Matt Warshaw's feature on the history of surfing in the movies ran in the Winter 1998 issue of Surfer's Journal. This version has been slightly edited.

The Bridge Theater audience pulled together for the San Francisco premier of 

 and turned the evening into a minor event, the high point coming about mid-way through TriStar’s handsome and thoroughly boneheaded film, when a love scene missed the dramatic mark by about 45 degrees, prompting a voice from the back rows to yell out “In God’s big, sweaty PALM!” which in turn caused me to redirect a stream of Diet Coke through my nose and mouth and back into my cup. Matty Lui’s near-death malarial episode set off another big round of unscripted laughs. Then a short and unresolved debate, to my left, while the credits rolled, about whether or not the 

 homoerotic subtext was there by accident or design.

In other words, a good time was had by all. True, the $10-million film devolved into parody (or a “sure-fire cult hit,” as charitably phrased by the 

) instead of the genre-buster studio executives hoped for. And if the typical 

 viewer spent a few moments stunned by the huge surf at Jaws, and by the cast member’s rippling stomach muscles, chances are he left the theater not with an meditative look, pondering the surfer’s caviler dash and style, but with a condescending smirk: If surfing makes you that fatuous and vapid, of course you’d jump off the top of a giant wave, swim to the bottom, grab a big rock and wait for death's arrival.

Which is more or less what the movie itself did. 

 all but disappeared from theaters one week after its debut. Two weeks later, according to 

 magazine, total ticket sales were less than $1.5 million.

Now, was this particular movie destined to fail? Well—yes. At the risk of piling on in unsportsmanlike fashion, I’d say that 

 was doomed from conception. Maybe pre-conception. In part because the story and characters are melodramatic and paper-thin, and in part because the movie tried to make actors from surfers, which is a dumber idea, and a greater conceit, than making surfers from actors.

But a more powerful force contributed as well; something I’m beginning to see as a kind of art-physics bylaw, where the light of surfing pass through the prism of cinema and automatically refracts down to mediocrity. Or worse. This lowering effect has been almost universal. Hollywood studios like TriStar, Warner Brothers, and New Line couldn’t beat it. Bud Browne, Hal Jepson, Taylor Steele, and a few hundred other surf-world provincials couldn’t beat it, either.

Bruce Brown beat it once—beautifully and memorably, creating a standard with 

 and a half-dozen smaller films, and the question hangs there: Why is it so hard to make a good surfing movie? If the sport is so photogenic, and so full of interesting characters, how come it’s something like natural law that the enormous majority of surf-related cinema ends up as repetitive, derivative, cliché, trite or boring? (Of course, the counterargument might be that a like-percentage of 

 movies are repetitive, derivative, cliché, trite and boring. Plus, we at least have one great film. Most sports don’t have a commensurate version of 

. Pretty damn ungrateful of me, in other words, to see the glass as nine-tenths empty, instead of half-full. My 

-counter argument was pretty complex in the first draft but boils down to: fuck that, surfing deserves better.)

Or maybe the leading question should be: what do we want from a surf movie in the first place? Uptown film critic David Denby recently pointed out the diverse wants and needs of movie-goers, then looked for common ground by saying we’re all “engaged in a lifetime romance, a passion without end—the love of movies.” That may be setting the bar a little high for surf cinema. But replace "movies" with “surfing” at the end of Denby’s quote and nobody would argue, and on some level we take that sense of romance and passion with us to the movie theater, or even to the living room TV. We want surf movies to be entertaining, sure. (I’m using a broad definition of “surf movie” here, letting it stand for nearly anything on film, TV or video that affects us as surfers.) We also want them to be up-to-date and filmed with care. To this end, people like John Severson, Bill Delaney, George Greenough, Greg MacGillivray, Larry Haynes, Dan Merkel, Jack McCoy and a few dozen others have, over the past 50 years, created a visual record of surfing that is hugely and proudly out of proportion to our modest standing in the world of sport and culture. We are totally set, in other words, for straight-up high-quality surf footage.

