Surfing

CHAPTER 5 Blue Screen

Hollywood Exploits Surfing—and Vise Versa • The 1920s to Today

Gidget Surfs, 1959: Practicing her board-riding moves in her bedroom, Gidget prepares to spread the good word about surfing around the globe. (Columbia Pictures)

Frankie “Surfs,” 1960s (Voyageur Press Archives)

Beach Party, 1963: “Surfin’ all day, swingin’ all night,” promised this Beach Party lobby card. (American International Pictures)

Hollywood has mishandled, misrepresented, misinterpreted, and misaligned few other people, places, or sports more than surfing. Perhaps only the Nazi party has been worked over more. Perhaps, that is.

Most American sports boast classic movies—and some of these films have won Oscars. Hollywood has been good to baseball, football, basketball, golf, and even bicycle riding. There’s an Oscar-winning movie about track and field—Chariots of Fire—and Robert De Niro won another for portraying a boxer in Raging Bull. Heck, Jackie Gleason was nominated for an Academy Award for playing an overweight pool shark in The Hustler.

Surfing? Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer from 1966 rocked the box office but wasn’t nominated for diddly, although it is generally considered a classic, and is reputed to be the most commercially successful documentary film ever made. And Sean Penn should have been nominated for something for his surfer dude character Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Instead, he’ll just have to be happy with creating one of the great comic icons of the twentieth century. Spicoli has the laugh power to reduce audiences to tears just by appearing on screen, putting him up there with the likes of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, and John Belushi.

Surfing doesn’t get much respect in the transition to the silver screen. When the Sport of Kings is portrayed by the Hollywood Squares, the result is almost always rated C for Corny, Crummy, Contrived, Commercial, and just altogether Crappy. Some of the worst movies ever made were waxploitation flicks: Surf Nazis Must Die, Monster from the Surf, and too many more. And then there were the Beach Party movies with the horrendous yin of Frankie crooning to Annette, countered a little by the yang of Eric Von Zipper and guest appearances by the likes of Dick Dale, Buster Keaton, Little Stevie Wonder, and Candy Johnson, the Perpetual Motion Dancer. Most surfing flicks from the late 1950s to today have latched on to stereotypes about surfing and packaged them for audiences around the world, all in search of the filthy lucre.

Hollywood has exploited surfing, and not always to the betterment of the pursuit. On the other hand, several generations of surfers have done well by Hollywood, going back to Duke Kahanamoku. Duke—and others from Tom Blake to Mickey Dora and Mickey Muñoz—exploited their own surfing and ocean skills to earn good money in front of and behind the camera. Sometimes they had to put on wigs and dress up like women, but they were being paid to go surfing.

Duke Kahanamoku could walk on water, and when Hollywood needed someone with those skills, they knew who to call. Over the years, Duke performed in some thirty movies, beginning with the role of Noah Noa in 1925’s Adventure and ending with 1968’s I Sailed to Tahiti with an All Girl Crew in which Duke played himself. In between, he was a pirate captain, devil-ape, wild-animal trapper, and a host of dusky natives and Indian chiefs with names like Tamb Itam, Jaffir, Kalita, and Manua. In 1948, Duke appeared as Ua Nuke alongside John “Duke” Wayne in Wake of the Red Witch. Yet Duke’s Olympic status prevented him from surfing, swimming, or doing water stunts in any films except newsreels. According to Duke’s biographer, Sandra Kimberley Hall, “The International Olympic Committee was adamant about athletes not being paid for pursuing their sporting activities outside of the Olympics. Look at what happened to Frank Beaurepaire, James Thorpe. To my knowledge, the only film he surfed in was Douglas Fairbanks’s travelogue Around the World in 80 Minutes.”

Duke’s disciple, Tom Blake, was a national swimming champion and natural waterman, but because he was not an Olympian he wasn’t prohibited from doing anything. Hollywood was waiting. Blake’s first film stunt was in Where the Pavement Ends from 1923 where he wrestled a dead shark. Over the next eighteen years, Blake worked in dozens of Hollywood movies with the likes of Clark Gable on Strange Cargo in 1939 and John Wayne on Wake Island in 1942.

Hollywood paid Blake’s bills for many years, but he soon tired of the life. “The shallowness of the film industry was what eventually caused Tom to leave the profession,” notes biographer Gary Lynch. “He grew to fundamentally dislike the film industry centered at Hollywood and finally disassociated himself from it after World War II.” When Hollywood saw that women dug Olympian-turned-movie-star Johnny Weissmuller in a loincloth, they all but ordered him to divorce his wife, and paid her off with ten thousand dollars. Blake saw what Tinseltown did to some of his contemporaries and he didn’t like it: “It was embarrassing to see the writers and directors of Hollywood make an intelligent and gifted athlete like Johnny talk and act like an ape-man,” says Lynch.

Yet while Blake held Hollywood in the same disdain as many surfers who followed in his wake, he wasn’t afraid to milk the studios for traveling and bean-curd money.

Annette: We got an early start

Frankie: We’re gonna have a ball

Annette: We’re gonna ride the surf

Frankie: And that ain’t…

Frankie and Annette: Allllll! Beach party tonight!

