I have not had the opportunity to see this movie, however I thought I might post this article from the Sunday Washington Post.
Surfing's 'Liquid' Assets
His Dad Made 'Endless Summer.' Naturally, Dana Brown Caught the Next Wave.
By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 17, 2003; Page N01
DANA POINT, Calif. -- Does every surfing movie wipe out and fail, eventually? Even the really good ones? Something happens out there on the water that has never successfully translated itself to film, despite some thrilling tries and daring cinematography. It's pretty, but you get the sense
that pretty doesn't even begin to get there. (You might as well be Frankie Avalon faking it in front of a moving screen.)
Same goes for words. Almost all the writing that's ever been done about surfing goes a little astray, even as those who swam in their words found some lovely sentences while goofy-footing
metaphors for the meaning of life. The surfer himself (or herself), a heroic icon in the mind's infinite beach fantasy, is legendarily inarticulate about the sport; the words are too technical, or too spiritual, or just too freakin' happy, padded out with the always handy "dude."
Surfers and surfing aficionados, some of whom fancy themselves philosophers, "should just shut up," says Chris Carter, known to most of us on dry land as the silvery-haired, good-looking
creator of "The X-Files," but known to the big blue sea as just another lunatic man on a board, a lifelong surfing addict who is hopelessly trying to reconcile grace and gravity on the downward
side of a wave.
Carter pops up fairly early in "Step Into Liquid," the new surfumentary by filmmaker Dana Brown. Carter is there only a minute, is quoted as saying surfers ought to shut up, and then he is never heard from again. What follows is an hour and a half of a lot of surfers (amateur and pro)trying to tell us how great it is.
Like we don't know. Like we never will -- unless, of course, we step out there with them.
"Step Into Liquid" is the extension of a family legacy, a further epistle on the mysterious holiness of riding the waves. Dana Brown, 43, is the son of Bruce Brown, the man who invented the surf movie, in 1966, with "The Endless Summer."
The premise, back then, was simple enough: Two young guys set out in search of the best waves, and proceed to ride them, and tell a few jokes, and the camera, somehow miraculously, comes
out into the water with them.
Technique was everything, and it didn't hurt that the two guys -- Robert August and Mike Hynson -- were not only likable but had heart-achingly enviable lives. They seemed to have achieved an almost monastic joy at the end of every faded orange sunset. Amid "Beach Blanket Bingo" and the delicious, melancholy pangs of the Beach Boys, "The Endless Summer" came along and suggested -- only suggested -- that something bigger was going on than a teeny-bopper trend. Bruce Brown hated the stereotypes even then -- the bongo-playing, rock-and-roll, juvenile
delinquency of surfing. (In interviews, he swears that surfers back then listened mainly to jazz. They were even cooler than they were given credit for.) Anyway, surfing was ruined. People believed in it too much.
It was ruined because everybody wanted to do it, and everybody did. Even those who didn't actually catch waves managed to catch the look and the music; the clothes, and the hair, and the ethos. Or, as Dana notes, some of them just welded surfboards to the roofs of their cars and pretended.
Almost 30 years went by, and Bruce, who'd made other movies about motorcycle racing and other extreme sports, took another stab at the sweet and toasty surf movie, this time written with
his son: "The Endless Summer II" was released in 1994, and fell somewhat flat. Technically, it was a marvel. As surf porn, it was all money-shot -- pipelines and curls all lovingly rendered in the slow-motion that has come to define the genre.
But it was also old-fashioned. It featured another two young surfers -- Wingnut and Pat -- and a lot of corny jokes, and it seemed only marginally aware of an emergent culture of New Surfing: the big business, the more aggressive moves, the punk-rock "Surf Nazi" templates, the tough-as-nails surf girls, the pro circuit, the MTV editing style, the X-treme X-tremeness that wave culture had become. (Surfing's 21st-century renaissance of cool has gotten so X-treme that it has spawned several new movies and television shows of late; surf-culture influences are again seen on fashion runways; some professional surfers are rich beyond their dreams. Two weekends ago, a crowd estimated at 85,000 pressed against a chain-link fence at Huntington Beach for a chance to watch the finals at the U.S. Open of Surfing.) So the son has taken one more stab at getting surfing right.