But we want more. We want a deeper connection. Surfing often leaves the confines of sport and wanders into obsession, therapy or spirituality, which can be powerful, but also a little strange and confusing. So consciously or not, most of us are looking for justification, context or meaning. We’d like to have the sport better explained—not just to others, but ourselves. Surf movies can do that.

 sure did. Lightweight as it is, the entire movie-going world had a better understanding and appreciation for surfing after watching Brown’s film, which is why it remains the closest thing we have to an empirical definition of a good surf movie.

Bruce Brown himself—or rather, his friendly and omniscient voice—is the star of 

. Mike Hynson and Robert August are fine in support, along with dozens of international bit players, but Brown’s Andy of Mayberry presence is the foundation upon which 

 is built. The storyline, meanwhile, isn’t exactly Shakespearean, but forward motion is produced just by flying around the world and seeing new people, places, and waves. Even without any real tension, drama or resolution, 

 takes you on a journey—literally and figuratively.

But what really put the film over the top is that Brown, by the early ‘60s, had become a genuine all-in-one moviemaker. Everything from the title credits, to wardrobe, to soundtrack music—all accountable to Brown—comes off well. His camera work is smooth, and in the editing room he's all economy and rhythm. The famous Cape St. Francis sequence, for example, clocks in at a tidy six minutes, with just 15 waves ridden, and leaves a viewer slightly hungry. Compare this to the Jeffrey’s Bay opener in the 1995 video 

, where producer Tony Roberts bangs together 

, thus turning the world’s greatest wave into a droning loop. (Why surf filmmakers haven’t looked deeper into the mechanics of 

 to figure out how and why it worked is baffling at first, until you remember that Brown’s real genius was to make it all look so easy—which was encouragement enough for the dozens of post-

 filmmakers who sailed off to find the next Cape St. Francis, not realizing that Brown had retired the perfect wave trope the way Bob Marley retired reggae music.)

Brown was just 26 when he began shooting 

, but he’d already made four feature-length movies. “And I think each got a little better,” he said recently, “one after the other.” Then he grins modestly and allows that none of his early work is very good. Which is true. What Brown doesn’t say is that he essentially did the same movie over and over, each more refined than the last, until he made 

. The over-the-dune shot used in the Cape St. Francis bit was tested in 

 (1958), and Brown learned how to shoot local color during a trip to Mazatlan for 

 (1959). Meanwhile, with the G-rated surf environment of 

 (1961), Brown began aiming for a general audience—meaning no more poker players and rum drinkers, as seen in his earlier films.

The point here isn’t so much that Brown had strong ideas about surfing, and how it should be portrayed (not uncommon), but that he understood how hard it would be to transfer those ideas to the screen, and was willing to give nearly all of his time, energy, talent and money to do so (dedication to craft, in other words; very uncommon). Which meant that in 1966, as the 35mm version of 

 played coast to coast, all but sanctifying the free-spirited and easy-going surfer, Brown himself had been grinding away almost non-stop for nine years.

But if Brown’s commitment to quality made the difference in places like Kansas City and Buffalo, and endeared him to movie critics from 

, it didn’t much matter in Hermosa Beach, Long Island or Sydney, or in any other hardcore surf town, between the mid-’50s and the early ‘80s. This was the era of the barnstorming 16mm surf movie. Good ones were preferred. But interest on this score, to hundreds of thousands of surf movie ticker-holders through the years, was nothing compared to the event itself—going out, getting drunk, getting seen, getting rowdy. The surf movie was mostly just there to stir everything together.

Generally speaking, if a surfer with pre-disco recall clears his throat and starts in with the good-old-days prologue it’s best to start edging for open spaces. But listen, goddamn it, I was 

, and I tell you that nothing short of drugs or space-launch could equal the opening-shot rush of a surf movie. “Surfers honed their yells and shouts through the week,” SURFER magazine wrote in 1975, describing the prep work before a big Friday night premier, “and gathered up all the energy they could for the big explosion.”

