Surf Movie Tonite! Excerpt | Books

Surf Movie Tonite!

Excerpt from the Introduction

Surf movies play off the belief held by all surfers, newcomers to weekenders to pros, that we’re living a life of rich open-air adventure filled with regular installments of folly and bliss, punishment and triumph. We few, we happy few. (Or actually we few million, but still.) Cartoonist Rick Griffin made this point in his gently surreal contribution to 1971’s “Tales From the Tube” comic book. In Griffin’s strip, a bushy-haired regularfooter drops into a gigantic wave, cuts back to avoid a band of sword-waving Samurai, then rides through a vortex of water directly into the aquatic lair of the Tube Monster, who lassoes the surfer with his tongue and swallows him whole. When the monster can’t digest the resin-coated surfboard, rider and board are spat out and deposited next to a beachfront surf theater - just in time for the next screening of Jumbo Stoke-A-Rama.

Going to a surf movie is kind of like that, but in reverse.

Fantasy and suspension of disbelief, for filmmakers as well as audiences, have always been a big part of the surf movie experience. California’s Greg Noll is famous as the pioneering goliath of Waimea Bay and a first-generation surfboard manufacturer, but he also made a few surf movies in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, and later said he “couldn’t imagine a shittier way to earn a living.” Equipment hassles and travel mishaps were among the reasons Noll listed, plus insufferable hours spent hunched over a camera while your buddies in the water shout and laugh and get the best waves of their lives, followed by the tedium of editing, venue-booking, poster-hanging, and barnstorming the movie up and down the coast, beach town to beach town, from high school auditorium to Elks Lodge to community center. “Then at the end of the year,” Noll finished, “you count everything up and find out, goddamn it, there’s barely enough money to get started on the next film.”

That’s pretty much been the story throughout the fifty-year history of making surf movies. And the result of all this planning and effort and expended energy? A perpetual groundswell of cinematic mediocrity. The critical viewer could reasonably argue that, out of roughly a thousand surf-related movies released since 1953 – mostly surfer-made films, but also about three dozen Hollywood or indie-produced movies – we’re looking at just one certifiable classic (The Endless Summer), a few satisfying backups (Riding Giants, Step Into Liquid), one lame but manifestly popular cult hit (Big Wednesday), and two worthy cinematic surf characters (Colonel Kilgore from Apocalypse Now and Fast Times’ Jeff Spicoli). Things drop off quickly after that. The average surf film, repetitive and formulaic, isn’t far removed from to Deep Throat-style porn. Just the running time of a feature-length surf movie is usually a problem. Paul Witzig’s 1969 film Evolution is considered a genre classic, but Wayne Lynch, the film’s headliner, admitted recently that he’s never actually managed to watch the movie in its entirety. Witzig himself watched Evolution in 1997 and afterward said “it gave me a headache.”

But quality, in this sunburned little film-world outpost, often isn’t the point. Given the same basic ingredients, a well-made surf movie is always preferable to a badly-made one, but art and craft generally fall in line behind getting the latest and hottest action footage. There’s method at work here - or at least there was in the pre-VCR era, when a surf movie would arrive in theaters like an encyclical from on high, there to instruct and inform as well as entertain. Phil Edwards’ hairy-chested brand of power surfing was introduced to the surf world at large in 1959’s Cat on a Hot Foam Board. Ten years later, The Hot Generation was received almost as a newsreel on the opening stage of the shortboard revolution. Surf magazines always beat filmmakers in reporting on the big swell, the hot young goofyfoot, the new surfbreak discovery, but a magazine could only take you so far. There was a world of difference between looking at a 1973 Surfing centerspread of Sunset Beach deity Barry Kanaiaupuni jamming off the bottom on a quadruple-overhead West Peak bomb, and sitting in a badly ventilated auditorium with five hundred other bug-eyed surfers watching Kanaiaupuni onscreen, as big as Godzilla, arms charging around his torso and head like broken powerlines, water arcing off his board in glittering twenty-foot-high sheets, with Jimi Hendrix’ “Voodoo Chile” on the soundtrack at cloudsplitting volume.

Context is everything with surf movies. That Kanaiaupuni sequence is available on video, and watching it now, on a TV screen, it’s easy to notice the static camera angle, the shaky framing, the careless edits. Kanaiaupuni still looks fierce and brilliant. But also small and boxed in. Thirty years ago, going to a big-deal surf movie was a little bit like going to Woodstock. Watching a surf movie on TV today is like seeing a photo of Woodstock on a postcard. The genuine surf movie experience was (and to some degree still is) very much dependent on place and locale, requiring not only a big screen but crowds and anticipation and noise and at least a dozen quick-witted hecklers, plus a half-pint of Schnapps getting handed your way, and a nice big fatty in your shirt pocket. A passing and slightly manic togetherness was the surf film’s strangest byproduct. “Surfers,” as freelance surf critic Paul Gross once noted, “are most comfortable with each other from a distance, and then only barely.” Except while attending a surf film. A big surf contest could pull a crowd, but friction is the underlying vibe, and contests repel as many as they draw. A surf movie could draw a crowd and produce a sort of Christmas-on-the-Western-Front feeling of unity and accord, with everyone temporarily setting aside their lineup feuds and grievances. Energy, not artistry, was the hallmark of the surf movie. Energy, like the mushroom cloud of cheers, shrieks, footstomps and whistles that filled the auditorium when the lights dropped. Energy, like a group of surfers pushing a filmmaker aside during the second reel of a lousy movie and tipping his projector off the balcony to explode on the empty seats below. “The reels rolled down the isle, unraveling the film,” Surfer magazine reported, “and the audience cheered and left.” Mob violence or unique bonding experience – it’s a fine line.

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Surf Movie Tonite!

Excerpt from the Introduction