Gnarly, dude

Newcomer John Monad (Austin Nichols, left) gives California surf champ Butchie Yost (Brian Van Holt) competition in the new HBO drama John from Cincinnati. (HBO/Astral Media/The Movie Network)

It looks like we have a mini-trend — or a wavelet, if you will — of surfing-themed entertainment this summer. It crested in June with the theatrical release of The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and the kids’ cartoon Surf’s Up, and the premiere on the tube of HBO’s John from Cincinnati, a quirky, quasi-mystical drama about a dysfunctional California surfing family. (Think The Sopranos with surfboards.)

The first two are just popcorn fare, but John from Cincinnati, airing on Movie Central and The Movie Network in Canada, is dark and intriguing. It’s likely to get that rare thing, the seal of approval from real surfers — if only for showcasing the skills of 16-year-old Greyson Fletcher, a genuine surf-and-skateboard ace who also turns out to be a wonderfully natural actor. And if the series lives up to the promise of its early episodes, it could join the small ranks of decent dramas that do justice both to the art of surfing and to the people who make it a way of life. 

The screen has had a complicated love affair with surf culture over the years. It didn’t help that, right at the start, fast-buck Hollywood took advantage of surfing’s surging popularity in the 1960s with a string of bubble-brained teen B-movies with B-words in their titles: Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Beach Blanket Bingo. Relentless in their silliness, these “surfploitation” flicks inevitably featured singing heartthrobs Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, second-banana comics like Don Rickles and Paul Lynde and plenty of laughable back-projection surfing sequences.

It took a gallant Bruce Brown to finally come to the rescue with his 1966 documentary The Endless Summer, a paean to the pure thrills of surfing that finally treated the sport with love and respect. Yet, decades on, the taint of the surfploitation quickies still sticks to the surf movie like barnacles. Maybe someday someone will make a film that transcends the surf genre the way Easy Rider transcended the biker genre. In the meantime, though, its good to remember that there’s more to surfing on celluloid than just Frankie and Annette. 

Here, then, is a “Hang 10” selection of noteworthy surfing pictures, from the cool to the kitschy to the unexpected.

A scene from the 1966 Bruce Brown documentary The Endless Summer. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

1. The seminal surfing doc: The Endless Summer (1966).

Bruce Brown captured the golden age of surfing in all its cheeky, Bermudas-and-brush-cuts innocence with this cheerful documentary, which follows a pair of proto surf bums, Robert August and Mike Hynson, as they circle the globe so they can surf all year. Both a vintage travelogue and a surfing primer, it boasts terrific footage of some of the era’s top surfers (including the fabled Mickey Dora), gorgeous colour cinematography by Brown and others, and that endearing goofiness associated with the surfer personality. Brown also provides the wisecracking narration and The Sandals furnish the film’s infectious theme, which is to surf movies what Ennio Morricone’s music is to spaghetti westerns.

2. The seminal surfploitation flick: Gidget (1959).

If you’re going to watch one of those kitschy teen surf pix, it might as well be the mama of them all. Back in 1957, California-based writer Frederick Kohner noticed that his adolescent daughter Kathy was hanging out with a funny crowd of kids who loved to surf and had their own lingo. Borrowing an expression from one of them — “gidget” refers to a short girl, or “girl midget” — he created the original surfer girl in a pulp novella that was swiftly turned into a film. Perky Sandra Dee plays the titular heroine, who thinks surfing is “the ultimate”; hunks du jour Cliff Robertson and James Darren, as surfers Kahoona and Moondoggie, respectively, are the rivals for her affections. The movie’s box-office success inspired several Gidget sequels and many spinoffs. How did real surfers feel about the surfploitation trend? Greg Noll, one of the surfing greats of the time, had this to say about 1964’s Ride the Wild Surf: “It made me want to puke.”

3. The first serious surf drama: Big Wednesday (1978).

This Hollywood atonement for the sins of Sandra Dee stars Jan-Michael Vincent, William Katt and Gary Busey as three Boomer surfing pals forced to face the ugly realities of life on-shore when service in Vietnam looms. Written and directed by John Milius, an erstwhile Malibu surf rat, and showcasing the talents of real pros like Gerry Lopez, this is one of the rare fictional surfing films that gets a thumbs-up from surfers themselves. (Milius, incidentally, was also responsible for the famous surfing scene in Apocalypse Now. See below.)