Genesis for our little entertainment subphylum goes back to a summer night in 1953, at John Adams Junior High School in Santa Monica, and we can imagine the actual life-giving moment itself as Bud Browne dimmed the theater lights and toggled on his movie projector and a reel-to-reel tape-recorded soundtrack. Waikiki hit the screen in vivid color. Cheers, huzzahs, more cheers. Browne picked up a microphone for some nervous voice-over commentary. More images came up. More happy noises from the audience. And so it went, for 75 minutes. Browne had defied the cliché, becoming the host with vacation pictures that other people actually 

 to see. “It was a tiring night for me,” Browne remembers today, and looking into his thin, somber 84-year-old face you can imagine just how tiring it was. “But it was all worthwhile, because I got such a big boot out everybody enjoying the movie.”

Browne’s film didn’t have a name. On the small, handmade posters he’d tacked up along the beachfront earlier that week, he’d just advertised a showing of “Hawaiian Surfing Movies,” because nearly all the footage was shot in Waikiki. Two-hundred and fifty people showed up (“Surfers and swimmers, and maybe a few sunbathers,” Browne remembers), each paying 65 cents admission. Browne later drove to La Jolla for a second and final showing of 

, but the audience there was smaller and less enthusiastic. Browne nonetheless quit his teaching job and flew back to Hawaii to began shooting a new film, 

, which showed in the summer of 1954. (The title was evidently judged as too frivolous, and Brown’s third film, in 1955, went back to 

Browne didn’t make extra prints, and cannibalized his own work when putting together a new movie, so 

don’t exist today. But as quiet and unobtrusive as Brown is, I’d guess that these first efforts were not as fun and raucous and silly as what followed. Browne’s real achievement here, I think, was to create the primordial soup from which the classic 16mm surf movie emerged in the late ‘50s, when Brown was joined by Greg Noll, John Severson and Bruce Brown, and the focus shifted from Waikiki to the Oahu’s North Shore. The genre’s undying conventions and customs were all in place by the end of the decade, including the short, hammy and occasionally well-executed comedy sketch; the vaguely sadistic wipeout sequence; and the thrilling, lemmings-off-the-cliff Waimea Bay climax. These were feature-length cult films, made by surfers, for surfers, and toured from school auditorium to lodge hall to recreation center, often playing for just a single night.

Local Los Angeles-area TV stations soon began producing half-hour surfing shows. Walt Phillips’ 1964 “Surf’s Up” program was taped in a low-budget Channel 13 studio, and each show featured a surf-celebrity guest, clips from the latest surf flick, and viewer call-in questions. Dale Davis and Stan Richards also hosted surf shows around the same time. During a viewer call-in segment, Greg Noll was asked, live and on-air, to define the surfing expression “beat-off,” but the ‘60s surf shows in general were predictable and bland. (Televised surfing since then has been a crap shoot. ABC’s 

 segments on the Duke contest in the ‘60s and ‘70s were smart and well-produced, but recent ASP world tour coverage by ESPN and Prime Ticket is little more than bright colors, loud music, spinning computer graphics and chattering hosts. SURFER’s good-looking cable TV show, meanwhile, is 20 or 30 IQ points shy of the magazine itself. Which I guess means it isn’t such a awful breach of modesty to declare the Surfer’s Journal documentary series, “50 Years of Surfing on Film” and “Great Waves,” as current champions of surf-television programming.)

The putative Golden Era of surf movies began with 

 in 1969, continued in the new decade with with 

 in 1977. Sound-synch interviews and rambunctious animated shorts were now being used to break up the surf action. The soundtrack music was good, too, continuing a tradition that went back to 1958, when Bruce Brown hired West Coast jazz ace Bud Shank to score 

. John Severson bought music from Cream, Steve Miller, Ry Cooder, and Crosby, Stills and Nash for his last film, 1970's 

. Pink Floyd were so taken with the psilocybin-laced visual flow of George Greenough’s 

 in 1969, that they donated music for his next film, 

. Honk and the Beach Boys contributed to 

But such above-board dealings were rare. Surf movie music, by tradition, was plain and simply ripped off. Filmmakers thumbed like DJs through their personal record stash on sound-mix day and taped as they pleased, assuming their homegrown soundtrack—100% plagiarized in most cases—would pass undetected by artists, record executives and copyright lawyers. And here special tribute must be paid to filmmaker Scott Dittrich, who stole a march on his surf movie competitors and their less-ambitious pilferings (Allman Brothers, Robin Trower, Santana) by scoring his 1974 film 

 with big-ticket acts like the Beatles, the Stones, Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. (Tiny budgets necessitated this sort of run-and-gun filmmaking. 

cost $70,000 in 1976. Bruce Brown spent just $50,000 on 

. Rising film and processing costs didn’t by themselves destroy the 16mm surf movie, but after Bill Delaney’s $400,000 

, both released in the early ‘90s, the genre was spoke of in the past tense.)

