In this youthful drama, Tom, a 14- year-old who's parents have just divorced, is abruptly uprooted from his wealthy Chicago home and sent to the strange land of LA to live in the far-out beach bungalow of his aunt, an aging hippie still stuck in a by-gone era. He is unhappy with the new arrangement and finds his new bohemian lifestyle strange and the activities of his new peers, stupid. His life begins to change a bit when he befriends a young surfer named Fin. At first he thinks of the fun-loving Fin as a real dolt, but later he admits he was wrong. Like the Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn characters on which they are loosely based, the two new friends soon find themselves having a series of adventures, some of them dangerous; by the summer's end, Tom finds himself wiser, accustomed to California, and a lot more grown up.
A movie director and his wanna-be actor/eccentric inventor nephew are filming a low-budget sci-fi movie. Things get interesting when the nephews' bizarro invention starts bringing visitors from other times, including Napoleon, Archimedes, and people from the future and cavemen from the past. Just when they are filming what they are convinced will be one of the greatest movies ever, the same machine sends an alien visitor to their set. Also includes a last-minute cameo from James Coburn, as the infuriated head of the studio.
