Documentary:
the making of Southern California Son
I was in my twenties, a late bloomer to the moving picture format.
I purchased my Super 8 GAF camera around April 1974, with the purpose of shooting the La Jolla Pony League baseball games to produce a documentary for the season-ending banquet.
Our club, "REBA," finished in the middle of the standings, garnering our share of the accolades.
The picture was well-received, the banquet was a success.
In the following months, I photographed my girl friends, various sea gulls, assorted friends, surfers and my dog, in no particular order of importance.
In those days I was a gypsy, changing my La Jolla residence on myriad occasions: from the Red Rest
down by the Cove to the debauchery house on Cave Street, then up the western side of Soledad Mountain to La Jolla Rancho Road, and finally down to the beach cottage.
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6671 Neptune Street
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It was April 1976, and I would reside across from the Sea for the next six years, living with
various roommates, including men, women, neuters, dogs, cats and roaches. In the fall of 1976, Chip Hasley and I traveled to Europe for three weeks.
We took the Super 8 camera and filmed ourselves getting drunk at the Heineken Brewery. We traveled through France across the rails to Biarritz to find flat surf. We euro-railed southeast to St. Tropez and took a bus to a rainy Mediterranean. The weather was miserable and the White Pointers were not to be found on the beach.
We left and moved into Italy and saw Florence, visiting Michaelangelo's David.
The natives were welcoming: "Bon Journo! American?
I love americans, so I give you good price! Student? Fantastico!
I give you student price!"
That night we trained north into der Schweiz. We wanted to photograph the Matterhorn. As we slept, some thief came into our compartment and took the bag which contained the camera and 34 minutes of exposed film.
Good-bye Kodak memories and hello real world.
Switzerland was a beautiful country. Too bad we didn't have the camera for the moving pictures. The natives were sehr schon und sie mocht der Amerikaner.
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The Germanic Blood-Lines
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Back in the States, insurance replaced the camera.
The idea of filming a scripted documentary settled itself into my mind. With the new Super 8 camera, I shot more footage of girl friends, birds, dogs, surfers and Mac Meda parties at the beach.
These thoughts danced in and out of my brain.
I didn't want to film the typical hard-core surf movie that showed endless waves of perfection in Hawaii or Mexico or Indo, with an occasional shot of surfers driving around with flat tires or throwing pies in each other's face or mooning the train at Trestles or eyeballing some girl's abundance falling out of her bikini.
I wanted the film to document the typical surfer growing up in La Jolla in an upper middle class family and how he is torn between his need for the ocean and his need to look to his future away from the sea.
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Shack at WindanSea
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This idea of a surf movie interwoven with a documentary narrative evolved as we lived in a community where many of us were born, all of us were nurtured, and the haunts of the denizens were known to all of us.
A local would just have to begin the sentence and his homies could finish it and give a brief
or lengthy dissertation about the person, place, or thing being talked about and its place in the
history of La Jolla from the inception of the town.
Show some brief scenes that would hint at a deeper significance that the viewers carried in their person, evoking the knowledge and the memories with a moving picture or a spoken word.
And cut between these scenes the surfing of the locals.
Originally, Chip was to be the protagonist of this narrative, but he wasn't crazy enough for the part.
The denouement I had scripted called for our hero to leap the eighty-eight feet from Deadman's cliff into the Pacific Ocean, where it was twelve feet deep at the high tide. Chip was not a stuntman. He was a history major.
A man more of words than actions.
He was scripting his own film, called "The Caretaker," in which he was to star. He couldn't risk his limbs for my documentary.
Chip's father, Chuck, was the original President of the
WindanSea Surf Club in the early sixties. Chip had seen it all, grew up with it--been there, done that.
Enter Bruce Byerly from stage right. Track and field star at La Jolla High School in the mid-seventies, waterman, surfer, blonde haired, handsome, constant companion of beautiful women, and----fearless.
The prototype La Jolla Surfer.
"Jump off Deadman's?
Me?
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Bruce Byerly - Jumping from Deadman's!
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No problem."
"You name the date and time, you make some payments on my car, then you roll the cameras!"
This movie was a documentary about growing up in La Jolla. One surfer was interchangeable with another.
Their lives shadowed each other.
TO BE CONTINUED
Copyright 2003 WindanSeaBeach.com
Later,
BA
Localism - Another Boring Piece of Crap by BA - the good stuff was written by others!
New - June 21, 2003
The link to more of my surf reports is:
Surfing With BA
The link to my "BS Page" is: BA's BS Page
Thought I'd better add some disclaimers:
* All of the tales I'm spinning are based upon facts of some sort.
* Most of the tales will be at least 50% factual.
I'm doing this web thing for a few reasons, and it is, and will be, "a work in progress" for a while:
1. It's an easy way for me to organize my "autobiography" so my kids will know a bit more about me.
2. I find this computer and internet stuff fascinating.
3. I was lucky to be able to start surfing - at least in my opinion - in the "Golden Age" of surfing - I do have some yarns to spin regarding those times.
4. This is an efficient way for some of the old guys to touch bases again - I've received a few e-mails from old (err, long-time) friends I've haven't seen in forty years or so - I think that's way cool.
5. I'm still surfing almost every day - and, at least in my opinion - that's a pretty "boss" thing to write about.
6. I think it will be nice, in a couple of years, to maybe look back at how good - or bad - the surf was in any given stretch of time.
© 2003 bill andrews and adaywithba.com - All rights reserved, and I reserve the right to be stupid.