But while the faces, surf locations and music changed over the years, the basic components remained the same. Nearly every title in the surf movie catalog will divide into three-parts wave-riding and one part everything else, and more than anything it’s this inevitable ratio—the awful predictability—that invites the cinematic comparison between surf movies and porn. Both cater to middle-of-the-road male fantasy. Both work best during the opening minutes. “Hardcore” applies to either genre, as a designation for product as well as viewer. Porn’s abysmal synth-loop soundtrack music was embraced by the surf trade in the 1980s, when surf filmmakers suddenly quit ripping off songs—the music business grew up and was no longer looking the other way. Meanwhile, the parody style of movie titles favored by porn makers—

had precedent with old-school surf hits like 

 movies were slightly better filmed and edited than theirs, and the backdrops sure were nicer (Hawaii, Bali, Fiji, versus a lounge room in an Encino tract home). But the real difference had nothing to do with the product, and everything to do with the manner in which it was viewed. Porn is private—even in a theater. Surf flicks are, or were, public. Which explains why the home video recorder was a money machine for the porn industry and an accessory to murder for the surf movie. Once the kids were getting a regular surf video fix at home, they found other things to do on Friday nights.

The all-time greatest surf movie star wasn’t Cape St. Francis or Waimea Bay or Gerry Lopez or Shaun Tomson. It was the audience. Ask an older surfer to name his three favorite surf movies, and the titles will be duly produced in a few moments. Now ask what it was like to 

 when those movies played, and images charge out of the memory-storing temporal lobes like stampeding cattle: the spinning bottle caps, the BAs, the flaming paper airplanes, the haze of pot fumes, and always the lusty screams, hoots, howls and whistles in the pre-launch darkness just before the opening frames.

How much of this energy was surf-specific is anyone’s guess. Shove 500 teenagers into a badly-ventilated auditorium on a Friday night, for any kind of performance or show, and you’re never more than two or three steps from pandemonium. But surfers, especially in the ‘50s and ‘60s, probably did bring a little something extra to their surf movie hoe-downs. Partly it was a need for information. American surfers, for example, saw the new vee-bottom boards in 1968’s 

 before the boards themselves were available here. Partly it was to stock up, in a time of scarcity, on photographed surf action. Which almost defies imagination today, as the surfing-entertainment trough slops over with videos, online sites, cable TV shows, and a rapidly-expanding catalog of books and magazines. I’m horrified to find out that I’ll have no fewer than 60 surf magazines dropped into my mailbox in 1998, but I remember a time when SURFER published just six issues a year, same for 

, and for American readers that was it for the year. Surf movie attendance at that time was compulsory.

But while news and information and hot new footage contributed to the surf movie encounter, it was all secondary. Mass assembly was the real attraction. Here was a chance to define and validate yourself as a surfer, not just in a group of two, or five, or 20, down on the beach where you were supposed to be, but in a crowd of 200, or 1,000, or even 3,000, out there at night among—as Phil Edwards phrased it—“the legions of the unjazzed.”

And make no mistake, the unjazzed were a powerful force in years past. Parents, teachers, lawyers, establishment figures of every kind—by and large, these people did not surf in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. In fact, they were often 

 surfing. So there was indeed a self-glorifying energy as surfers, shoulder-to-shoulder in an auditorium, looked around and saw nothing but allies. Consciously realized or not, 

 were the show. And with audience members taking their seats with pockets full of bottlecaps and half-pints of Schnapps, the evening’s entertainment was bound to become—well, democratic. The filmmaker did his part, and the audience did theirs. The latter’s level of engagement might end with rude jokes and insults (“

 was compulsory for any kneeboard shot in the ‘70s; Greenough excepted), or it could move up to vandalism and low-grade violence. “An unhappy crowd,” as described in a 1975 SURFER article, “eager for the film to end, hurled the projector and the film reels from a balcony into some empty seats below. The reels rolled down the aisle, unraveling the film, and the audience cheered and left.” At the Santa Monica Civic in 1970, I watched a dozen or so audience members rush the stage during intermission, pick up a box of door prizes (T-shirts and wetsuits, as I recall) and hurl the contents into the front rows.

