Marc Rubel's Big Wednesday review ran in Surfing magazine's February 1980 issue, which was itself a review of the 1970s. This version has been slightly edited.

For the 1970s, the dream went something like this: A major Hollywood motion picture about surfing would take the country by storm, putting the nation's youth back on the 

 track of surf fever. Soon no self-respecting kid, no matter what landlocked state he was from, would dare to show his face down at the local municipal pool unless he was wearing his Lightning Bolt trunks and had an autographed Buzzy Kerbox surf leash attached to his inner tube. The commercial market would be so lucrative that large corporations would fight each other to their last stockholder for the right to sponsor professional surfers and surfing competitions. Prize money would escalate faster than gold prices, and Tracy Austin would be kicking her mother for making her pick up a tennis racket instead of a surfboard.

 was to be the motion picture that would take us forever out of the negative social stigma that was burned deep into surfing during the '60s by all those insipid "Beach Party" movies. 

 would bring us respectability and, as a byproduct, those long-sought-after excessive amounts of legal tender that every other sport managed to get a hold of during the '70s.

Granted, there were plenty of surfers who had no desire to see a second wave of surf fever. Lineups are crowded enough already, and any newcomers who make their way into the surf courtesy of wanting to act out a celluloid fantasy will be about as welcome as Yasir Arafat at a bar mitzvah.

But as it turned out, the dreamers were roused out of their castle-building trance with all the subtlety of going over the falls at Waimea. The Big Wednesday was an $8 million bellyflop that sunk quickly to the bottom of the Warner Brothers' vault. There would be no rich endorsements. Hollywood, and everybody involved with the film, let us down.

Of course, in all fairness to the filmmakers, it was absurd in the first place to put that kind of expectation and subsequent blame on their shoulders. They set out to make a movie, not to create an industry. It's easy to understand, though, why so many people had such high hopes for 

. History cries for some kind of retribution from the Hollywood studios that in the past have treated surfing as well as they have treated the American Indian. Furthermore, the film was made by people who actually surfed, using actors who surfed and a crew of established surf stars and photographers. And unlike the occasional television coverage of the Hawaiian pro contests, which are dependably intercut with other sporting classics like "Celebrity Tag-Team Sponge Diving," a movie stands on its own with a chance to be more than just a movie. It can become a media event that attracts national attention over a prolonged period of time. But even if 

 had been both a critical and financial success, I doubt very much that the commercial market for surfing would have reflected much of a change, and the likelihood is that things will never change until ridable waves are breaking in places like Dallas and Wichita.

 didn't come together were being tossed around even before the last frame rolled through the sprockets. Besides the obvious criticisms of a weak storyline and even weaker characters, one of the main theories suggested that surfing, by its very nature, is too elusive or even cosmic—that the very essence of surfing and its place in the Universal Flow of things is too pure—to be captured onscreen. That notion certainly slides right in with some of the prevailing attitudes of the '70s, but as we enter a decade that is already being billed as the "Expect Less" era, maybe it's time to come back down to earth. Year after year a small number of adventurous, die-hard surf photographers—trekking all over the globe to some of the most remote spots in the world, using 16mm cameras that are often in several states of disrepair, living and working on the barest of budgets—manage somehow to bring back footage that gets to the heart and soul of surfing. If there are still expectations about a film capturing surfing, maybe it's best to simply consider the collective body of these works as that film.

, Hollywood in this past decade gave us two other movies that touched upon surfing: 

, which made the most obnoxious, drunken characters in 

 look like saint in comparison to its portrayal of surfers; and 

, which gave us Robert Duvall as a sadistic lieutenant colonel who gleefully wipes out a Vietnamese village so that he can have a good peak to surf. Admittedly, taking the surfing segment of 

 out of context does not give it an honest appraisal, for it plays a key part in the overall view of the absurdity and madness of war. But no matter what light you see it in, the general impression of surfers that the movie-going public takes home with them is somewhere between Hitler and Attila the Hun. John Milius, the director and coauthor of 

. Considering the personal hand he has had in creating these negative images of surfers, I'm beginning to wonder what really happened in his past at Malibu.

There may not be much in the way of comforting thoughts to offer in all of this, but at least it's nice to know that the disastrous results of 

 combined with today's spiraling inflation rate, has just about guaranteed that Hell will have to freeze over before Hollywood does another film with surfing as its central theme.

"THE AGONY AND THE EXCESS," BIG WEDNESDAY REVIEW by SURFING MAGAZINE (1980)

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