— Annette and Frankie, “Beach Party,” 1963

Preston “Pete” Peterson was a contemporary of Tom Blake, competing against him in swimming and paddle races in the 1920s and 1930s. But while Blake’s story is well known, Peterson remains a riddle wrapped in mystery with a side order of enigma. Born in 1913 in Texas, he was in California with his parents in time to buy his first board by the age of seven. Peterson went on to become one of the great watermen of the twentieth century: He dove deep, dived high, and swam, surfed, stroked, and sailed with the best. He won the Pacific Coast Championships in 1932, 1936, 1938, and 1941—four out of the ten years it was held. Peterson was the first to paddle to Catalina from the mainland and one of the first wave of California haole to invade Hawai’i, going over with Lorrin Harrison and Gene Smith in 1932. Riding the South Shore reefs on heavy redwood boards, Peterson and his fellow adventurers were jazzed to find Hawai’ians on balsa boards weighing only thirty to forty pounds. When the Californians ran out of money, they stowed away on the USS Republic, posing as soldiers for a free trip home. From what he witnessed in Hawai’i, Peterson experimented with balsa and lighter materials, innovating lifesaving equipment that is still in use today: paddleboards, soft rescue tubes, all-fiberglass hollow boards, and foam/plywood/balsa sandwich surfboards. Peterson was also an expert tandem surfer, still winning contests into the 1960s.

Real Surfing Movies

Bud Browne Pioneers the Surf Film

As the popularity of surfing grew in America, entrepreneurs like Bud Browne, Greg Noll, Bruce Brown, and John Severson traveled up and down California to Mexico, Australia, and beyond, shooting the best surfers on the best waves. They edited the movies together, thought up a narration, and fed it all live to stoked surfers along the coast. The movies also had an ever-changing soundtrack of whatever music the auteur thought was appropriate.

Bud Browne was the first to make a real surf movie. Tall and angular, Browne learned to surf at Venice Beach in 1939 while working as an LA County lifeguard. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he taught school while taking classes at the USC Film School.

In 1953, Brown cut together forty-five minutes of surfing footage from Waikiki and packaged it as Hawaiian Surfing Movies. All at the same time, Browne would project the movie, do a live narration over the PA system, and play music from a reel-to-reel tape recorder in the projection booth.

Gun Ho! 1963 (Voyageur Press Archives)

Hawaiian Surfing Movies was a cult hit, inspiring Browne to make a film a year for the next eleven years, including Locked In, Cat on a Hot Foam Board, Spinning Boards, and Cavalcade of Surf. Browne toured California, showing his movies at civic auditoriums, women’s clubs, high school auditoriums—anywhere they’d let him set up his gear. And as surfing began to flourish in the 1950s, his films became insanely popular.

In those days, Browne was a one-man show: setting up the projector, voicing a live narration, and DJ-ing a soundtrack that fit the action. Gordon McLelland now works with Browne packaging and distributing his films as well as selling footage to other surf moviemakers: “Remember, the pre-1960 surf movies had no soundtrack: the narration was live and the music was from records or a tape machine that would be turned on and off between talking. The narration often changed and it wouldn’t have been unusual for different music to be used at different showings. My recollection is that Severson and Bruce Brown mostly used cool jazz, mixed with comedy ragtime, classical music and I believe John used ‘Peter Gunn’ in several films for the big-wave sections. John Severson didn’t like ‘surf music’ at the time and thought it was mostly kooks trying to cash in on the culture. That said, he did take the picture of Dick Dale surfing below the San Clemente Pier that appeared on Dale’s first album.

“The surf movie connection to ‘surf music’ was after the fact,” McLelland continues. “The music came first at surf stomps, then later, due to popular demand the connection to films was made. Watching videos won’t help much because all Bud’s films and most of the others had the music changed when they went to video, to avoid lawsuits from record companies, music publishers, and the musicians. It seemed appropriate to use surf music so we all did it when the new soundtracks were created.”

Annette “Surfs,” 1960s: She may never have gotten her incredible ’do wet, but she looked good doing it. (Voyageur Press Archives)

Peterson worked as a stuntman, stunt coordinator, set designer, and shark wrangler on films and TV shows from the 1930s to the 1980s. Yet for all his legend, Peterson is nearly invisible; one has to rely on word of mouth and rusty memories to get an idea of what he did in Tinseltown. John Elwell surfed Makaha with Peterson in the 1950s and called him “a huge figure in surfing in the Thirties to the Fifties,” and remembered him doing stunning surfing stunts in RKO specials.

Surfing’s the source, man!

— Surfer 15, Point Break, 1991

Paul Stader was another old-time surfer who worked his way up from stuntman to stunt coordinator to second unit director on dozens of shows starting in 1937. In his first picture, he did a dive doubling for star Jon Hall in John Ford’s The Hurricane and became an instant stuntman. Stader went on to perform all of Weissmuller’s swings and dives in the Tarzan series, and worked with Peterson on The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno decades later.

Peterson and Stader did tens, if not hundreds, of stunts for Tinseltown, from wrestling sharks and falling to their “deaths” to riding waves. Their screen credits are mostly invisible, however. As Stader’s motto went, “The only credit we get is at the bank.”

The surf bums in the 1959 movie adaptation of Gidget spend most of their time lounging around the Malibu beach shack talking parties and chicks, then every once in a while they stand up on cue, grab their surfboards in a chorus line, charge into the water, and take off on the same wave en masse. Yet of all the actors in the cast, only one truly knew how to ride a wave: Doug McLure. As Gidget surfing stand-in Mickey Muñoz remembers, “He was a reasonably good surfer, but he was married to a high-maintenance lady who demanded he work constantly, so a lot of times it was up to me to drag him out of his house and go surfing. I also became pretty good friends with Cliff Robertson, who impressed me with all the work and research he did to get his part right. To play the part of the great Kahuna he learned to surf and hung out with all the characters so he could really be a surfer.”

Surf Party, 1964: If Frankie and Fabian could surf, then surely Bobby Vinton could ride a board just as well. (Twentieth Century-Fox)

Behind the scenes, it was Muñoz, Mickey Dora, and a half-dozen other true surfers who made the charges against the rock at Secos. Dora doubled for the Moondoggie character played by James Darren—although the Great Kahoona character was closer to the real Dora. Dora stood in to hotdog the fun little Secos waves, until Gidget gets all moonie over Moondoggie. The closest they come to consummating their flirtation is riding tandem. Look close at the screen and you’ll see it’s Dora on the bottom, holding up an oddly muscular young woman named Mickey Muñoz.