Certainly there was a relationship between movie quality and audience reaction. Bud Browne, John Severson, Bruce Brown, Greg MacGillivray, Bill Delaney and other high-end filmmakers never had to watch their projector sail off the balcony during a screening. And I also remember long minutes, particularly as the evening wore on, where an audience would lapse into a quiet sort of restlessness. Nobody would dare shout an insult during the obligatory Gerry Lopez sequence, but after 10 or 15 near-identical Pipeline tuberides, public stoke would unmistakably taper off.

But the evening was dictated by the event, the gathering, more so than the film. This is probably why MacGillivray sounds dismissive when talking about his surf movies. “You feel that maybe what you did wasn’t all that important, or that creative or significant.” But MacGillivray knew his audience and understood that he wasn’t so much creating energy as channeling it. 

 is a good example. It debuted in 1972 to a full house at the Santa Monica Civic, with a 

 reviewer noting that the audience “went crazy,” and was “dazzled . . . stunned” as the movie progressed. But watch 

 now, on videocassette, the way you’d watch any other rented movie, and it’s like paging through a favorite scrapbook. Beautiful images and neat memories—but a long way from crazy, dazzling or stunning. And to one degree or another, that’s how it is for virtually every surviving 16mm surf movie. 

 made the VHS transformation with its original spirit mostly intact, and it’s still the one to go back to from time to time. Pretty much all the others can stay in the archives.

The topic of surf video puts me in a state of mild despair, so it was good to come across the following one-panel 

 cartoon recently. A record producer is in the studio, talking to a punk band. “Not bad, fellas,” the producer says. “Let’s do one more take, with more emphasis on tone, harmony, rhythm, composition, lyrics, musicianship, tempo, and originality.”

Taylor Steele, video king: “I rarely watch surf videos.”

Kelly Slater, world champion: “I don’t really watch those things.” (Asked to elaborate, Slater cited “bad editing” and “shitty music.”)

Steele and Slater know as well as anyone that the huge majority of surf video is embarrassingly, relentlessly bad, and that the accumulated store of badness is growing by the week. They’ve also seen adolescent and pre-adolescent surfers parked like lawn statues in front of a TV set with the latest vid spooling by. So it’s a phenomenon too big to ignore—though God knows I’ve tried.

Steele is the decade’s most popular video maker. He probably sells 20,000 copies per title and nets around $100,000 a year. (Steele won’t give numbers; the estimates come from competitors.) For most other video makers, 5,000 sold is a big success. Profits are small or non-existent, and in this regard nothing has changed since the early days. Greg Noll’s description of surf-moviemaking in the ‘50s as “just a shitty way to make a living” fits the video generation as well.

Just as websites now allow almost anyone to be a publisher, video allows almost anyone to be a filmmaker. Camcorders sell for as little as $1,000, and tape is practically free (low-end 60-minute no-processing-required videocassettes cost $10; three minutes of 16mm film and processing costs $100), which helps explain how a guerrilla videographer can make and distribute a few hundred units for about $5,000.

Surf videos are essentially cheaper, shorter (45-60 minutes) versions of the old 16mm surf movies. Shot sequencing, never too complex to begin with, has in most cases been reduced to simple on-screen announcements (“Pipeline,” “Wipeouts,” "Luke Egan") followed by a two-minute barrage of action. The traditional wipeout sequence now allows for newly-opened flesh wounds. The latest version of the perfect wave has been discovered and filmed a thousand times since 

, to the point where this once-holiest of grails now hits the screen as commonplace.

