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Muscle Beach

Set on a single day in Venice, MUSCLE BEACH follows Abe, a briefly famous bodybuilder who's returned to his old stomping grounds, where his best friend Jay has gone missing. Throughout the harrowing midsummer day, Abe navigates a rogue's gallery of Venice Beach characters, each with their own agenda, their own secrets, and their own strange theories of where Jay might be.

Starring Lindsey Normington (ANORA), Kirk Baltz (RESERVOIR DOGS), and Venice bodybuilding legend Ike Catcher, MUSCLE BEACH skirts the line between documentary and narrative, harnessing the real characters and raw carnival energy of Venice to tell a story about pumping iron, tainted supplements, and the bonds and betrayals that linger between old friends.

  • Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman
    Director
    Dry, Syzygy, The Birth of the Feed
  • Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman
    Writer
  • Fred Kolouch
    Producer
  • Lauren Boyle
    Producer
    Everything But The World, DIS
  • Billy Sullivan
    Producer
    Vox
  • Ike Catcher
    Producer
  • Jack Lawrence Mayer
    Producer
    Big House, HBO's Single Long
  • Lindsey Normington
    Key Cast
    "Alice"
    Anora (2024), The Idol, Blindspotting
  • Ike Catcher
    Key Cast
    "Abe Riesenrad"
    Divinity (2023)
  • Kirk Baltz
    Key Cast
    "Chase Morgandy"
    Reservoir Dogs, Natural Born Killers, Dances With Wolves, Face/Off, Bulworth
  • Kewon Vines
    Key Cast
    "FreeTop"
    TiTi Do You Love Me, Outlaw Johnny Black, Dashing Through The Snow, A Hip Hop Story
  • Project Type:
    Feature
  • Genres:
    Noir, Dark Comedy, Docufiction
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 30 minutes 25 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    May 16, 2025
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital 4K
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography - Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman

Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman has partnered with New York Times OpDocs, MEMORY, BBC, Discovery, WARP Records, The New Yorker, Anonymous Content, DIS, WIRED and others to craft award-winning, genre-bending films for and about the frenetic, accelerating networked world and its obscure subcultures. MUSCLE BEACH is his first narrative feature.

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Director Statement

The seeds of MUSCLE BEACH were planted back in 2016 when I directed a documentary about Venice Beach bodybuilders. While filming that doc, I met Ike Catcher, the ‘King of Muscle Beach’ and former Mr. Vienna. Something about his simultaneous bombastic exhibitionism and quiet guardedness spoke to me. He seemed to typify the strange contrasts of the Venice Boardwalk itself.

During COVID, I spent a lot of time walking around Venice to get out of the house, hanging out on the fishing pier, and reflecting on Ike and on the surreal intersection of fitness and entertainment culture that typifies Muscle Beach. I started thinking about an original noir feature that could capture the anarchic spirit of the Boardwalk, a land of opposites where crust punks and unhoused wanderers lounge on the grass near Snapchat founders and trust-fund surfers.

The film we made showcases the real Venice Beach community, featuring actual bodybuilders, street performers, and local hustlers alongside professional actors. As Ike Catcher put it to me when I first approached him with this wild idea: "whenever Hollywood comes to shoot in Venice, they clear out all the real people and bring in actors to play us." We set out to do exactly the opposite, capturing the boardwalk's real people and carnival spirit before they get washed away in the churn of development and gentrification.