Muñoz donned a blond wig and one-piece bathing suit to double for Sandra Dee, yet even four decades later he can’t really remember why. Muñoz was small, but not nearly as petite as Dee, who looked like she would blow away in an offshore breeze. Surfer Linda Benson was Dee’s main double, but for the tandem ride, Muñoz was called on. Muñoz was a regular foot and Benson was a goofy foot, and this was the first—but definitely not last—time that Hollywood didn’t bother to know the difference.

Ride the Wild Surf, 1964: The surf was wild and so were the instant clichés. Color it influential: Most every surf film that followed owed a debt to Ride the Wild Surf. (Columbia Pictures)

Muñoz does remember that the job came at a good time. “I was married at 19 and had a son by 20 and I needed money. I worked on Gidget for almost three months and it was pretty good money—like $65–$85 a day. I did the surfing but I was also lifeguarding on the set, and I tried to coach Sandra Dee. I tried to teach her how to hold a surfboard and walk down to the water’s edge and even paddle, so they could get some of that on camera. But she was a skinny little Hollywood blonde and not a real athletic person. I don’t know if I had much respect for her at the time because she wasn’t an outdoors type person.”

Muñoz and a lot of the other real surfers were around the set most of the time it was on the beach as well as a bit at the studio. They tried to steer the movie away from corny and into reality, but they rarely succeeded. “Hollywood works in its ways and the director is king,” Muñoz explains. “Whatever the director conceives of, that is what you try and do. But if he came up with something that was either not possible or too off the wall, everybody would go, ‘Hey, that’s not surfing.’ I’m sure we put in our two cents. I’ve never been afraid to do that.”

Muñoz got a full summer’s work out of Gidget and earned enough screen time and money to get a coveted Screen Actors Guild card. “I think a SAG card cost $500 then, and that was a lot of money,” Muñoz said. “Once I got my SAG card I got other stunt work in Hollywood. I kind of pursued it. I knew a lot of people in the business and so through those people I got work. Not a lot, but I did work as a stuntman and whatever I could do on set—usually water oriented.”

Mickey Muñoz doubled for Mickey Rooney on a TV show called Mickey. He tandemed with a sturdy surfer named Marge Calhoun—on her shoulders—and nearly drowned doing a water-ski stunt. When the producers asked Muñoz if he could water-ski, Muñoz claimed he was an expert—even though he had only done it once. Like a lot of surfers before him, he came up with the skills to pull off a difficult stunt. “They dragged me off a pier on that ski and I ended up under water like 20 feet. There was no Water Safety then and there was only the driver in the boat and he was looking ahead, so I blew a few bubbles down there.”

And like Tom Blake before him, Muñoz wrestled a shark. A live shark. “I teamed up with a character named Frank Donahue to film some stock footage of a man and woman fighting a shark. We went five miles out to sea from Santa Monica and caught a mako shark on a handline. Frank dressed me up as a woman, again, and had me fight the shark—live—and makos are bad-ass. I was in pretty good shape then from paddling and surfing and the muscles in my back flared when I fought the shark. It wasn’t very ladylike. Then we took the shark back to land, froze it, and they had me fight it again—not fresh, but frozen.”

For Those Who Think Young, 1964: “Thinking young” meant surfing, dancing, and other beachside hijinks. (United Artists)

Like others who have surfed through Hollywood films, Muñoz isn’t a great fan of the movies he was in: “Gidget was corny, but you know I’ve probably seen it three times since we made it; each time I see it I appreciate it more for a fairly honest attempt to capture what was going on in surfing at the time. They tried, but Hollywood can’t seem to help Hollywoodizing everything they do.”

In 1963, Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson of American International Pictures began producing a string of “surf” movies, directed by William Asher and starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. These waxploitation films—Beach Party (1963), Muscle Beach Party (1964), Bikini Beach (1964), Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965)—shamelessly cashed in on the surf craze, employed a lot of real surfers, launched some careers, revived others, and sunk a few.

The Beach Party flicks flip-flopped from phony to funny every few minutes. It’s hard not to like a series that revived Buster Keaton’s career and launched Little Stevie Wonder, but there’s also a lot that’s hard to stomach—like Frankie Avalon, that short, dark, and handsome Italian guy from South Philly portraying a surfer who had an annoying habit of breaking into song in front of his girlfriend.

The ongoing theme of each of these movies was Annette fending off frisky Frankie, who is not yet ready to get married. Their breakup-to-makeup shenanigans resulted in a lot of love songs, heartbreak songs, and makeup songs—Frankie and Annette crooning in front of a projection screen with the full moon shimmering on the water and the lights of Point Dume twinkling in the background.

Musically, the Beach Party movies all had a similar motif. Frankie and Annette were joined by semi-regulars like chanteuse Donna Loren—borrowed from Dr. Pepper commercials—and a force of nature named Candy Johnson as the Perpetual Motion Dancer. Johnson shook that thing like few things have ever been shaken; there was so much mojo locked up in her booty she had the power to take out surfers on waves, bikers on their choppers, and any other male within a hundred yards. Each movie also boasted a regular house band, starting with Dick Dale for the first two movies. He was replaced by the Pyramids, the Exciters, and the Kingsmen. Love ballads, novelty songs, and some good rock’n’roll—these movies had it all.

Beach Party: The first of the series set the stage for the corny-to-cool scenario. The film begins with Frankie and Annette on spring break, driving a jalopy along PCH and singing a bongo-driven, jazzified “Beach Party” theme song. This song tests the assertion that it’s hip to be square, but the music goes uphill from there.