Hot new videos are sometimes bootlegged, which is a bummer for independents, and a non-issue for international surf companies, who spend up to $200,000 per video, all straight from the marketing budget. Product exposure is the whole point. So bootlegging is another form of distribution. “Rip it off,” urges Kelly Slater at the beginning of Quiksilver’s 

 video. “Everybody does it. Make some copies for you bros, pass ‘em out.”

Ben Marcus, SURFER video reviewer, puts the number of video titles released over the past 10 years at 500. “Or actually,” he says, changing his mind “it might be more like a thousand.” (It was a thrill watching Marcus drag two enormous cardboard boxes up my stairwell, in the summer of 1997, each box containing about 125 surf videos, thus instantly and free of charge boosting my surf cinema collection from 100 to 350 titles. I’d already begun keeping notes on surf movies and videos, as a research aid. If, for example, I needed to find clips of Bob Cooper for an article on “Great Mormon Surfers of the 1960s,” my little capsule reviews would lead me to 

. I’ve tried to bite down on any critical impulse, although “lame,” “super-lame,” and “fuck me, how lame is 

?” all pop up in a review for a better-left-unnamed 1988 movie—which doesn’t say much for my resolve, or powers of description. Anyway, the 250 titles from the Marcus annex are nearly all from the mid-’90s, which would certainly bring my collection up to date, and on a Friday morning, eager to watch and review, I turned on the computer, TV and VCR, dragged one of the cardboard boxes over to my desk, reached in and came up with a videocassette titled 

. Off I went. By Sunday afternoon I was broken. Thirty titles were reviewed. Another 100 or so were piled up in the trash. The rest were, and remain, in the closet. In 72 hours I’d been transformed from surf video cynic to surf video fascist.)

Surfing—that is, actual wave-riding—will sometimes rise through the video ether and present itself as resonant or emotional or otherwise interesting. Surfers themselves, however, are invariably shown as two-dimensional, flippant, arrogant, ironic, and shallow. As most surfers are. But some are not, and a sharper rendering of these people would make the whole show a lot more interesting. Which isn’t to suggest that the producer of 

 should have edited out the clip where North Shore lunatic Shawn Briley threads one end of a condom through his nose and out his mouth, then flosses his nasopharynx. But isn’t there a chance, a 

 that Briley has something else to offer? Why not crib a few notes from his SURFER interview (“The Angel Inside,” December 1994, touching on poverty, prison, God, death, and redemption-by-surfing), and actually try to bring a piece of Briley’s weird, street-wise being to the screen?

Because the filmmaker would have to risk an opinion, a feeling, a viewpoint, which is A) difficult, and B) commercially unnecessary. Why hassle it when the critics are already on your side? SURFER ran 12 video reviews in the first six months of 1998, 

 ran eight, and all 20 were upbeat and enthusiastic. “Nice graphics, good music, hot surfing.” “This thing rocks from start to finish. The surfing’s insane.” “Another radical surf flick with killer tunes.”

But good reviews do not by themselves explain why trash surf video is so popular. Maybe it just is what it is, and I’m pulling a massive analytic boner here, like a restaurant critic assessing the Taco Bell menu. Or maybe not. Someone with better rhetoric chops than my own could, I think, build an argument where corporate globalization, disposable goods, MTV, school-funding cuts and computer games would each get a co-producer credit for 

Adrenaline Surf Series III: Down to the Bone—

music by Hell Rott, Guttermouth and Mutilage.

Videotape, the actual image-bearing magnetic ribbon, has a coarsening effect. It doesn’t hold color, depth and detail the way film does, the difference being similar to that of a print photograph and a color copy of that photograph. Also, video cameras don’t yet shoot in slow-motion, making them almost useless for water photography. So here’s where the creative disincentives begin. Videographers on their best days know their work can’t compare to film, and not just compared to the 25-year-old 

 industry standard, but all the way back to Bud Browne’s Waikiki vacation movies from the mid-’50s. Plus that exquisite opening-night pressure has been removed. A home video release target date, as a creative spur, is a gentle nudge on the shoulder compared to the horrifying specter of a dark auditorium and a restless, mocking, potentially violent live audience.

