Patty Duke was in love with a much older man, and her manipulative manager/guardians Ethel and John Ross were going to do something about it. To separate the then 17-year-old actress from her 30 year-old lover Harry Falk, they sent her away on location to film a musical about a teenage girl who trumps all the boys on her high school track team by running in time to the hepcat drum solos she hears in her head. "When I want to go faster," she perkily explains, "I speed up the beat and I go!" Based on the original musical Time Out For Ginger, Billie was shot in a breakneck 15 days between seasons of the also-perky The Patty Duke Show. Modern audiences will find Billie entertaining not only for its genderqueer camp (when her father (Jim Backus) scolds "Try to remember you're a girl," Billie longingly laments "I wish I were a boy!") but also for its infectious mod dance routines and great garage rock drum solos by Dominic Frontiere (composer of the eerie The Outer Limits theme). After Patty Duke got back from shooting Billie, she married Falk anyway and did Valley Of The Dolls (1967) to forever outrun her "perky" reputation.

By Violet LeVoit