After a quick charge through the surf, Dick Dale and his baby blue Stratocaster jump into “Secret Surfin’ Spot” and the gang starts frugging. From a contemporary perspective, Dale’s rocking scenes may not appear to be anything special. But this was 1963, pre-Scopitone, pre-Hullabaloo, pre-Shindig, pre-MTV; it was music video before music video. The close-ups of bikinied girls and baggied guys whooping it up in the sand probably had every teen in the theater ready to move to California and go surfing.

The actual plot of the movie was pretty painful. A frumpy anthropologist studies the kids, comparing their mating rituals to aboriginal tribes before he, too, catches the spirit. Surfing has that kind of effect.

Muscle Beach Party: This sequel again featured Frankie crooning for Annette and vice versa. Dale penned the theme song, “Surfer’s Holiday,” and in what is arguably the finest musical moment of the series, plays guitar for a blind, twelve-year-old musical sensation billed as Little Stevie Wonder.

Born Steveland Judkins Hardaway in Saginaw, Michigan, he signed with Motown and had a hit with “Fingertips (Part 2).” In Muscle Beach Party, Little Stevie rocks the house with “Happy Feeling.” Candy Johnson does her perpetual motion thing to the tune and cracks the camera lens at the end.

Bikini Beach: Dick Dale did not appear in the third movie—nor did the Beatles, who were signed and scheduled, but dropped out after hitting it big on The Ed Sullivan Show. This left the producers to scramble and create a character called Potato Bug, played by Frankie, and hire the Pyramids as house band. The gag with the Pyramids is they were bald—a slap to the mop tops of the British Invasion—and their wigs fly off when they flip into the hot-rod song “Midnight Run.”

Pajama Party: Then things got really weird. Pajama Party seems like a rush job. Frankie Avalon didn’t sing, Tommie Kirk played a Martian named Go Go, and Annette’s character name changes from Dee Dee to Connie. Dressed in a nightie, she sings a love ballad called “Stuffed Animal” to a stuffed animal. Dorothy Lamour does a bizarre dance number called “Where Did I Go Wrong?” Pajama Party also witnessed the return of Buster Keaton and Frankenstein’s monster’s bride, Elsa Lanchester. Call it a greatest hits…of something.

Beach Blanket Bingo: Annette’s back as Dee Dee and Frankie is singing to her again. Donna Loren roasts a hot dog (metaphor, anyone?) as she sings the lost-love ballad “It Only Hurts When I Cry.” The Hondells are the house band, Linda Evans lip-synchs her way through a few numbers as Sugar Kane, and Harvey Lembeck does a musical number as biker Eric Von Zipper.

How to Stuff a Wild Bikini: This was the last of the series to star Frankie and Annette. Poor lovelorn Frankie is stationed in the South Pacific and spies on Dee Dee with the help of witch doctor Buster Keaton. Meanwhile, Dee Dee is back on the beach being tempted by various things, leading to more makeup and breakup songs. The highpoint here is the house band, Portland, Oregon’s the Kingsmen, who became eternally famous for “Louie, Louie.”

The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini: Released in 1966, Frankie and Annette were gone, replaced by Tommy Kirk and Deborah Walley. Just as surf music was going down, so were the surf movies.

Ride the Wild Surf had great potential. The film was shot first and acted later, bending a story around North Shore surfing footage captured during the winter of 1963–1964. The waves are howlers, which is where the potential lay—yet so, too, were many of the words that came out of the “surfers’” mouths. In the end, it was a serious but failed attempt to capture the mood of the North Shore at the time. Ride the Wild Surf launched a few careers—and a thousand surf-flick clichés.

The story begins with three mainland guys arriving fresh off the plane in Honolulu, then driving across the island to challenge the big stuff on Oahu’s North Shore. Steamer Lane (Tab Hunter), Jody Wallis (Fabian), and Chase Colton (Peter Brown) dress in suits and ties accessorized with a variety of social, physical, and philosophical chips on their shoulders. They look groomed and groovy, but the North Shore ruffles their feathers. Our heroes meet chicks, fight fights, and are constantly challenged by the waves to prove their manhood.

The wahines are played by Barbara Eden, Shelley Fabares, and Susan Hart, setting a high standard for future surfer girls.

The supporting cast includes James Mitchum as Eskimo, a big, gruff, no-nonsense guy with a Roman nose who rides the biggest stuff wearing black-and-white striped trunks. Sound like someone we know? Greg Noll says he was a victim of circumstances. “Hey, I was just out there surfing, you know, because it was good Waimea that season,” Da Bull snorts. “I kind of knew there was something going on because Mickey Dora was out surfing Waimea, and he had never done that. He didn’t really like the big stuff, but I knew he was getting paid and so was Mike Hynson. Well, Mickey and I were friends and I wanted to see how he would do and maybe keep an eye on him. We rode a lot of fun Haleiwa and Sunset and 15–20-foot Waimea, and I caught so many waves in those black-and-white trunks, they created the Eskimo character and wrote him into the movie.”

Surfer Fred Van Dyke got some face time in Ride the Wild Surf, but that pales in his memory compared with the surf time: “That winter had the best Waimea and Sunset surf that I can remember,” Uncle Fred says. “It would come up to 25, drop, and come up again, and that went on for about two months. We were totally surfed out, but forced ourselves to continue. We really did not get a break for a couple of months, and it was mostly glassy except for the mid-afternoons. The camera people didn’t realize how special it was and they got fantastic footage.”

The surfing was shot entirely from land, which was a shame as it didn’t capture the danger of riding those waves. After two months, the producers had hours of surfing footage in the can—and a lot of what was in the can featured Noll’s black-and-white striped can. Noll says he was briefly considered as the actor for the part of Eskimo, but he accents the briefly. “They called me up to LA to audition for the Eskimo part, I guess,” Noll laughs. “I went up there and stood on a stage and they gave me a card to read. I think I said three words, ‘The cat is…’ and then the hook came out and they yanked me off the stage. I guess I had the shortest acting career ever.”

