on June 10, 1967. They flew me
from Hollywood to New York. I was treated like a star. In Newburgh, they named
a street after me called “Carole Holland Way,” but it was only for two weeks. I
was so nervous that I didn’t go into the theater to watch it. My family and
friends knew it was not very good but did not come right out and say so. They
were nice about it.
CR: Do you know why it did not get a
national theatrical release at that time?
CH: It got caught up in some kind of
squabble between Walter Reade and the producers, so it ended up being shelved.
CR: What were your feelings like after
hearing that the film was never going to be seen?
CH: Even though the film was not great, I
thought I did a fairly decent job and it could have helped me get other roles.
But I did not stay in Hollywood long enough to promote myself and get the film
footage out, so people could see it. I just chose to dislike it and put it out
of my mind. So, when it got lost and nobody saw it, I didn’t care because I
didn’t believe it was going to take me anywhere. I walked around for many years
with shame for making this film. It didn’t seem to bring me any happiness.
CR: What did you do after leaving
Hollywood?
CJ: I moved to New York and continued
acting for a bit. I did commercials and had day parts on soap operas such as Love
Is a Many Splendored Thing and As the World Turns. I appeared in a
number of Off-Broadway plays and a few movies, most notably Tootsie
where I played an autograph hound in a scene with Jessica Lange. In the
nineties, I began writing for local newspapers and then the National
Enquirer. I then joined a women’s ensemble group and began playwrighting.
Two of my plays, Funky Fifties and The Lifters, were nominated
for the Samuel French Best One Act Plays Award.
CR: Did you ever try to find Eden
Cried?
CH: In 2017, we did a reading of my
play Hometown Premiere at the Ritz Theatre in Newburgh, where
the film premiered. The staff of the theatre searched for Eden Cried because
they wanted to use a clip of it in the staged reading, since the play was
loosely based on the film’s premiere. It could not be found. I thought
then, ‘Perhaps I should accept that I did the movie, but I won’t ever find it,’
CR: When Eden Cried finally
surfaced on DVD what was your reaction?
CH: It was being sold on DVD by
Sinister Cinema.com and I
purchased a copy. What they did to salvage the film, is they added a narration
that pokes fun of the sixties’ era. I really liked that. The film is so corny
that it’s funny. The narration gives the film a Mystery Science Theater touch.
CR: After watching fifty years later,
what surprised you the most?
CH: That I had so many costume changes.
CR: What are your feelings today toward
the movie today?
CH: I have done a 180-degree turnaround. It
is like a cult film. Now everything in my apartment is Eden Cried. The
framed movie poster is on my wall. There are twenty-four products with the Eden
Cried poster on it—t-shirts, tote bags, coffee mugs, hoodies, pillows, etc. When
I couldn’t find it, I was glad I couldn’t. But when I found it, I was glad I
did. I have embraced it and absolutely love it.
(Look for Carol Hollenbeck’s
upcoming novella, A Moment of Blonde Madness and Tom Lisanti’s upcoming books,
Ryan’s Hope: An Oral History of Daytime’s Groundbreaking Soap from
Citadel Press/Kensington Books and Dueling Harlows: The Race to Bring the
Actress’s Life to the Silver Screen from McFarland and Company.)
(Photos courtesy of Tom Lisanti and Carol Hollenbeck.)