Although his father, now 65, shares an executive producer credit on "Step Into Liquid," the new movie belongs to Dana, who wrote it, produced it and directed it, and suffered the indignity of a
90-day studio option that led to the surfer's worst nightmare: office meetings. "I went to 100 meetings in those 90 days in Hollywood, and it just got worse and worse," Brown says. "When
the option ran out, I figured that was it."
But an investor came along soon after -- Ray Willenberg Jr., the president of NV Entertainment Inc., part of a high-tech visual outfit based in San Diego -- and put up the nearly $2 million it
cost to make "Step Into Liquid."
Brown arrives about 40 minutes late for an interview at the Harbor House coffee shop on the Pacific Coast Highway on a slightly gray Monday morning. (This doesn't feel late, though. It
feels appropriate, it feels relaxed, it feels so surfer.) He is accompanied by Maureen Drummy, 31, a third-grade teacher with long blond hair and one of those nut-brown SoCal tans that should
be their own category on the Census. Drummy is also a professional surfer and appears briefly in
the film, because, Brown says, "Mo surfs like a girl." (A brief interlude in "Step Into Liquid" finally acknowledges the significant inroads made by women in the past 15 years into the sport's many complicated cliques and patriarchies.) For every comical jab Brown lobs at Drummy, she giggles and returns the favor.
Brown is a slight man with a faded tan and sandy hair, and he's just returned from Hawaii, where "Step Into Liquid" (which opens Friday) recently had its premiere. He was more nervous about
showing the film to the Hawaiian surfers than anyone else, he says. The Hawaiians are the sort of high priests of the sport, tending to its most ancient traditions. Brown, both surfer and maker of a surf film, felt the highly attenuated sense of pride and shame that haunts almost anyone who has ever paddled out to greet a wave.
"You'd think surfers will love any surfing movie, just because it's about surfing," Brown says. "It's just the opposite, though. They're like wine tasters at a winery." He stood in the wings and fretted, but later, after the credits rolled, the Hawaiian surfers "got me in a headlock and said" --
and here he slips into an islander accent -- " 'How do you do that, you and your dad?' They kept punching me in the arm. We stayed up until 3 in the morning. I guess that's a pretty good movie review.
"I was stoked."
"Stoke" (cross-referenced in your Jeff Spicoli glossary list, kids) is the Zenlike state that surfers
refer to often, the reason they keep paddling back in. Non-surfers are always amazed, he says, then he uses a word like "stoked" without a trace of parody. On a recent publicity tour in New York, which involved such stunts as taking a TV weatherman out to Jones Beach for a brisk and comically green attempt to get him on a board, people were always begging him to say it again. "Stoked, stoked, stoked," he says.
Also, "I wore my trunks every day under my shorts. I try to stay optimistic about my chances [for surfing]. Even in the middle of New York City."
So very stoked is "Step Into Liquid" that it perhaps overstokes even its current sellout audiences in Los Angeles and other beach towns in Southern California. Brown admits the movie has no
story arc, no conflict, nothing to resolve. It only means to evoke a love for surfing. "If someone said, 'Explain love,' or 'Explain friendship,' you couldn't do it," he says.
"That's what making this movie is like."
Early on the movie sets up the premise that surfing is meant only to be fun, and should only be regarded as such. Implied in this is a swipe at the negative vibes of the sport, which are never
specifically mentioned or portrayed -- the territorial fights, the raging egos, the vicious stereotypes, the drug rumors.
Straying from its own stated premise, "Step Into Liquid" attempts to explain that surfing is more than just fun; by the movie's end, when a group of surfers journey by boat to the Cortez Bank, 100 miles west of San Diego, to surf monstrous 60-foot-tall waves, we are meant to understand surfing as a terrifying mystery and addiction. (In case we're not getting it, Brown seems to like interviewing the editors of surfing magazines, who are all of a type -- longish gray hair, flowered
shirt, weathered skin, bigger words.) As ever, surfing eludes mere mortal ticket holders.