Ride the Wild Surf is as corny as just about every other surf movie not made by surfers, but the entertainment value goes way up when you watch it forty years later with Da Bull. “Oh my God, look at these guys!” Noll roars at the sight of Fabian, Brown, and Hunter checking the Waimea lineup. “A suit and tie? At Waimea? Look at the hair. It’s perfect! Look at the car. No rust! No wonder we didn’t hang out with these guys. They’re a bunch of Hollywood dorks. A bunch of phonies. I avoided them like the plague, and the other guys hung around because they were getting paid.

“That’s Haleiwa there, and who’s the guy in the stinkbug stance at Sunset? There’s L. J. Richards on that wave and that’s Ricky Grigg. The backside guy is Butch van Artsdalen. I remember that style. Check out Jeff Hakman! What is he, eight years old there? Here’s a big wave. That’s Mike Stange taking off behind me at Waimea and wiping out and there I go wiping out so maybe Mike wouldn’t be lonely when he went over the falls. Oh and now I’m claiming it there on the shoulder. Guess I was ahead of my time, huh? Okay, it’s starting to come back to me now. I remember telling the camera guys that if they wanted some good wipeouts to keep an eye on me, because that’s what I was good at.”

Noll watches with one hand over his eyes, the other on the remote control. When the Hollywood phonies are on, he fast-forwards to get to Barbara Eden’s parts (if you know what we mean) or the surfing. When Dora takes off at Waimea, Noll perks up like a proud father watching his fledgling son. This was Dora’s first time at Waimea, and all he could find to ride was a crummy ten-foot four-inch hot-curl with a pointed tail and round bottom; on film you see him struggling to turn and trim the board at Sunset and Haleiwa. But Noll is proud of how his friend held up at Waimea. “Look at him take off on that wave, a little fade at the top and a big drop,” Noll says. “This is his first time and he rode really well. Look at him there in front of me.

“I distinctly remember riding behind Dora on one wave at Waimea and he looked like he was slowing down and about to get creamed. I put my hand on the back of his shorts and gave him a shove and that got him through to the end standing up. Well, that was kind of like the guy pulling the thorn from the lion’s paw. Dora never forgot that wave and it became one of the foundations of our friendship.”

When Barbara Eden and Peter Brown buy New Year’s Eve fireworks from Mr. Chin, Noll nods, “They got that part right, anyway. The North Shore on New Year’s Eve has always been World War IV.”

Ride the Wild Surf ends with a scenario that most surfers write off as hokey. Still, it has some basis in truth. There is a big day at Waimea with the surf escalating every fifteen minutes. The number of surfers in the water dwindles like ten little Indians, with all of them holding their ground and hoping to be the last man standing. That’s not how most big days are—although there have been instances, notably a swell at Makaha in December 1969 when it was Noll himself who was the last man standing on one of the biggest days of the twentieth century. Ride the Wild Surf didn’t let truth get in the way of a good story, though. The movie launched the Life or Death in the Big Wave ending that would appear in surf movies seemingly forever.

“So, they got a few things right in this Ride the Wild Surf,” Noll harrumphs. “But holy shit, did you see that guy’s hair?”

Between 1959 and 1965, Hollywood foisted films from Gidget and Beach Party to Blue Hawaii on a naïve public, while Bruce Brown tried to counter all the nonsense with The Endless Summer. Finally, by 1967, the waxploitation genre had exhausted itself, producers had run out of corny songs, and the surf movie went dormant, thankfully, until deep into the 1970s.

In 1975, American International Pictures, who was responsible for all of the Frankie and Annette flicks, took another stab at surfing with Murph the Surf, the Hollywood version of Jack Murphy, a well-known Florida surfer who attempted one of the biggest jewel heists ever—stealing the Star of India sapphire.

Then in 1978, surfer-turned-director John Milius stepped in and stole the show with Big Wednesday. The film was Milius’s coming-of-age memoir, American Graffiti on a surfboard.

The film’s surfing has Peter Townend doubling for William Katt, Ian Cairns for Gary Busey, and J. Riddle and Bill Hamilton for Jan-Michael Vincent, with Katt and Vincent doing some of their own wave-riding. Some of the surfing is beautiful—particularly PT in his prime, carving and soul arching at Malibu, Hollister Ranch, and Costa Rica. As Hamilton says of being paid to professionally wipe out, “Stunt work is a great way to get paid if you’re into pushing the adrenaline button. The way the guys use science and technology these days to eliminate so much of the deadly stuff is impressive, but you have to hand it to those guys in the Thirties and Forties who were going on balls and adrenaline alone.”

Reinventing the Ride the Wild Surf cliché, Big Wednesday ends with a climactic day of surf where the three buddies are reunited for a session subtexted by all that Passage into Adulthood business. For the finale, the crew shot a big day at Sunset Beach, standing in for Malibu, and pushed reality a little bit: twelve-foot west peaks don’t swing through Malibu all that often, but oh well, it’s Hollywood.

Toward the end of Big Wednesday, the Vincent character wipes out bad, but survives. Apparently they didn’t want Riddle or Hamilton to chance the wipeout and lose a double, so they looked elsewhere. Gerry Lopez was involved with the shoot in California and Hawai’i, and he saw firsthand what happened: “For Big Wednesday, Bruce Raymond and Jackie Dunn were paid $100 each to go out and eat shit as hard as they could. Bruce did his first at Sunset but looking at the dailies, Milius decided it wasn’t gruesome enough, so had Jackie do his thing at the Pipe. Jackie took off on about a 10-foot wave, stalled at the top, and let himself get pitched, swam in, got the board, and went back out and did it three more times—for a hundred dollars. I wouldn’t do it for ten thousand. In the editing, they turned the negative upside down and that little cut of Jackie, who looked even more like Jan-Michael than either Billy or Jay, really made the wipeout sequence work.”

