As I was cruising through Facebook this morning, I came across a post that had some clips from Greg MacGillivray’s classic surf movie, “Five Summer Stories.” It reminded me of how cool it was going to the showings of all the surf films back in the early days and how great they were.
They just don’t make ’em like that anymore.
For me, it started with John Severson’s “Surf Safari,” which came out in 1959. A friend’s mom took a carload of us up to Hollywood where it was showing in a small art theater. This was one of the major highlights of my early surfing years.
When the big wave sequence came on, and the soundtrack cranked up the theme to “Peter Gunn,” it was pure magic. I will never forget the narration: “On Dec. 15th, the biggest swell to hit the Hawaiian Islands in over 50 years came marching out of the North Pacific. And only a handful were there to meet the challenge.” Da Da Da Da Da Da Daaaaa. Nothing short of EPIC.
In reality, the early surf films were not much more than glorified home movies. They were all shot in 16 mm. The narration was done live with a microphone and a small PA system with the soundtrack playing on a portable tape recorder, which was actually just a bunch of instrumental records recorded on tape and stuck together.
There was surfing footage mixed in with funny home-done skits and shots of guys driving old surf cars to wherever they were going. And they always had extremely popular wipe-out sequences. People loved those.
It’s always fun to see people totally eating it big time, as long as those people were somebody else and not you.
The showings were always in high school auditoriums and places like that. Always huge events with all the local surf communities attending. Total social event that was not meant to be missed.
I remember being so surf-stoked after those screenings that I would have to get up at the crack of dawn the next morning to go out and try all the cool stuff I had seen the “good guys” doing in the movies. And it never failed that the surf would be terrible those next mornings. Never figured out why that was, but it just was.
So, my dad got an 8mm movie camera to film all of us local kids who were learning to surf by our house in Surfside. On the weekends for like a month he filmed us every Saturday and Sunday morning. Then we had a big showing in our living room.
The 8mm movies came in short 4-minute reels back then. Dad had about twenty of them. You would show one and then have to change the reel and show the next. I had a stack of instrumental 45 rpm records on my record player. We were all in a fever to see ourselves surfing.
Well, unfortunately my dad had about 95% footage of neighbors walking by, planes and birds flying over, clouds and local dogs running down the beach. Of the 5% surfing footage, he missed most of the rides and just got the last couple of seconds of the ones he did get. There was mass disappointment. Words were said and my dad vowed to never take surf footage again.
This is where I inherited the camera. I made two home surf movies: “I Surf for Adventure,” followed up by the glorious “Curse of the Surf Snatchers.”
One of my showings was at the home of the great female surfers Marge and Candy Calhoun in Laguna Beach. My girlfriend, Banzai Betty, lived across the street. Some of the local surfers were in attendance.
Somewhere in the middle of the showing, Hevs McClelland stopped the projector and took a vote to see how many people wanted to see the rest of it. This sort of gives you some idea on why I never continued making surf films. Humph.
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