California Surfing History Film Series

The California Surfing History Film Series documents nearly 200 years of history and culture, dating back to the original Hawaiians who brought surfing to the Mainland for the first time when they first were hired to work the ships that carried sugar cane and cow hides from Hawaii to San Diego Harbor.

Forty years later, three princes of the Hawaiian king arrived in the San Francisco area for boarding school in 1885. Surprised to find rideable surf in California, they had a local millwright shape them 14-foot redwood boards that they rode in Santa Cruz in 1885. None of the locals attempted to surf for 40 years, until Duke Kahanamoku's surfing clinics in Southern California popularized the sport in the various surfing centers along the California coast, resulting in clubs and even contests, ranging all the way from San Diego to Santa Cruz by mid-1930's.

By the 1950's, surfboard design made for lighter equipment that even allowed women and children to get in on the action, creating a new postwar generation of enthusiasts. This marginal subculture even began to establish its own identity, much like American cowboy and biker cultures. The Tex-Mex sound of instrumental "Surf Music" began to impact the airwaves as a robust and legitimate genre in the popular music culture of the late 1950's.

By 1960, the Hollywood comedy, Gidget, popularized the sport throughout the country, showing up en masse for contests, surf music shows, and the coastal highways and cruising boulevards near the beach. Surf fashion and even the psychedelic-tinged surrealism of "Surf Art" also made its presence felt in the 1960's.

Contests and surf clothing have made for big business since their humble beginnings. The advent of the professional surfer and the competition for company team rider spots in any given town means that the culture of the surfing spots has changed drastically in the last 90 years as populations of wave riders has increased and contest performance has become so crucial to many of the better riders in any given area. The mellow vibe and Hawaiian influence that prevailed in California surf culture eventually gave way to a more hard edge, embracing a more aggressive approach to surfing and their fellow riders as some populations risen to unbearable proportions. Much of surf culture began to align itself with the Punk Movement of the 1980's.

As many surfing areas became urbanized, California surf culture even embraced the Gangster Culture and its Hip Hop music, which skate culture aligned itself with even further. This influence on California's surf and skate culture has only been intensified with the pervasiveness of harder drugs like Methamphetamine.

Surf gangs and drug dealers became part of the scene, and the Meth scourge ran so deep among their ranks that it even claimed the lives of several world-class professional surfers. Others were severely debilitated, and the few that emerged unscathed went on to much-publicized sobriety.

Since that time, many of these prominent figures have gone on to espouse a sober existence and right livelihood. They banded together to run most of the gangs out of the scene and do their part to set a good example to the younger surfers, now that many of them have children of their own. These efforts have even had a positive effect in the surfing areas themselves, with a reduction in violence and greater tolerance toward outsiders, beginners, and riders of other boards than the standard issue three-fine shortboard ridden by the professionals on the contest circuit. They have done a great deal to clean up surfing's image in the last twenty years.

Producer/Director Chris Thompson has spent the better part of twelve years researching and collecting source material for the project, including filming interviews, scanning photos, and transferring film and video footage. This ambitious project will result in two feature-length documentary films that cover the two earlier periods in California's surfing history, along with a ten-part series of hour-long segments that provide an overview of the development of California's surfing history and culture, from the early 1800's to the present.