Dude, You Seen My Movie?

Part of being one of the most innovative surfers on the planet is continually needing a new forum to show off your stuff. Professional surfer and amateur filmmaker Jamie O’Brien produced his own film, 2004’s Freak Show. He plans to take things to new levels with the release of his next film this year.

For decades now, the surf movie format has been achingly simple, and for good reason: When it comes to surfing’s transcendental experiences, images do better than words. Surf movies succeed where surf writers fail.

It’s that easy. We could commission the entire magazine staff to spin you 25,000 finely honed words about the act of riding a wave, but those words (which, truth be told, may or may not end up being finely honed) can’t hold a candle to a sixsecond video clip of Bruce Irons in the Mentawais. Similarly, hours upon hours of soggy post-surf talk yield little in the way of concrete description of surfing, serving instead only to bolster the egos of the beer-addled.

You have to feel it to know it, but if you can’t feel it, seeing it is the second best thing, which is why the paradigm for the surf movie has had little reason for transformation in the past six decades. Waves, music, cut, print. Until now.

Because a recent trend toward celebrity-driven surf movies—where a single corporately underwritten surfer produces and stars in his own film— seems to be sweeping the surfscape.

There’s no denying the power that celebrity has played in recent surf history. If the curmudgeon in you wants to say that surf celebrity is brought on by the relatively modern phenomenon of high-dollar endorsement deals, think back to the old days. Think about guys like Greg Noll and Phil Edwards, Gerry Lopez and Buttons Kaluhiokalani. Hell, think about Duke Kahanamoku. All surfers who had little in the way of lucrative endorsements, all some of our sport’s most iconic celebrities.

Bruce Irons has enjoyed the success of his 2005 release, The Bruce Movie.

Our culture has always held out a special place of reverence for its celebrities. That celebrity certainly has been leveraged in surf movies, but not nearly to the extent that we’re seeing with the recent rash of surf star films.

Kelly Slater had his own movie back in 1991— Kelly Slater in Black and White. Then there was Searching for Tom Curren and Drifting: The Rob Machado Chronicles. But whereas those films represented a slow trickle of bios reserved for the über-elite, the most recent deluge of surf biographies on the market is enough to represent a cultural shift.

Taj Burrow has three surf movies to his name— Montaj, Sabotaj and Fair Bits. Joel Parkinson’s movie, Free as a Dog—A True Dog’s Tale, comes Joel Parkinson out this spring. Kelly Slater’s feature-length film may or may not be coming out in the next year, but to tide us over until such time, the folks at Quiksilver have given us Letting Go, a documentary film about Slater. It’s a wonder that they had time to work on it though, as the scuttlebutt up at Quiksilver HQ is that Dane Reynolds’ summertime release, First Chapter, will be the best thing that any of us have ever seen. Not to be outdone, Reynolds’ contemporary Jamie O’Brien is making another movie about himself to follow up on the movie he made about himself back in 2004. That one was called Freak Show, the new one is called SuperFreak. Mick Fanning is Mick Fanning, and yes, he’s just entering post-production on his own surf film. And although Chris Ward already has had two films made in his honor—the creatively titled Psycho Ward and Where’s Wardo?—he’s got another release coming within the year.

You can be sure that there will be more than those coming down the pike (did somebody say Andy Irons?), but there’s only one man that everybody’s chasing in this pursuit—Andy’s little brother Bruce. Say what you want about Kelly Slater, Tom Curren, Rob Machado and Taj Burrow—all of whom had movies out before Bruce did, but Bruce’s movie changed everything. Why? Because it was called The Bruce Movie, that’s why.

The interesting part of many of today’s celebrity-driven releases is noticing the eye for editing that surfers have when reviewing themselves. Though most surfers can’t get enough footage of Mick Fanning, it’ll be interesting to see what Fanning himself selects as worth watching.

Unashamed, straightforward and brash, the movie’s title did as much to sum up the film as it did the film’s protagonist. A 30-minute documentary of Bruce’s 2004 year, The Bruce Movie featured clips of Bruce telling a faceless interviewer that his questions were stupid, then displayed footage of Bruce doing what he does second-best, driving through impossibly long barrels. Thanks in large part to Bruce Irons’ enigmatic nature, the movie was highly anticipated and even better received. Trading on his persona, the film’s creators wanted us to believe that we were going to learn something about Bruce by watching this film. Whether we did or not is a point to be debated, but The Bruce Movie sold out theaters, earned critical acclaim and won “Video of the Year” at the 2005 Surfer Poll and Video Awards.

There are some very smart marketing executives plying their trade in the surf industry, and it didn’t take them long to see that the model for The Bruce Movie worked. If a company could produce and distribute a video drenched in their corporate logos that also served to make their number one investment even more famous—well, it doesn’t take a Wharton grad.