Dana Brown's new surfing documentary Step Into Liquid may be many things - "insanely gorgeous," "visually spectacular" and "exhilarating," if you believe the critics - but the one thing it is not, its director insists, is The Endless Summer 3.
"Three is too many," Brown said. "And (besides), that's Dad's deal."
Dad, in this case, is Bruce Brown, the 65-year-old surfer and filmmaker who helmed the seminal 1966 documentary The Endless Summer. Although he would eventually grow up to write the narration for its hit 1994 sequel, Dana was too young at the time to be of much help to his father behind the camera. He was not too young, however, to mount a board.
"I remember learning to ride a bike," said Dana Brown, now 43. "I do not remember learning how to surf."
Growing up in Dana Point, Calif., whose name he shares by mere coincidence, Dana Brown was immersed from birth in a culture so enamored of the sport that joining Little League was considered abnormal. His father was a founding member of the legendary Dana Point Mafia, a group of surfers whose collective ruminations on the beaches of Laguna and San Clemente became the very genesis of the surfing industry.
The Endless Summer films remain Bruce Brown's claim to fame, however. Together, their reputation as the sport's definitive audiovisual essay is unassailable: Brown's camera tracked surfers Mike Hynson and Robert August on a quest around the world for "the perfect wave," and ended up submerging every 1950s beach-bum stereotype along the way.
Artistically, Step Into Liquid doesn't break any new ground. The film brims with Summer references, from interviews with his father (who is an executive producer) to a segment that plays like "Robert August Revisited," the star surfer from the earlier films. And its method of underscoring its own shimmering aquatic imagery with the pop stylings of Richard Gibbs follows the same music-video format.
For Dana Brown, the most horrifying similarity lay in the sound of his own voice.
"I was stunned at how much I sounded like my dad," he said of his first experience playing back the voice-over narration. Then he added, with some resignation, "There's not a whole lot I can do about it."
But to Sam George, editor of Surfer magazine and one of the film's subjects, Step Into Liquid is a cultural bookend, not a carbon copy.
"The concepts that The Endless Summer dealt with were brand-new: one, that you could surf around the world; two, that you would want to; three, that there was something more to surfing than recreation, that there was an ethic," he said. "What Dana's film represents is the fruit of all that, how that lifestyle progressed, how it did become this broad, diverse way of living."
Wary of over-intellectualizing, George added that the film can be appreciated on a purely visceral level.
"The message is that surfing is bitchin,'" he said. "After all these years and all these changes, the essence of surfing ... it's bitchin.'"
That essence courses through all 90 minutes of Step Into Liquid. It's there in the faces of its subjects, reflecting a shared delight despite the thousands of miles that separate them, and it's there in the enthusiastic, gee-whiz timbre of Dana Brown's narration. Moving with lightning dexterity from one coastal destination to another - from the bleak shores of Ireland to Rapa Nui, the most remote island in the Pacific, to the muddy but active surfing community of Sheboygan, Wisc. - the movie has the infectious spirit of religious propaganda, spreading a gospel of the most blatant hedonism.
Step Into Liquid also suggests, however, that the sport's universal appeal has the power to mend socioethnic rifts. In the film's most controversial vignette, brothers Dan, Keith and Chris Malloy journey to their native Ireland, where they are astonished to find Protestant and Catholic children bonding over surfing lessons. The footage has been dismissed as simple-minded at best, manipulative at worst, but Dana Brown is firm about its integrity.
"We never said, 'O.K., kids, hold hands,'" he said. "It's epic, and it just happened. ... I was amazed. Adults were tearing up. You can tell it meant something to the people there."
Another segment follows 54-year-old San Clemente resident Jim Knost back to Vietnam, where, during the war, he served as a hard-hat diver and was immediately smitten by the nation's beaches. Yet another explores the art of tow-in surfing, perfected by partners Laird Hamilton and Dave Kalama, in which the swells become so large and move so quickly that a jet ski is required to pull the surfer into the wave.
Kalama, a Newport Beach native, described Step Into Liquid as the first movie since The Endless Summer to nail the diversity of the culture.
"It has broadened people's perspectives on what surfing is," he said. "(You have) an extreme surfer's point of view as well as the surfers in Texas or the guys in Michigan - the one common thread is that we love to surf."
In that respect, Dana Brown considers his film a closer relative of On Any Sunday, his father's multilayered 1971 documentary about motorcycle racing.
"These threads showed the overall view of what would happen on any Sunday," he said. "Instead of following a character or two people, let the sport be the thread."
The film's reception so far indicates that the public is, well, stoked. Step Into Liquid won an audience award at the 2003 Maui Film Festival and caught the attention of director Forest Whitaker before going on to play to packed crowds in Tribeca, N.Y., and Los Angeles. In its opening weekend alone, the film, which was made on a budget of $2.5 million, grossed about $135,000 in only five theaters.
But until the film's wide release on Friday, Dana Brown may have to contend with the fact that his biggest fan is still his father, whom he describes as "the one person who isn't going to let you go out onstage with your fly open."
"I think he really likes it. He got kinda choked up," he said. "I owe him a lot.
"Don't write that down," he added a second later. "I'd hate for him to find that out."
©2003, The Orange County Register (Santa Ana, Calif.).
Visit the Register on the World Wide Web at http://www.ocregister.com/
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
 |
|
|
||||||||||||||
