Surfing the Global Wave

Surfing the Global WaveSurfing belongs, without a doubt, to the more aesthetically appealing sports on this planet: Sunsets, girls

in bikinis, and the unleashed forces of nature. It’s no wonder that the market for surfing-lifestyle is

booming. At this year’s X-Dance Film Festival, usually referred to as the Academy Awards of action sports

filmmaking, a group of Austrians raked in the top honours. Their film: A surf-movie with a twist.

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text_michael ginthör photo_jakob polacsek E C O N O M Y 29q

Last year, Quiksilver extended its alreadyremarkable brand-portfolio with the additionof the French ski-manufacturer Rossignol.Billabong founder, Gordon Merchant, pocketed200 million dollars for a mere 5 percent of hiscompany shares. That’s not bad for a couple ofbrands whose beginnings basically consistedof stoned daydreaming on Australia’s SouthCoast about business ideas that originallywould serve only one purpose: To be able todrop everything as soon as a swell hit theshore. Merchant and his wife tailored theirfirst boardshorts in their kitchen in Torquay,while Quiksilver’s venture capital was a 2,500-dollar loan that Alan Green had been grantedby his father to produce wetsuits.Like in so many cases, yesterday’s hippies haveturned into the “work hard/play hard” yuppiesof today. Quiksilver generates an annual turn-over of more than two and a half billion dollarswith their myth of the endless summer. Hardlyany sector of the fashion industry has grownfaster and more consistently than the surfingsegment, with current annual growth rates ata steady ten to twelve percent. And that’s cer-tainly not because of the recently discoveredsurf breaks in Baden-Württemberg or CentralSiberia. Future markets like Russia andGermany will never truly be wave rider desti-nations. After all, Billabong and Quiksilverdon’t sell any wetsuits or surf booties there.What they do sell, though, is something com-pletely different and infinitely more profitable:A whole lifestyle.No doubt: Action sports, in general, and surf-ing, in particular, communicate a wild and freeattitude towards life. The sensation that comesfrom the intense dialogue with nature that isrequired of these sports often takes on mysti-cal dimensions. It comes as no surprise thenthat wave riding, today, enjoys an image ofmythical proportions. While Jack London andMark Twain were among the first of a wholecohort of writers, filmmakers and artists to beinspired by its deep blue fascination, it wasHollywood’s dream factory that mystified andAmericanised surfing by nurturing its sportyand aesthetic development.Surfing has a 1,500-year-old history with a lotof ups and downs, so to speak – from its reli-gious beginnings in Hawaii, to its total oppres-sion and near-total annihilation during theyears of the Calvinistic colonial government,all the way to its pop-cultural renascence inthe 1960’s. Throughout its long history, surfingwas never just another sport: It always hadunderlying elements of a spiritual journey, amystical endeavour or even a rebellion against

the establishment with its 9-to-5 schedules.Surfing is the only action sport with fareastern roots. As such, it also has traces ofeastern philosophies.It is obvious why a phenomenon of such pro-portions also needed its cultural outlets:Accordingly, the early 1960’s saw the birth ofthe first surf-movies. Bruce Brown’s “TheEndless Summer”, produced for a mere 50,000dollars back in 1963, made more than 30 mil-lion dollars in the box office – and that’swithout TV-, video-, or DVD-deals. After that,Hollywood recognised the niche and tried tocapitalize on this countercultural trend.Nevertheless, John Milius, the co-writer of“Apocalypse Now”, failed in his attempt to rakein the blockbuster dough: His film, “BigWednesday”, flopped in both the financial andthe aesthetical sense.“Step into Liquid”,“RidingGiants” and “Young Guns II” were among themost successful surf-flicks of recent times, allof them, at their core, American movies expor-ting the fascination of surfing as a counter-cultural movement and spiritual experience tothe rest of the world.The media presence and image value of sur-fing keeps growing, partly because of thesport’s obvious visual advantages and partlybecause of its wild-boy attitude. AmericanExpress uses big-wave superhero, LairdHamilton, for its TV-ad campaigns. In countrieslike Germany and Austria, the surfboard servesas the archetypical beach-decor in ads used topromote sunscreens and leisurewear. And inTokyo, teenagers even take their boards out onthe street or on their dates, rendering themuseless accessories. Boards have ceased to besporting goods and have instead become ameans of identification.

