The Lover’s Guide to Surf Cinema

Joe Guglielmino, most commonly referred to as Joe G. or Joseph G., but never just Joe, or at least never by me, is a surf filmmaker who occupies a very central position in surf film’s Valhalla. He slouches in the middle of the great hall seated near Kai Neville, across a gilded table from Taylor Steele, around the corner from Michael Oblowitz. Bruce Brown is there, obviously, bored and rolling his eyes at a poster of Bunker Spreckels pinned lazily to the wall by Alby Falzon. John Severson would recoil but is merely amused so chortles instead.

Joe G. is a powerfully handsome man, dressed all in black with menacing eyes but a playful smile. Classically Italian. A true hero. He knows he belongs with the greats but is humble enough not to preen. He observes. Playfully smiles and discusses surf things with a now iconic self-effacement.

But wait. Do you not watch modern surf films? Are the names Joe G. and Kai Neville and even Taylor Steele like Khoisan clicks in your ear? Somehow familiar yet completely undecipherable? 

Oh but you should and oh how they shouldn’t be! The period beginning with Taylor Steele’s Momentum and ending with Joe G.’s 2014 release Strange Rumblings in Shangri-la is a renaissance. A period. An epoch. 

But let us return our attention to Joe G. Why does he matter and more importantly why should he matter?

I’ll tell you. First set up the film projector and let’s reverse all the way back to Joe G.’s youth. And here we find him, our hero, in southern Florida near Miami during the go-go Cocaine 1980s. Houses, massive houses, are being built all around the humble G home. Money, drugs, Colombians, wildness! Joe G. is a teenager but also an outcast. Let’s listen as he speaks…

“I found surfing when I was 12 or 13. I was so…I had kicked around in the whole youth sport scene growing up but I felt like I never fit in. It was so structured, so organized, and I just felt very…apart from it all. And then surfing. I fell absolutely in love. It was so fun to be in the ocean…”

He pauses, reflecting, looking into the distance with firm eyes before breaking into a wide smile. “Every Floridian I’ve met, or I guess even people who grew up where the waves are bad, are always crazy in love with surfing aren’t they? Like laughably in love with it even. And that was me. Since the waves were so bad, surf film became a major way my small group and I felt like we were part of it. We watched every single surf film we could dig around and find. Jack McCoy films, Chris Bystrom films…anything and everything and we would watch them over and over and over until they broke. Then we’d order the cassette tapes of whatever music was used in the film. We became fans to an obscene degree. It was this crazy pursuit. We just wanted to own and be part of surf culture in any way we could. It was beautiful. Just beautiful and it made sense.”

We fast forward just a touch and see our hero, still young, moving from Florida to southern California to attend San Diego State University. “I ended up in La Jolla and just happened to bump into these surfers who I had been watching on film. Jason and Benji Weatherly, etcetera. I was going to school and trying to get a business degree at the time. My dad is a professor of business and entrepreneurship so I just figured that is what you did. But I was spending all my time just not believing that I was actually a part, very far outside but still a part, of this surf scene. Somehow I graduated and got an internship at a brokerage house. Dudes were driving Ferraris, cocaine lunches, everything. But you know what it felt like? It felt exactly like organized sports. Like what drove me into the arms of surfing originally. That first day the boss sat me down and told me how much money I could make and I had a nervous breakdown. I quit right there and went straight to Taylor Steele who had just started Poor Specimen and said, ‘Dude I just graduated. I can do anything!’ He let me pack boxes in the warehouse. And I did it for free. I called my dad and said, ‘I got a job at a brokerage house and quit. But don’t worry! I’m packing boxes in a warehouse and not getting paid!”

We fast forward just a touch more. Our hero’s life spins by, quickly, on the screen. There he is moving from the warehouse to the production side at Poor Specimen. There is Taylor Steele becoming more and more famous, riding on the gilded wings of Kelly Slater, Rob Machado, Ross Williams, Shane Dorian. It was everything a surf crazed Floridian could ask for. Almost.

“It was like a dream. We’d go in to the warehouse on weekends because there was literally nowhere else any of us wanted to be. Films were being made and edited. We’d sit around and watch surf movies but also classic movies. Really study them and start learning about film. Thomas Campbell was doing The Seedling at the time and I was very, very ancillary to that but just watching him work with film. And Chris Malloy was doing Shelter…and it was all just insane. We felt like we could do anything! Around this time Taylor took some time off. I was trying to run the business and one of my buddies left to go work for Ridley Scott’s production company. He called me up and said I could come work too and I figured it was a good opportunity. I wanted to go learn how to make film. I remember talking to Timmy Curran right before I left. He asked, ‘You leaving?’ And I said, ‘Yeah. Gonna go to Hollywood.’ He just nodded very slowly and said, ‘Man, it’s gonna be really good to see you blow up.’ And that’s how dumb we were. But it was great. It was a literal dream. Living in a warehouse, drinking free beer that people would drop off. We’d go to surf shops and…like…get free shoes or a surfboard. We’d sit around talking about all the things we were going to do, all the important films we were going to make in Hollywood. And then I got there.”

We pause for one moment just to make sure we are all caught up. Our hero has moved from Florida to San Diego. He has buried himself in surf and that is not an ample preparation for anything in life outside of surf. I know this truth intimately. But we are not watching my story. We are watching Joe G.’s. I apologize. He now enters the belly of the beast.

