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

With surfing's popularity once again on the upswing, Hollywood and the American mainstream press returned their attention to the sport. Between them, however, journalists and filmmakers in the late '70s and throughout the '80s couldn’t seem to decide if surfers were crazy and violent or crazy and dumb. Either way, the salty-haired people they described had little to do with actual waveriders, and much more to do with the state of American pop culture.

 article described “surf gangs” who faced off against nonlocals with “rocks, sticks, knives . . . chains and even guns.” The magazine’s leading piece of evidence was the rise of the Surf Punks, a Los Angeles pop-punk satire act whose debut album 

 had just sold 100,000 copies, with songs like “Punchout at Malibu” and “Somebody Ripped My Stick.” 

 provided no actual statistics on surf-related violence, and localism-inspired aggression had actually peaked five years earlier, but the magazine wouldn’t be deterred. The crowd at Huntington was a “snarling, sideswiping throng”; in Redondo there were “rival gangs” who had “split the beach down the middle by painting a line across the boardwalk”; and at other breaks there was trouble between “edgy short-haired punks and their laid-back, long-haired elders.” Those brave enough to keep reading to the final paragraph would likely not have been reassured by surf journalist Jim Kempton’s reasonable and realistic assessment that “there’s less violence in surfing in one year than in any one high-school football practice.”

Simple surf-related mayhem wasn’t enough for 

 which added a religious twist in “Walking on Water,” a lengthy 1982 feature portraying “a new order of surfer, one who rides with Jesus and waits for Armageddon.” After briefly reviewing the previous surf boom of the '50s and '60s—now described without fail as the sport’s “golden years”; never mind how strange and disturbing wave-riding had in fact appeared to most journalists of the period—writer Frank Rose grimly switches to present tense to describe a Southern California cultural landscape filled with parking lot brawls, drive-by shootings, and freeway torture-murders; a place where “madness has been reasserting itself as the number-one mode of expression.” Surfers were deep in the mix, Rose said, and many had responded with end-times religious hysteria. “If your member causes you to sin, 

 one Jesus-loving surfer reportedly shouted while running down the beach at a surf contest.

 articles, and to every other mainstream hit piece written about surfing during the 1980s. Punchouts at Huntington Pier weren’t unheard of. Palos Verdes locals really did throw rocks from the top of the cliff at nonlocals. But there was also a lot of lazy, myopic, predetermined reporting. Frank Rose didn’t care that there were miles of beaches on either side of Huntington Pier where tens of thousands of surfers got their two or three hours of wave-riding in and drove home satisfied. Or that there were hundreds of California breaks north of Santa Barbara where the crowds were small or nonexistent. The Orange County religious wacko yelling at surfers to cut off their dicks? That was the story 

 went with. Southern California’s ongoing ridiculousness? That was the message. To one degree or another, writers had been mining the same journalistic vein for decades. It wasn't entirely wrong, but it was far from right. The sport deserved better.

Hollywood’s return to surfing began with 1978’s 

. The film cost $11 million—five times more than any other Hollywood-made surf movie—and was directed by a burly USC film school graduate named John Milius who’d recently hit it big as the guns-and-blood director of 

Milius actually had the right background to make a surf movie. Fifteen years earlier he’d been a teenaged regular at Malibu, and for 

’s first act he attempted to re-create his surfing youth, just as friend and fellow USC film school classmate George Lucas re-created Friday night cruising in 

 took place over the course of a single night and ended on a quiet note, Milius tracked three surf buddies for ten years and brought it home with a bombastic surf event—the “big Wednesday” of the title.

To give his film a full dose of high-action verisimilitude, Milius put together an all-star second unit of surfing cameramen, including Bud Browne, Greg MacGillivray, Dan Merkel, and George Greenough. He also hired Peter Townend, Ian Cairns, Bill Hamilton, and J Riddle to stunt-double for the leads, and brought in Gerry Lopez for a cameo. The effort paid off. 

’s action sequences were beautiful and dramatic. Furthermore, there were moments of rude good humor in the early going, and Hollywood newcomer Gary Busey sunk his oversize teeth into a co-starring role as the friendly but slightly unhinged Leroy the Masochist.

 plot was paint-by-numbers, its characters were thinner than fiberglass, and the grand finale—the “day like no other”— was long, clumsy, and false. The 

 called the movie “resoundingly awful,” and the 

 said Milius had “aimed for the lowest, most mindless common denominator.” 

 bombed at the box office. It came back to life as a video store cult favorite, but 20 years would pass before Hollywood again took a chance on a surfing-focused production.

, in what almost seemed to be an act of creative absolution, Milius proved himself more than capable of producing a memorable big-screen surf character. As a screenwriter for 1979’s

, Milius invented William Kilgore, goofyfooter and US Army Air Cavalry Colonel, played to Academy Award-winning perfection by Robert Duvall. Kilgore’s order to firebomb a North Vietnamese village “into the Stone Age” so that he and a few of his troops can ride a nearby pointbreak is both cruel and insane, but surfers understood the impulse. Napalm was extreme, sure. But surf-lust will have its way. Similarly, when Kilgore barks out his straight-to-immortal exclamation, “Charlie don’t surf!” it was understood not just as a dividing line between surfers and the Viet Cong—“Charlie”—but between surfers and the world in general. Kilgore is a crazy person. But less crazy to surfers than to the world at large.

Despite all the encouragement to view surfers as dangerous, the public came to see them mostly as harmless, clueless, mildly-drug-addled slackers—thanks to Sean Penn’s sidesplitting turn as surfer-dude extraordinaire Jeff Spicoli in 1982’s 

Like Colonel Kilgore, Spicoli is a surfer-rebel to the hilt—eating bare-chested in the school cafeteria, having pizza delivered to his American History class, and declaring with confidence that the only two things required in life were “some tasty waves [and] a cool buzz.” 

 writer Cameron Crowe introduced Spicoli in the 1981 book version of 

, a semi-autobiographical account of his year spent undercover as a student at Clairemont High in San Diego. On the page, Spicolli was funny but well in the background. In the film, Sean Penn turns the character into a front-and-center comedy masterpiece, and all he did was imitate his perma-stoned friends from his teen years surfing in Malibu.

Surfers weren’t sure what to make of Spicoli and 

. Clearly, they were being laughed at, which provoked a defensive response—

 a “stupid teen flick.” But from there it got a little complicated. Anyone looking to make the point that surfing was still being bum-rapped by outsiders held Spicoli up as a grossly unfair stereotype. At the same time, anyone trying to make the 

 point—that the sport needed to clean up its act—held Spicoli up as an all-too-familiar archetype. Years passed before surfers in general warmed to Spicoli. A decade after the film came out, surf journalist Ben Marcus completed the transformation by ranking Penn’s performance “up there with the likes of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and John Belushi.” (

 agreed: "Spicoli is a benchmark stoner character," the magazine wrote in 2017, "up there in the pot-lined hall of fame alongside people like the Dude in 

, Hollywood still had yet to produce anything resembling a good surf movie. But with Jeff Spicoli and Colonel Kilgore, it had at least come up with two first-rate surfing icons.

 magazine article, a lot of surfers had fallen into end-times religious hysteria. “If your member causes you to sin, 

 one Jesus-loving surfer reportedly shouts while running down the beach at a surf contest.

Chapter: 7

Long Division

Surf and Destroy

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