4. The surfing buddy movie: Point Break (1991).

Spoofed to hilarious effect in the recent British comedy Hot Fuzz, this cops-and-robbers-on-surfboards film stars Keanu Reeves as a young FBI agent from Ohio named Johnny Utah (go figure) who sets out to bust a gang of California surfers that also robs banks. Infiltrating the gang, Johnny falls under the spell of its charismatic philosopher king, a shaggy Patrick Swayze. There’s some good surf action and some skydiving, too, but the highlight is actually a heart-pumping chase on foot through the alleys and backyards of suburbia, shot mostly from Johnny’s point of view and ending in that emotionally fraught, firing-in-the-air climax which Hot Fuzz has so much fun with.

Anne Marie (Kate Bosworth) lives for surfing the film Blue Crush. (Universal Films)

5. Empowering the surfer girl: Blue Crush (2002).

This recent attempt to revive the teen surf movie is pretty much a wipeout, but it does score points as a belated corrective to Gidget. The surfer girl in this film, played by Kate Bosworth, isn’t just a cute trophy for some surfer dude but a serious competitor who can ride the pipe with the best of them. Unfortunately, like those teen films of yore, this one has too much romantic goop. Skip though it to enjoy the state-of-the-art surfing cinematography, which takes you right inside the wave, and appreciate the way digital trickery trumps those cheesy back-projections of the Gidget era by transplanting Bosworth’s face on the body of a real pro surfer (Megan Abubo).

6 & 7. The surfing/skateboarding axis: Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001), Lords of Dogtown (2005).

In the 1970s, a bunch of grungy L.A. surf kids from the wrong side of the beach transformed themselves into the bad boys of skateboarding, a tale chronicled with frenetic brio in filmmaker Stacy Peralta’s Dogtown and Z-Boys. Peralta was one of those kids and successfully transfers that manic surf/skate energy to the screen, along with lots of awesome footage from the period and a tasty ’70s-rock soundtrack. Sean Penn, appropriately, narrates. According to Peralta, the rebel image and breakneck style of skateboarding today owes a lot to the Z-Boys, and they in turn based their ground-hugging moves on Hawaiian surfer Larry Bertleman.

Lords of Dogtown, written by Peralta and directed by Catherine Hardwicke, tells the same story in dramatic terms, focusing on the three star Z-Boys, Tony Alva (played by Victor Rasuk), Jay Adams (Emile Hirsch) and Peralta himself (John Robinson). Not as effective as the doc, but better than we’ve come to expect from most surf dramas, its cast also includes a long-haired Heath Ledger as the boys’ swaggering, booze-swigging mentor and John from Cincinnati’s Rebecca De Mornay as Jay’s loving mess of a mother.

8. Surfing is hell: Apocalypse Now (1979).

Early in Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War epic, Coppola and screenwriter John Milius introduce us to the lunacy of that conflict via Robert Duvall’s gung-ho Lt.-Col. Kilgore, who wears a Confederate Army hat, blasts Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries from his helicopter and, incredibly, sends his men out surfing in the midst of an attack on an enemy village. Insane, you say? Hardcore surfers might beg to differ — when the waves are perfect, what’s the risk of a little shrapnel?

9. The quintessential surfer dude: Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982).

Who can forget Sean Penn’s Jeff Spicoli, the blond, blissfully stoned surfer who can’t keep his shirt on, in Amy Heckerling’s classic high school comedy? Whether getting baked with his buds in a VW van or having a pizza delivered to his history class, Penn’s Spicoli lovably embodied the laidback, fun-seeking philosophy of the surfer dude. The standout in an impressive cast of unknowns, Penn was actually a hard-working young Method actor who did such a thorough job of playing a teenage doper that many figured he must be the real thing.

10. Surfing Evolution 101: Riding Giants (2004).

Another Peralta doc, this film focuses on big-wave surfing but it’s also a great introduction to the evolution of the sport. Three generations of surf pioneers are represented by Greg Noll (1950s-’60s), Jeff Clark (1980s-’90s) and Laird Hamilton (1990s-2000s), whose indefatigable pursuit of 12-metre-plus monster waves helped propel surfing out of the era of Bermudas and long boards and into the age of the wet suit, the short board and the jet-ski tow-in. Pair Riding Giants with The Endless Summer and you’ll have the perfect surfing double-bill for a long summer evening.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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