“Yeah, wow. I saw the total insanity of Hollywood. It is not a collaborative process. I moved up there and started working for Ridley’s company. He had, I think, three companies working out of the same space. He was doing films but there was also the music video and commercial parts of the business too. It was a gnarly grind. I thought it was going to be all about the work, the films, but nobody cared at all. The only thing they worried about was trying to make sure there was enough vegan cheese on the lunch order. Ridley was making Matchstick Men at the time, cutting film for real. I was working on music video stuff. And plugging the parking meters outside. One night, I went outside to plug them and I was with this P.A. girl. I propped the door open because if it closed you’d get locked out and there would be no way to get back in. So I propped it open and we went to stick quarters in the meters so no one would get a ticket. After we were done we walked back and Ridley was standing there in the doorway. And he goes, very calmly, ‘What the fuck are you doing? You just left the fucking door open.’ I say, ‘Oh sorry, we were just plugging the parking meters. Don’t worry. We plugged yours too.’ And he just goes off. ‘Will you tell me you are fucking sorry when the whole place has been robbed? When there is a man standing over me pointing a gun at my face and telling me to give him everything? Will you fucking tell me you are fucking sorry then? Because it has happened!’ Then he spun around and marched away. I looked at the P.A. girl and she had the most amazed look plastered across her face and the biggest smile. And she said, ‘Oh my god. Ridley Scott just talked to you!’ But for the most part it was just gnarly. The amount of time people spent thinking about the food they were going to order for the set made me so mad. I’d want to peel the paint off walls. It felt like…organized sports! Again! The same thing that alienated me as a kid in Florida and as a college graduate in Orange County. I thought, ‘This is fucking horrible. It’s shit.’ Nothing was as true as surfing was to me. Nothing.”

And pause again. I’m sorry but have you ever read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces? Please don’t! It is the most trite piece of shit ever. Awful! Horrible! Gag bad! But maybe our hero, Joe G.’s path follows? We have the “Call to adventure” (surf), the “Mentor along the way” (Taylor Steele), the “Abyss” (Ridley Scott tirade/vegan cheese). Will atonement come next? Let’s continue watching.

“Right when Hollywood was melting down Globe called. They knew about me a little from the stuff I had done on Taylor’s films. I told them, ‘I’m down! I’ll do anything! You don’t even have to pay me!’”

(Atonement!)

“And I get to fucking do it again.”

(How good does that feel? Maybe I shouldn’t hate on Thomas Campbell so much.)

“I get a second chance to do what I love.”

(I mean Joseph Campbell)

“I get to be in the middle of a thing that really matters.”

(Except I totally do! He was a fake Buddhist! He coined the term, “Follow your bliss.” Very ick.)

“And it is absolutely amazing. Look, maybe I’m just not that ambitious. But seeing Hollywood, living in that space and then getting to escape set me free. I get to capture the beauty of surfing and guys who are really wild good at doing it. I get to bring this dude who is probably never going to get to do that and bring him along for the ride. You know? What more is there? So I came on with Globe and had an idea. I wanted to take the beauty of film but go capture next level action with it. I pitched the team, told them we are going to go shoot a movie called Secret Machine, and go shoot it on film. Everyone around said, ‘Are you kidding me? Film is a dead format. Dead.’ This was right when digital was getting really good. Like really HD and film was seen as finished but I wanted to do it on film and my bosses totally took a flier on it. They said, ‘Look, this guy has a vision and we are going to let him go after it…’” 

Secret Machine set the surf world on fire. It was gorgeous, it was progressive, it was different, it was…perfect, winning best cinematography at the 2006 Surfer Poll along with Film of the Year at the prestigious X-Dance Film Festival. The combination of high performance captured on real film did something. And the way Joe G. managed the team. How the love of surfing was apparent and the love they all had for each other seeped right off of the screen. C.J. and Damo Hobgood, Taj Burrow, Dion Agius etcetera.

Year Zero came next, again shot on film, again with the same team plus Nate Tyler, Creed McTaggart. Analog, around the world, burning it to the ground. And then Strange Rumblings in Shangri-la. The high point of the epoch. One of the best surf films ever made. It virtually swept last year’s Surfer Poll, winning best film and best director. And it also won best film at San Sebastian, New York, Bells Beach, and Rabat’s surf film festivals. Evan Slater, ex-editor at Surfing magazine and current head of Hurley marketing, said, “It’s like your fantasies were all downloaded then played on screen.” And Dion Agius said, “Firstly, I want to make clear that no fucking way do I condone the misuse of prescription pills.”  More words, here, would be wasted on description. It is something that must be seen. Must be heard. The music in all his films is just beyond. New bands are broken and go on to great fame. New songs enter our daily vocabulary never to depart. He is a master of light but also a master of sound. And let’s return our attention to the screen, to Joe G., one last time.

“Music is so utterly important to how I understand surfing. The two are beyond intertwined. Back in Florida, in 1991, I heard Smashing Pumpkins on a surf movie and wrote a letter to Caroline records in Chicago and told them they needed to get the album into distribution and come tour Florida because they had a major surf fan base down there. There were like ten of us and we were psyched. They came a year later and played in Washington Square Park in Miami Beach in support of the new album and sent me and my buddies free tickets to the show. There were about 100 people there and I got so psyched because I got to stand three feet away from D’arcy and it blew my fucking mind. The music in surf films was like windows into different parts of the world. Now it’s fun to try and give that same feeling to others…”

And our small film ends. Joe G. still loves the surf. He is a father to three sons and lives in Long Beach because he wants them to look at surfing communities from the outside, just like he did. He wants them to discover how special and beautiful the ocean is for themselves and, in making it a little harder to get there, he wants for it to become their sanctuary like it was his. “I didn’t fit into the world as a child. Not at home. Not in school. Not in sports. The only place I could go where things made sense was the  ocean.”

And it still is the ocean. A fan to a heroic degree.

[Feature image: Joe G.’s films blend highly modern surfing with ancillary visuals that make interstitial moments just as engaging. Elements in place. Strange Rumblings In Shangri La. Photo by D.J. Struntz.]