Meanwhile, surfing has been affected by the same high-to-low cultural drift in American popular entertainment that has taken us from the elegant and the accomplished (Fred Astair, Cole Porter), down to the low, the cynical and the rough (Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, 

). Surf cinema, of course, had nowhere near as far to drop. But there used to be a certain pride and determination among the better surf filmmakers. The sport was aggressive, tranquil, frightening, absurd, sensual, even spiritual, and it was considered a worthwhile challenge to try and bring these moods to the screen. To this end, Delaney, MacGillivray, Severson and a few others never sank below the level of craftsman, and occasionally rose to artistry.

Maybe two or three video-makers today are working toward such levels. Jack McCoy has either arrived or gone beyond. McCoy isn’t the only one who shoots and edits on film (making a video transfer prior to dubbing), but he has the patience and tempo born of 25 years experience and works from a glistening color palette that makes nearly everyone else’s work look like pencil sketchings. So you can disregard any best-ever video compilation that doesn’t place McCoy’s 

Then again, how difficult could it be here to hit the top of the guild? Cheap equipment, small budgets and smaller imaginations—such are the common denominators among surf video producers, along with a commitment to aggression, violence and speed. It’s there in the titles: 

. It’s there in the blender-puree editing. God knows it’s there in the music.

But I should stop for a moment and remember the thrill of seeing Taylor Steele’s 

 for the first time, in 1992. The video begins with a black screen, a rumbling bass guitar, and a whispered voice: “I’m already dying; I’m bleeding.” Then a huge, empty wave explodes into white, against a sonic background of guitars and drums, followed by an assortment of Pipeline clips. As an introduction to the New School teenagers (Slater, Machado, Dorian, Williams, etc.), 

worked perfectly. Plus there was an audio-visual match, with hard-grinding Banzai Beach, filmed in low-tech regular-motion, settling right into Steele’s hard-grinding soundtrack.

Where Steele and all his videographic acolytes blew it was in thinking that the punk energy hit of 

 opening sequence could be repeated and sustained through a 45-minute video. Or seven year’s worth of videos. But by the time Steele released 

 in 1993, amidst a flood of Steele look-alike videos, the thrash-loop soundtrack was already the safe and conservative choice, and headed for cliché. I smiled at Gerry Lopez’ political skill, during an interview two years ago, when he paused to consider the video genre. “I love the action,” he said. “I just turn the sound off. I don’t understand. I guess it’s the same thing my parents used to say about me when I listened to the Beatles.”

Except, of course, the Beatles knew a thing or two about tone, harmony, rhythm, composition, lyrics, musicianship, tempo, and originality.

As do Bob Dylan and Nina Simone, which is why I nearly teared up in appreciation, two years ago, watching J. Brother’s silk-smooth 

 video roll to a finish with Simone’s version of “I Shall Be Released.” 

 checks in at a scrupulously edited 23 minutes. It’s neatly packaged (ceramic hula dancer against a white background on the video box cover; no lettering), and the between-surfing accent shots fill the screen like small gallery pieces. But Brother’s real accomplishment with 

 is to honor and elevate the relationship between surfing and music, using the Beastie Boys, Mozart, jazz, blues, and Hawaiian slack-key.

, but stalled at about 4,000 copies sold.

 Taylor Steele’s latest, won SURFER magazine’s 1998 Best Video award, and is rumored to have sold a record-breaking 25,000 copies. 

 features a half-dozen mildly entertaining comedy sketches but is essentially another riff on 

: high-speed surfing and high-speed guitars. Plenty of heat, not much light, and more of the same in the future, no doubt. Advice to the sentient surfer? Watch sparingly. Or do as the bumper sticker advises and kill your TV.

“We’re suckered by Carter’s inanities—lapses of story and logic that you might expect from a guy who used to write about surfing.” This is 

 magazine’s recent description of X-Files producer Chris Carter, and from here it’s pretty easy to make the case that mainstream media just isn’t about to give surfing any kind of break.

On the other hand, having slogged through 

, I’m inclined to think that the following press comments were entirely just and fair.