Big Wednesday cost twelve million dollars to make only to be released in the shadow of Saturday Night Fever. The movie was savaged in the media. “I was devastated,” Milius remembers. “I wanted to join the French Foreign Legion.”

And oddly enough, this was one movie most surfers applauded.

North Shore was a surf movie by the numbers. The plot was Ride the Wild Surf born again in the 1980s with an equal dose of laughable lines and silly scenarios. Still, the movie remains a flawed classic.

Rick Kane is a haole from Arizona who wins a wave-pool contest that gets him to Hawai’i to compete in the Pipeline Masters. Ridiculous, yes. North Shore was another surf film mishandled by the Hollywood Squares, but it wasn’t for lack of horses. They had natural comedians the likes of Robbie Page and Mark Occhilupo; they had great surfers the likes of Laird Hamilton, John Philbin and Gerry Lopez; they had righteous babes like Nia Peeples. And they still managed to make a clumsy, very 1980s movie.

Lopez acted the role of bad-ass Vince, and in retrospect he says North Shore could have been better if they’d had more—more time, more money, and more surf. “Hey, they had six weeks to shoot that movie and not a lot of money and the surf was terrible. I think if they had gotten good waves at the Pipe like they did for Blue Crush, then North Shore would have been better,” Lopez says. “Like most surf movies, North Shore has aged a little with time, and while it is still something of a howler, it is also a time capsule looking back to the Eighties on the North Shore, in all its day-glo glory.”

Point Break was half surfing flick, half California crime thriller. Eager, young FBI agent Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) tracks down a gang of seasonal bank robbers who hide behind masks of the presidents of the United States. As the robbers leave wax residue behind and the tan lines show on their real behinds, the FBI figures they’re surfers gone bad—or at least worse than your typical surfers. Reeves finds the gang, who is lead by New Age ringleader-surfer Bodhisattva, played by Patrick Swayze.

The chase is on, and Point Break has its moments—both great and cringy. A lot of the metaphysical babble coming out of Bodhi’s mouth makes real surfers howl with derisive laughter. And the editing of some surf scenes is off, as the producers didn’t bother to differentiate between regular and goofy foot.

For the surfing, Matt Archbold doubled for Swayze with Jodie Cooper standing in for femme fatale surfing moll Tyler Endicott, played by Lori Petty. Surfer Vince Klyn has a cameo as a bad-ass bad guy, along with Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

For the ending, Point Break stuck to the cliché launched by Ride the Wild Surf. Take a poll of just about every surfing movie and you’ll find they end with a day of giant surf and a brush with death: Big Wednesday? Jan-Michael Vincent almost buys it. In God’s Hands? Matt George rocks off into the deep. Blue Crush? Anne Marie takes a licking at Pipe but keeps on ticking. North Shore? Same deal. Sticking to this formula, Point Break ends with Utah tracking Bodhisattva around the globe for two years, finally getting his man at Bell’s Beach, where Swayze shows up to surf the “fifty-year storm” he long predicted. Ludicrous, yes, but that’s Hollywood.

Utah slips the bracelets on Bodhi in the middle of a water fight. Bodhi is busted, but in one of the finest bro gestures ever caught on film, Utah lets Bodhi go to ride the wild surf one last time. Bodhi paddles out as the guy with the bad Australian accent screeches, “You leeeeet heeeeem gieeeoooo!” Bodhi takes off on a monster and eats the Mortal Doughnut.

That’s not Matt Archbold as Bodhi in the finale; it’s none other than for-real wild-eyed adrenal-junkie hairball-hellman Darrick Doerner wiping out at Waimea accidentally on purpose and bodysurfing to the bottom of a gaping, twenty-foot barrel. No special effects or CGI here. It was one guy putting his neck on the line for real to keep it real. That was, as they say in Hollywood, a hell of a trick.

Doerner is now best known as being the dance partner to Laird Hamilton, the man at the helm of the PWC who dragged Laird into that giant death wave at Tahiti’s Teahupoo and many other monsters at Jaws and around the world. But in 1988, all of this tow surfing was off in the future, and surfers had to catch giant waves with their bare hands.

The Point Break stunt started with a photo of Doerner taking off on one of the biggest waves ever ridden, on Super Bowl Sunday 1988. “The Point Break producers came to Hawai’i and they were auditioning in town,” Doerner remembers. “Mark Foo and Ken Bradshaw and all these guys drove in to audition, and I didn’t know about it because I was lifeguarding. Well, Patrick Swayze whipped out that picture of me from Super Bowl Sunday and he said, ‘Hey I want to meet this guy.’ So they tracked me down and we had a rendezvous at Chun’s Reef. I paddled out and there he was in the lineup.

“I said, ‘Howzit, I’m Darrick.’

“He said, ‘I’m Patrick Swazye, and I want you to die for me.’

“I said, ‘I don’t die for anyone.’

“And boom, I got the job.”

Doerner surfed in North Shore and Big Wednesday, but Point Break was his big show. Since then he has worked on In God’s Hands and Die Another Day, and he knows the business much better. Looking back on Point Break with a lot more movie experience tucked next to the flippers under his belt, Doerner would do things a lot differently if he had it to do again. “Point Break was hard because they didn’t know exactly what they wanted,” Doerner says. “There was no storyboard, and so I had to wipe out over and over again. Six times I did it, broke seven boards, and perforated my eardrum on the second try. That one hurt. And they tried to dye my hair blond and it came out pink and orange and it burned my scalp and people were laughing at me. I went over to Makaha side one time and Mel Pu’u tried to chase me out of the water because he didn’t think I was me. Well, the producers left and then came back and said, ‘We want you to do the Iron Cross when you take off.’”