Brian Wimmer, originally a Sundance FilmFestival kid and a personal friend of RobertRedford for decades, saw the sign of the timesand founded the X-Dance Action Sports FilmFestival in Park City, Utah back in 2001. It takesplace at the same time as the Sundance andgenerates a lot of action-sports momentum.Wimmer’s wish for the festival is “to do foraction sports films what Redford did for inde-pendent films: provide them a unified forum."And he does this with the help of partners likeFuel TV, the American extreme-sports net-work, which provide the means with which toreach big audiences.When my film team and I took off on our tripfrom L.A. to Costa Rica in 2004 to deconstructthe myth of wave riding in our very ownAustrian way, we never would have dreamed >>

Wave-riding means synchronizing to the

cycles of nature.


ZEN AND ZERO

The journey: 7000 miles through Central America searching for the perfect wave and the outlaw and

surfer-poet, Allan Weisbeker.

The team: Michael Ginthör (co-author/director), Philipp Manderla (co-author/producer),

Edwin Steinitz (editor), Jakob Polacsek (sound), David Auerbach (camera) and Herwig Mauer (score)

www.zenandzero.com

On the road: We finally wrapped up

filming almost 3months after taking off.

The result: Awards for Best Director and

Best Screenplay at the X-Dance Film

Festival 2006 and, of course, a few good

memories.

>>that we could get a foot in the door of the American action-sportsindustry. In the past few years that industry, with its increasinglycompetitive market situation, has mainly produced very visuallyoriented, high-performance surf movies. The concept of soul-surfingwas put on the back burner and the original quest for the perfectwave was replaced by the search for the most radical cutback andthe most spectacular helicopter-shot. Even big corporations, likeQuiksilver, Billabong and Ripcurl, have founded film companies oftheir own to produce the necessary, premium-image footage, withthe great advantage of also having the best athletes on the planetunder contract. It wouldn’t have taken much more than to put KellySlater and Andy Irons on a cruise ship, ship them off to Indonesia,and you would have your surf-movie right there – granted of course,the weather played its part. “Zen and Zero”, our philosophical, yetquirky cultural comedy, on the other hand, seemed to have little ornothing to do with these super-cinematic, ultra-technical stuntextravaganzas on the seven seas.

“Zen and Zero” was basically a calculation with very few variables:We bought two off-road vehicles in L.A., a Chevy Suburban and aToyota Pickup, hoping to be able to sell them 7,000 miles down theroad in Costa Rica for double the price. The profit should buy us threemonths of time along the coast of Central America to dig into thesecrets of surfing. After two years of working on the film and whenwe were sufficiently happy with the product to introduce it to thepublic, we suddenly received notice of our invitation to the X-DanceFilm Festival.“Right on!” we thought, “We’re finally going to have our premiere.The days of cutting and re-cutting the movie are finally over.” Thenwe googled directions to Park City and left L.A. with few illusionsabout winning, even if a mere flower pot. After all, we were upagainst some serious competition: Laird Hamilton was going to bethere promoting his latest film, and Quiksilver-afiliate, Roxy, wouldbe showing a movie starring the surfing world-champion, SofiaMulanovich. Even “Going Downhill”, Bode Miller’s biography, wasscheduled for a screening. With all of these high-end productionsfeaturing top athletes we thought we didn’t stand a chance.But “Zen and Zero” won awards for Best Director and Best Story andwas even nominated in the categories for Best Film and BestSoundtrack. They called our movie the “Sex, Lies and Videotape” ofaction-sports filmmaking, and described it as the “Hippest surf filmever! Hilarious, heartfelt, and, at times supremely heroic.”Unfortunately it only occurred to me later, that I could have declaredthe birth of a new genre during my five seconds of glory, when Ireceived my awards: “Austro-surf does today, what the spaghetti-western did back in the 1960’s,” I could have proclaimed. But thenagain, maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t. ><


Surfing the Global Wave

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