: “Pushy philosophizing, overripe lines, stunted characters.” (Dave Kehr, Chicago 

: “They probably should have shredded the script as well as the waves.” (Rita Kempley, Washington 

 “An abysmally turgid and pretentious mess [filled with] tepid adventure, ponderous philosophizing, unromantic romance, bogus mysticism, vapid travelogue, and forced symbolism.” (

 in 1959, Hollywood has made about 20 surf-themed movies over the past four decades (the tally goes up or down depending on how “surf-themed” is defined, or how Hollywood is defined, for that matter), and the results have been mostly ridiculous, occasionally sublime, and always worth a look. Nothing against Bud Browne, Taylor Steele and the rest of our in-house crew, but surfing really takes on a whole new life under the klieg lights. Ignite those Hollywood-size afterburners of money, ego and talent, and pretty much the only thing a project 

 do is roll away quietly. Even the failures have worthwhile moments, from 

 cameos featuring Little Stevie Wonder and Dick Dale, to Shane Dorian’s shimmering back-lit Honolua Bay surfing in 

, to the oppressive underwater wipe-out sequence at the end of 

But make no mistake, the union between Hollywood and surfing has for the most part been a failure. Critically speaking, for sure, and more often than not commercially as well. So it’s interesting to think about whether or not Hollywood could ever produce a surfing-based showpiece on the order of, say, 

 trailer, the very notion of quality in the Hollywood surf genre seems pretty ridiculous. “What in the world is a Gidget?” asks a voice-over announcer, while Sandra Dee, James Darrin and the rest of the gang are shown in high frolic. “It’s a girl! A cuddling, befuddling teen, who set out to find a man of her own!” Plainly, we are a long way from 

But maybe in the same universe. Theoretically, at least. Fredrick Kohner’s 1957 

 novel had darker, tougher, sharper characters (Gidget included) than those featured in the Columbia Pictures movie, was far more nuanced in its presentation of surfing, and didn’t make the big morality play at the end, with everyone off the beach and heading back to home, work or school. I won’t go so far as to say that 

, but a more faithful rendering of Kohner’s book might have at least saved us from some of the frothier excesses of Hollywood’s upcoming Frankie and Annette period.

I’ll jump in here and say that, yes, Hollywood could make a great surfing movie. The Duke Kahanamoku story, with money problems, self-doubt, race and class issues all accounted for, along with the sunny afternoons, Olympic gold medals and smoking long rides in from Zero Break—that could be fantastic. And the chances of such a movie being made are probably improving, despite the prohibitive box office stats for 

. Or at least the chances are better now than they were in the ‘60s, which started with the triumphantly banal beach movies and ended with the schizophrenic 

Columbia, Alta Vista, Patton, and American International together made about a dozen beach movies in the early and mid-’60s. They had little or no actual wave riding (

 excepted), were despised by surfers, and were panned or ignored by critics. They did, however, perform neatly at the box office. 

 (1969) capped the decade off in pretty bizarre fashion. The WindanSea Surf Club set off in late 1967 to compete against a team of Australians, in Sydney. 

follows the group across the Pacific, documenting their stops in Tahiti and New Zealand in a brazenly derivative 

style. Once in Australia, however, Nat Young, aided by Bob McTavish and George Greenough, march in and commandeer the 

 project, turning it into a psychedelic-yet-pedantic introduction to the vee-bottom board and “involvement” surfing. You can almost feel the G-forces as the film is wrenched off course. One minute it’s all short hair, longboards and competition-stripe T-shirts, with a narrator saying things like, “The waves here break off a point, and we were getting a lot of really neat rides.” Then suddenly it’s echo-chamber guitar, swirling in-the-tube shots, and Young’s voice-over railing against “the system,” and explaining in ponderous tones how surfing “is the perfect form of self-expression.”

 for its own good. But it was a mugging nonetheless. Anyway, the film tanked, and Hollywood ignored surfing for a long time.

“The system” and “self-expression” were at it again in the early 1990s, as Bruce Brown, lured from his quiet Santa Barbara ranch house by New Line studios, finally agreed to make 

. Brown sounds weary in the narration for this beautiful but redundant 1994-released sequel. Two years later, in an interview for “50 Years of Surfing on Film,” Brown seemed not so much weary, but amused and slightly pissed off.

"ROUGH CUT: SURFING ON FILM," by MATT WARSHAW (1998)

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