Greg Noll said he could not imagine a "shittier way to earn a living" than making surf movies, what with the handbill-hanging, booking the local Elks Club, selling tickets, and flogging up and down Coast Highway to do one-night stands for high schoolers jacked on Miller High Life and Peach Schnapps. And unless your name was Bruce Brown or Greg MacGillivray, all you got for your efforts was seed money for another movie. Next year, same deal, and so on and so forth. More trouble than it was worth, basically.

This is one of the reasons I've always admired Greg Weaver and Spyder Wills, the two behind-the-scenes adventurers and bohemians who were too clever or too busy or too offbeat to ride the surf move merry-go-round. They had the gear and the chops. They had the work ethic, putting in 16-hour days when necessary. Both were supremely well-connected in the surf world—Weaver was a Gordon & Smith teamrider in the '60s and shot his first SURFER cover in '71; Wills, an ex-Air Force neat freak and flute player with black-belt Frisbee skills and a line to Drew Kampion's secret red phone (Drew described Wells as "tall, thin, affectionate, mustached and sinister), got his SURFER profile in '69. Yet both of them, individually or as a team, always preferred to work as hired guns. 

 flicks—Wills and/or Weaver shot for all these movies and dozens more, usually credited, sometimes not. They were like the Wrecking Crew sessions players: show up, do the gig, pick up the check, split. And like the Wrecking Crew, they handled their instruments better than nearly all the guys who were out there hustling up their little measure of cinematic surf-world fame. 

I'm dragging Weaver and Wills into the light here for a moment because they deserve whatever small bit of recognition I can send their way, and also to better fix them both in the vast surf-name nebula floating in my head. For years I thought cameraman Greg Weaver (above) was the same guy as skateboarder Greg Weaver, the floppy-wristed blond boy-angel who was the face of Cadillac Wheels in the early days of urethane (above, top). Spyder Wills I sometimes mistook for Durban shaper Spider Murphy. By paying tribute, I hope to never make these mistakes again.

WEAVER AND WILLS: STYLEMASTERS FOR THE AGES

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