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Poster for Muscle Beach
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Released
1948 · FILM

Muscle Beach

Runtime
9 min
Documentary

Synopsis

*Muscle Beach* was shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1949 and won a prize at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1951. The short film became a cult favorite, screening at film clubs around the world. Strick shot the film using an army surplus movie camera during weekends in the fall of 1948. The songs in *Muscle Beach*, composed and sung by political folk singer Earl Robinson with lyrics by screenwriter and poet Edwin Rolfe, accent the film’s three-movement structure as it transitions between soaring gymnastics shows, flirty beachgoers, and children playing near the now-demolished pier at Ocean Park. The film was preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2009.

Credits

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 3

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Scored by Earl Robinson

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