Where his father's movies focused on the adventures of a pair of surfers, Brown's movie credits 105 total surfers in 10 different chapters.
There are predictable scenes of top surfers catching top waves in Hawaii and California, but there are as many unlikely journeys, too: In Galveston, Tex., Brown and his crew followed surf nuts who chase oil supertankers to surf in their wake. In California, he tells the story of Dale Webster, a middle-aged man who has surfed every single day for the last 27 years. On Lake Michigan, we meet a band of surfers who wait for the right combination of wind and water level to surf Midwestern-style. (Where, Brown says, "This one guy kept telling me the waves were
bigger than Pipeline [in Hawaii], and he's talking in that accent they have up there, ya, ya, and I'm like, 'Dude, have you ever been to Pipeline?' and he's like, 'No,' but he keeps saying over and over that he's seen waves on the lake that would cover a Volkswagen. I told him if he keeps saying it, I'm going to put it in the movie. I thought it might embarrass him, but he kept saying it was true.")
Brown followed a war veteran back to Vietnam, so the guy could surf with the locals, and a kind of catharsis is implied in all this. The point is further driven when the crew shows up in Ireland,
to meet up with two American brothers, the Malloys, who've made it their cause to travel to Ireland and teach Protestant and Catholic kids to surf. At its most tender and fuzzy (and
fuzzy-shouldered), "Step Into Liquid" follows Bruce Brown and other older surfers, including the original "Endless Summer" dudes, to a reunion in Costa Rica.
The sport of surfing is particularly kind to its elders, something Dana Brown thinks must have come from its Hawaiian roots.
"It's true," Drummy says. "I surf mostly at San Onofre and it's just a mecca for, you know, older surfers, the 40-and-up surfer."
To which Brown reacts: "Hey!"
"Sorry," Drummy says with a laugh. "But, really, there are even guys out there in their seventies and women out there in their seventies" -- Drummy's mother was an early pioneer in the women's
surf scene -- "and they are the hierarchy. We absolutely give them the utmost respect. They can have any wave they want."
Brown wonders what kind of relationship he and his father would have had if surfing had not been all around them. "Some people grow up in banjo-playing families," he says. "And some of
us grow up in surfing families."
Brown had a "pretty typical" relationship with his father while growing up, he says. "I was respectful of him, maybe a little afraid when there was that tone in his voice."
Surfing "is a weird thing because you can not get along with your folks and you're fine out there in the water. You get back and the beach and it's like grrrr with your dad. But out there there's no
politics or whatever. It's a real timeout, not a fake one that's like, let's not talk about it in front of company."
We decide to step into liquid for a couple of hours. We drive down the hill to the state beach. Mo Drummy unzips a haggard-looking red surfboard, its top spotty with layers of wax. Brown
wants to get in the water, but he's also complaining of a sore hip. He poses for some pictures on the beach. Out in the water, dozens of surfers sit on their boards and float, unmoving, waiting for a wave. (The morning is not particularly bountiful.) Watching them wait, you realize the thing that's never in the surf movies: the waiting.
"Oh, you wait and wait," Brown says, about the waiting part, especially where moviemaking is involved. He and his crew spent 21/2 years making "Step Into Liquid," which is a whole lot of
not-surfing. We wait, and a news photographer clicks off some portraits of Brown taking in yet another beach scene.
Almost immediately a beach patrol truck and a burly officer (so unsurfer-looking) demands to see a film permit, which, according to state law, we must have in order to do any kind of commercial picture-taking (journalistic or otherwise, the officer insists) on the state-owned beach.
"A what?" Brown asks. "I've made a whole movie on this beach and never had a permit."
Nevertheless, the officers threatens to write us a $1,400 ticket.
Dana Brown enjoys this moment for what it's worth -- the surfer standing up to the Man -- but it's a foregone conclusion that the rest of the morning is a wipeout. He picks up the surfboard and we head back to the car, and step onto asphalt.
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