That was then and this is now, and many of the high-tech luxuries that North Shore surfers take for granted now didn’t exist then. The buoy and satellite reports weren’t refined and there weren’t six WaveRunners in every lineup. Doerner felt the pressure and he didn’t like it. “The producers were like, ‘When’s it going to happen?’ and I’m saying, ‘Hey, I’m just a surfer. I don’t control the ocean. It does what it wants.’ I didn’t have any Water Safety hovering around on WaveRunners and no one was blocking for me. It was just me out there in a wetsuit with orange hair. The other times I had done the wipeout all the braddahs in the water didn’t care that I was shooting a Hollywood movie. Booby Jones and Ricardo Pomar and some other guys were out there and the pecking order was in place and I had to hustle for waves with the rest of them and it was hard to focus on what I needed to do.

“Well, when they wanted me to do it again I called Laird and I said, ‘Hey I want you to be my friend and be out in the water with me when I have to do this.’ You know? Because I wasn’t sleeping so good, knowing I had to jump off a four-story building again. Laird said he’d do it and he didn’t ask for a dollar. Well, the day came and Laird played traffic cop for me and that helped, but I still had to go through the pecking order. When my turn came Laird said, ‘Okay, everyone just stop,’ and I pulled that one really cool Iron Cross at the top, then jumped and got down the face. It was like, splash, bounce, bounce, oh woohoo barrel ride. I bodysurfed right into a giant right barrel and it was really cool. I looked across Waimea Bay and could see the cliff and the cars and people and the hills, looking out of this giant barrel.”

On film, the wipeout is nuts, and you have to wonder how much control even the most experienced surfer has in a situation like this, bodysurfing to the bottom of a twenty-foot pit. But Doerner was absolutely in his prime and he pulled it off. He came right out the back of that thing, and when he bobbed to the surface he was a legend. “I popped up and I could hear all these car horns honking and people were hooting and screaming and someone was yelling, ‘That’s a wrap!’”

Perhaps the biggest crime of In God’s Hands is that it managed to be fairly humorless. Surfers are funny people. Hang around with Tom Carroll or Brad Gerlach for a few minutes when they’re on and you’ll see. In God’s Hands took a natural comedian like Shane Dorian and turned him into an insular, thousand-yard-staring sourpuss.

Still, Dorian’s surfing is worth the price of admission alone, and there are other surfing highlights from the likes of Todd Chesser and Brian Keaulana who both pulled into career tube-rides at Backdoor and Jaws. In God’s Hands had the talent and the chance to make history, but missed the drop and earned another C rating.

The story behind the story of In God’s Hands could be a movie itself. Naturally, the film ends with a life-or-death day of giant surf in which Dorian’s character faces his fears and lives while Matt George’s character faces the future and dies. And so the producers needed to stage an epic wipeout, except this time the wave was Jaws.

Going over the falls in the worst possible place at Jaws is not something anyone is willing to do for any amount of money; some consider it suicide, others consider it disrespectful of the spot. Chesser was doubling for George, but when the big day came, he was AWOL. Buzzy Kerbox was pulled from the sidelines. “I wasn’t working on In God’s Hands with all the guys and I was a little bummed I didn’t get any part of it,” Kerbox remembers. “But I was there on Maui and I was picked to do the wipeout. We negotiated pretty much on the spot. I think it was $2,500 for the day and a per-wipeout adjustment which was like a few hundred dollars per wipeout.”

A few hundred dollars per wipeout adds up when you do fifteen reshoots, the number of times Kerbox ate it on purpose at Jaws over two days in February 1995. The producers knew what they wanted, they just weren’t exactly sure how to get it. “The biggest day was the first day we shot,” Kerbox says. “The scariest part for me was knowing I was going to wipe out on whatever came in and whatever came in I was going. I don’t wipe out at Jaws that often. I’ve had some bad ones, but the bigger it gets the more cautious I get. Wiping out on purpose didn’t appeal to me too much because you never know what is going to happen there. You could wipe out not too bad and then the next wave is a monster and it gets you on the head. It’s just weird. You spend all your time out there trying not to wipe out and then the next thing you know you’re doing it on purpose.”

When asked if he would ever wipe out in the pit at Jaws, Brian Keaulana lays it down like a true pro: “I think there are very few people in the world that have the skill and knowledge to survive a huge wipeout like that.” Darrick Doerner echoes this, but in a more straightforward way: “Hell no. Do you think I’m crazy?”

Kerbox was crazy enough to try it, and like everything else in Hollywood it took multiple takes. “What they wanted was me coming unglued on the face,” he says. “They wanted it to be as dramatic as possible but they didn’t necessarily want me going over with the lip. In the movie the wipeout isn’t supposed to kill the Mickey character. It just takes him to the bottom where he grabs a rock and runs off with it. They wanted dramatic.”

Out of the fifteen wipeouts Kerbox did, the money shot came early on the first day. “The shot we used I was on the shoulder and it was no big deal. I was warming up and ready for more. They called no sets for a while and they called it off for the day. And the next day was smaller. So what could have happened was more scary than what did happen.”

The irony behind all of this is that on the same day Todd Chesser was supposed to pretend to wipe out at Jaws and drown, he flew back to Oahu, got caught inside a giant wave at a place called Outside Alligators and drowned for real. In God’s Hands was all about the ethics of using Personal Watercraft in giant waves. Todd Chesser hated them, but if there had been one on hand at Outside Alligators, he might still be alive.

Of all the stunts done by surfers going back to Duke Kahanamoku and Tom Blake, it was Rochelle Ballard who came the closest to eating it. More than forty years after Mickey Muñoz and Linda Benson redoubled for Sandra Dee in Gidget, Ballard was chosen as a surfing and body double for actress Kate Bosworth playing Anne Marie Chadwick in Blue Crush.

