Return of the Longboard

Simon Anderson and his Mighty Thruster

Surf and Destroy

Terror from Below

The Unsinkable Tom Carroll

An Explosion of Talent

Tom Curren's Mile of Style

How to Turn a Circus into a Riot

I Predict Waves in Your Future

Cult of the Surf Photographer

Video Killed the Surf Movie

Waves for Sale

Surf Boom Redux

Terminally Hip

Super-Sizing the World Tour

Somebody Should Do Something

Surfers vs Apartheid

Make Room at the Top, Obrigado!

The Last Big Wave

Eddie Aikau's State of Grace

A Beloved Rival

Long Division

For two decades, the surf movie was surfing’s own traveling medicine show, with filmmaker’s barnstorming their latest release up and down the coast for loud, beery audiences, in what constituted the sport’s only type of nocturnal mass gathering. Up to 15 full-length surf movies were produced annually during the genre’s first peak, in the early- and mid-'60s, and a second peak followed ten years later. By the late 1970s, though, the franchise hit the first in what proved to be a terminal series of obstacles.

Production costs had gone up steadily throughout the decade. 

, released two years later, cost $20,000; and 1977’s 

, the most expensive surf movie to that point, cost just over $70,000. Movies could still be made for much less, but 

 and a few other high-end titles had raised the bar in terms of quality, and moviegoers were no longer as willing to put up with the old grindhouse-style surf flick. “Surfers are getting ripped-off by amateur filmmakers,” photographer Dan Merkel noted, sizing up the post-

 movies. “Jerky panning, out-of-focus shots, poor color—you can only tolerate so much of it.”

Meanwhile, record label legal departments had let filmmakers know that their enterprisingly bootlegged soundtracks—a defining feature of the genre during the early 1970s, with Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Santana, and Neil Young all making huge, unknowing, free contributions to surf cinema—was over. Finally, the art-house movie theater, which had long been the surf moviemaker’s preferred venue, was itself a dying breed. Battered and under fire, the surf film staggered into the 1980s—only to get cut down, along with big-screen pornography, by the VCR.

Video first came to the attention of surfers not as an entertainment outlet, but a self-help tool. In the early 1980s, world tour pros (and world tour hopefuls) arranged to have themselves taped while surfing and then watched the results with an eye toward correcting any flaws in their performance. Almost nobody at the time could afford their own video equipment—the least-expensive camera-playback system cost around $2,000—and there was a short boomlet of we-film-you services, where for $50 a “videographer” would drive to an appointed break, at an appointed time, and shoot a customer for two hours.

Hollywood, meanwhile, got religion on the second-market profitability of what was already being called the “home video revolution,” and thousands of pre-Blockbuster mom-and-pop video rental stores were now loading their shelves with dueling pairs of Betamax and VHS titles. 

, the 1978 box-office dud, became surfing’s original video cult classic. Meanwhile, video's first "hardcore" surf title was 

, a two-hour Aussie-made presentation of the 1981 Rip Curl Bells Beach contest—it came with a steep $69 price tag, though, and of course you needed a VHS player as well.

The number of titles grew (Bruce Brown's 

by Joe Mickey and Dave Natal), and if you lived in a beach town, and didn't want to stump up the money to buy outright via mail-order, you could always take your chances on a rental at the corner video store.

Surf companies got into the video game. Quiksilver made a for-sale 1984 promo video called 

, and other brands copied the idea right away. The best-known was the 

 series produced by Astrodeck, a wildly popular peel-and-stick surfboard traction product.

Meanwhile, continuing surf cinema’s one-man-show tradition, a small but growing number of independent filmmakers shot, edited, scored, and in some cases distributed their own work—at less than one-tenth the cost of a surf movie. Thirteen new surf video titles were released in 1989 alone.

 ran an article called “Has Video Killed the Surf Movie?" and a few months later 

 seemed to answer the question by noting that “the era of the surf movie sadly seems to be drawing to a close.” The handful of big-screen productions that followed—including 1990’s 

 creator Bill Delaney at a cost of $400,000—felt like the encores of a past age.

The video medium seemed almost custom-made for surfers. Like VCR owners everywhere, they liked the convenience and economy. But it went beyond that. For a quick pre-surf adrenaline boost, nothing worked better than a two-minute hit of 

. VHS tapes, in fact, turned out to be the best instructional tool the sport had ever seen—using the rewind and slow-motion buttons, everybody, beginner to expert, could now dissect and examine in close detail the techniques of the world’s best surfers. When they weren’t in the water, Kelly Slater and the rest of the 1990s “new school” pros spent their grommethoods attached to their TV screens, watching Tom Curren, Mark Occhilupo, and Tom Carroll, until the pros’ moves were transferred almost by osmosis.

Quality, for the most part, was no longer a surf cinema priority. Bill Delaney, Greg MacGillivray, Alby Falzon, and the rest of the sport’s ranking filmmakers from the 1960s and '70s, had either moved on with their careers or wanted nothing to do with video. The loss of talent showed. For the most part, surf videos looked like short, bad, stripped-down surf movies. They were half as long (45 minutes on average, rather than 90 minutes) and followed the same format: brief segments strung together in no particular order, each one backed with its own piece of music, but without any of the quickie comedy bits that had been a surf movie staple since the late-'50s. With a few exceptions, the soundtracks and narration were awful. Image quality wasn’t too bad, at first; nobody was yet using camcorders, which were big, heavy, and expensive, impossible to waterproof, lacked a slow-motion feature, and produced a flat, cheap-looking image. Videomakers instead shot in Super-8 or 16mm film, then transferred the film to videotape for editing. There was some loss of color and clarity, but not much, and they were miles better than the shot-on-tape videos that arrived in the late 1980s and early 1990s—surf cinema’s dreary low point.

When the living room replaced the auditorium as the surf movie venue, the sport lost its best communal activity. True, surfers by this point were by and large less concerned with self-validation. In 1959, it meant a lot to jam your way into an overheated shoulder-to-shoulder nighttime crowd of two hundred, or a thousand, or even three-thousand surfers, and make enough noise to alert the world to your presence—to holler your allegiance to an activity that the rest of the world didn’t understand. By 1989, however, “surf culture” was everywhere, having blended into the larger culture, and less distinct for being so diffuse. Nonsurfers wore Quiksilver trunks and called each other “bro.” All the 

 rowdyism that got surfers in trouble during the Eisenhower years—the squares loved that stuff now. There was no longer anything particularly liberating or statement-making about attending a surf movie, in other words. This particular culture-war skirmish was over. Surfers won.

Yet the sport was a poorer place for the surf movie’s downfall. Surfing looks incredible on the big screen. Surfers will gladly still pile into an auditorium. Given the forces at work, it probably couldn’t have played out any other way, but the sport’s mid-'80s media conversion from moviehouse to VCR nonetheless felt like a betrayal—for the sake of convenience, surfing had allowed itself to become several degrees less festive, less public, less out-and-about.

Battered and under fire, the surf film staggered into the 1980s—only to get cut down, along with big-screen pornography, by the VCR.

Chapter: 7

Long Division

Video Killed the Surf Movie

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