Carlo goes on a vacation to Southern California, where he quickly becomes immersed in the easygoing local culture and becomes entangled in two beach-side romances.

A New York tourist (Tony Curtis) falls asleep on a Southern California beach on his first night in the West and wakes up to The New Phantasmagoria--catamarans, surfers (including a dog), bodybuilders, acrobats, motorcycle chicken races, a nut fishing in the shallows . . . and Sharon Tate as a skydiver named Malibu who gives him the rapture of artificial respiration when he is conked on the head by a flying surfboard. This is the '60s American Dream: youth and beauty and money and sex in Southern California. Go west, all men.—alfiehitchie

New Yorker Carlo Cofield has driven to Southern California for a vacation, he, promptly upon arriving in Malibu, losing everything in his car, a VW Beetle, being destroyed. In trying to rebuild his life to survive at least in the short term, he becomes ensconced in two different but ultimately intersecting groups in he being attracted to a woman in each. The first group is the Malibu beach crowd, he attracted to a skydiver also named Malibu, who, unfortunately for him already has a boyfriend, one of the beach muscle men, overly earnest Harry Hollard. The second group is the corporate world of swimming pool company president Rod Prescott, whose longtime mistress, Italian national artist Laura Califatti, is the person who wrecked his car, who naively believes that Rod cannot leave his long suffering wife Diane Prescott for her, and who is the second woman he is attracted to. In the process, Carlo senses a few opportunities not only to land on his feet but proverbially to make his millions to live the good life, all while getting the woman of his dreams, the questions being which of Malibu or Laura is that woman, will he be the man of her dreams, or whether the cosmos has a different idea for them all.—Huggo