From small days at Haleiwa to medium days at Laniakea to big days at Backdoor, Pipeline, and Avalanche, Ballard made Bosworth look good. When Anne Marie tows into a monster at Avalanche, that was Ballard on the board. “That was also me going head-first over the falls at Pipe a few times. Not on purpose, but it still hurt,” she remembers.

To set the record straight, there is one large Pipeline wave in Blue Crush that is pig-dogged by Noah Johnson, doubling as Anne Marie in a bikini and wig, much like Muñoz for Dee. That wave is epic, but it came about only because Ballard was sitting on the beach, recovering from near-paralysis due to a collision with another surfer at Laniakea just four days earlier.

Ballard was jazzed to be a part of Blue Crush. Producer Brian Grazer and director John Stockwell came to Hawai’i to tell the story of young women surfers struggling for courage, money, and respect, and the more she hung out with them, the more she realized they wanted to get it right. Grazer and Stockwell were surfers, and they listened to what the girls had to say and hired the right people—Don King, Sonny Miller, Brian Keaulana, Brock Little, Terry Ahue, Sanoe Lake. It was all good, as they say, and the money wasn’t so bad, either.

Ballard was there to surf and duck-dive and get caught inside and paddle through heaving lineups, and she did it all. While working on the show, she knew she was going to have a shot at surfing big, perfect Pipeline with only a couple of others in the water, and that meant a lot to her. “You know, Anne Marie’s story in the movie is close to my own story,” she says. “Many years ago I hit my head on the bottom while surfing Cannon’s, and I’ve been afraid of that place ever since. I’m comfortable with Backdoor up to eight feet but I’ll tell you that there have been many, many days where I’ve sat on the beach looking at big Pipeline. I’ll put my leash on and take it off and put it back on but then finally not go out. I’d go home seeing myself getting pitched over and hitting the rocks and it was scary. Just like Anne Marie. I thought I didn’t have the guts to do it. I’d never made the drop at Big Pipe, and I was really looking forward to surfing a big Pipe day with no one else out, so I could have a chance.”

The crew of Blue Crush got along well, but the ocean was the difficult star. Winter 2001–2002 wasn’t cooperative and for most of the shoot, Pipeline was a sleeping giant that refused to awaken. The Second Unit shot surfing whenever it could. “I was having a blast working on the movie and surfing good waves with all these gnarly guys blocking for me and getting paid for it and eating too much Craft Services,” Rochelle said. “It was so much fun, and it was good to be working with guys like John Stockwell and Brian Grazer who listened and cared.” Rochelle was at Laniakea with Don King and Chris Taloa and the Second Unit crew, to shoot a scene where the local mok Drew character drops in on Anne Marie and breaks her board. Before the cameras were rolling, Rochelle Ballard took off in front of Chris Taloa for a warmup and the two collided. You’ve heard of a headbutt? Well this was a butthead, but it wasn’t funny. Chris Taloa’s big, hard Hawai’ian okole connected with Rochelle Ballard’s head, and nearly paralyzed her. “That was a heavy, heavy thing,” Ballard said, referring to the situation, not the thing that hit her. “I went from the most excruciating pain to total numbness. They took me out on the Ski and then Med Evaced me to the hospital and for a while there I thought I was paralyzed and would never surf again.”

Ballard was out of commission for two and a half weeks, but the show went on. “Well I knew they had a permit to shoot for an hour at Pipe and I was really looking forward to that: surfing perfect Pipe almost alone.”

Ballard’s big chance on Pipeline came four days after she was injured. The crew had exactly one hour of perfect waves to capture the climactic last ride of the movie where Anne Marie charges Pipeline for death or glory. But for Ballard, discretion was the better part of valor after her crash: “I was on the beach with John Stockwell and Brian Keaulana and Pipeline was going off. This was the best day in like three years and they had it for an hour, but I felt sick inside. John and Brian asked how I was feeling and I had to say that I didn’t think I could do it. That was the worst feeling of my life, but I was too messed up physically to go charge giant Pipe backside. Well at that point they grabbed Noah and put him in wig and said, ‘Let’s do this thing.’”

Just like that, a starlet was born. Like Mickey Muñoz in 1959, Noah Johnson put on a wig and bikini and paddled out into an empty Pipeline lineup to bag the epic wave. He made a cute surfer girl.

Noah figures he rode about ten waves and made most of them, while on others he wiped out accidentally on purpose. “They wanted some wipeouts so I did the best I could. I dove the lip on one and jumped out of the lip on another and got super deep on a couple and ran into the closeout. You go where there’s no choice but to eat it and then just use instinct to get through it safely. Your mind will only allow so much intentional stupidity so to a certain extent you have to put things beyond your control. Brian Keaulana was right there with the ski giving me rides back out to the lineup. Don King was shooting from the water and Sonny Miller was on the back of a ski with Kai Garcia driving. I remember being way deep in the barrel and waving at them. Ha ha, it was killer. That hour at Pipe was great, but somewhat balanced by the fact that I was dressed as a girl, and I couldn’t go right. As a testimonial to my commitment to the job, I passed up a couple silly Backdoor waves that to this day I wish I had gone on. A scary brush with conformity.”

There were also some shots that couldn’t be used, the result of being a boy dressed liked a girl: “They had some epic footage of me from that hour at Pipe,” Noah says, “but in all of the close-up shots, you can see my package hanging out from that bikini and it’s obvious the surfer is a man, man!”

The Three “Maui-skiteers,” 2002 Dave Kalama, Laird Hamilton, and Darrick Doerner surf Jaws in latex commando uniforms and night-vision goggles, doubling for James Bond in the opening sequence of Die Another Day. It was a stunt even 007 would have trembled at. (Photo © Ron Dahlquist)