Big Wednesday

The Following Thursday

A tribute to John Milius’ Big Wednesday

by Sam Bleakley

We’ve all dreamed of living out some angle of Big Wednesday’s (1978) core plot of the wild early days, and the tight friendship of Matt (Jan-Michael Vincent), Jack (William Cat) and Leroy (Gary Busey). The Three Musketeers. The three faces of surfing – elegant Matt (surfed by Billy Hamilton), the natural; powerhouse Leroy (surfed by Ian Cairns) - ‘no brains, no headaches’, paddle out in anything, take off on anything guy; studious Jack (surfed by Pete Townend), eyeing the rips, checking the tides, cautious, competent. Watching Big Wednesday makes you want to go surfing, desperately. There could be no better accolade for a surf film. You won’t find Big Wednesday on the list of all time great movies (Milius would achieve that with his script for Apocalypse Now) – it is a film for surfers by surfers in a mould that is now way out of fashion, eclipsed by grainy homespun art movies with tricksy longboarders trying to capture the spirit of the lost era that Big Wednesday frankly mocks.

“Crashers!” The Enforcer wants a piece of the action. Party crashers, smartasses - bad judgement! Ray Charles’ ‘What’d I Say’ kicks in. Drums. Then the gospel-powered soul moan: Hey mama, don't you treat me wrong / Come and love your daddy all night long / … All right now, hey hey, all right…/ See the girl with the diamond ring / She knows how to shake that thing... Alright - the carnage ensues. The soundtrack to the blistering party scene has already laid down the Crystals ‘He’s a Rebel’ and Barrett Strong’s early Motown classic ‘Money (that’s what I want)’.

“Hey you guys – SPLIT!” shouts the Enforcer, having beaten up most of the crashers with the help of Leroy the Masochist. The night slow dances on to The Shirelles ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’ The following morning the boys drive down to Mexico, their youth in ferment.

Big Wednesday is John Milius’ autobiographical movie, his indulgence. Milius grew up surfing in California in the 1950s and 1960s and co-wrote the script with Dennis Aaberg. The film is unashamedly for the boys – unfolding archetypal (and stereotypical) issues of male bonding, pride, heroism, and nostalgia for a golden era. In Milius’ case, it is a particular kind of nostalgia for his era of surfing – the age when all boards were longboards – eclipsed famously in the film by an appearance of Gerry Lopez with his Lightning Bolt big wave pintail, a matchstick in comparison with the logs that Matt, Jack, and Leroy grew up with. And the boys paddle out for that one last ride as the longboard era is immortalised.   

As homage to Malibu folklore, the trio seem to borrow from stylist Phil Edwards, mad-dog Mickey ‘Da Cat’ Dora, and the studied posturing of Lance ‘No Pants’ Carson. Playing Matt Johnson and echoing Phil Edwards’ exquisite style, it was Billy Hamilton’s eloquent surfing that spoke to me. Out of the water, Matt, unlike Edwards, starts drinking and is mistaken for a bum, a fake, a “ho-dad”. A wobbly Matt is helped down the steps to the Point by Jack and Leroy in 1962. 

“I'm never gonna drink again,” he says.

“If you hadn’t passed out, it would’ve been okay. Where’s your board?” asks Jack.

“In my car,” slurs Matt.

“Where's your car?”

“I don't know.”

“Wait. Stop. Wait a minute. Look at that. Good swell,” says Jack.

On the beach Leroy finds a nice looking board, but the owner can’t lend his stick to some ho-dad.

“He ain't no ho-dad, squid lips!” shouts Leroy. “That’s Matt Johnson …”. The owner’s younger friend lets Leroy take his more beaten up chunk of foam, fibreglass and resin. 

“Oh, its cold,” quivers Matt as they paddle out. “If you leave me, I'm gonna drown. I'm gonna drown...and all you're gonna find is this shitty old board.” 

A set appears, oily, thick and dark blue.

“Man. He's gonna get sucked over. Look at the guy...” The friends gasp as the wave picks up Matt. The moment shakes Matt out of his stupor, sobers him up enough to recover his body memory. He clicks in, takes off, fades into a bottom turn, climbs, gets tubed, cuts backs, climbs and drops, walks to the nose and hangs five.

“Boom…I don't believe it. Nobody’s that good. That is Matt Johnson. Matt Johnson on my board,” says the stoked kid. Matt kicks out to a belch as the drunk kicks back in.

Pretty basic stuff, but, like Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953), or the punks in West Side Story (1961), you identify. Big Wednesday touched a deep chord with surfers – a poignant cultural history and realistic character narrative. It ingeniously used the ever-changing seasons as a metaphor for the changes in life – through peace, war, birth and death in the Beat and Vietnam eras, when the “teenager” was first invented and then canonised. The film wrestles with friendship, and how surfing irons out differences. Cornwall is the California of the UK, and while I couldn’t enjoy the climate or the point breaks, I could certainly cherish Big Wednesday’s portrait of cool.

As Big Wednesday unfolds, entering the Vietnam era, so a sour underbelly to the California dream emerges. Matt’s inability to adapt to the new time is a symptom of something bigger. Matt represents the loose post-war era of surfers sleeping on the beach, living day to day. Jack, the lifeguard, represents new conservative interests – surveillance, order, above all social responsibility. Head lifeguard Jack puts aside old friendship, allegiance, to tell his drunken friend Matt, through a loud speaker, that there’s a “county ordinance” against sleeping on the beach.

“Stuff it, lifeguard!” is Matt’s response. Matt staggers onto the highway to cause a car crash, and back on the sand Jack punches him in frustration and orders him to leave the beach.

Matt is the new Wild One, the outlaw - the rebel without a cause. He symbolises youth resisting responsible adulthood and family life beyond the brotherhood of surfers, another kind of family. (But now he has his own ‘real’ family). Later Matt sees Bear, the guru-like surfboard shaper from an earlier era:

“Goddamn, you look terrible. Has somebody been beating on you?”

“I got drunk and caused a wreck. Jack punched me,” says Matt.

“That’s no way for a friend to act,” says Bear.

“I was wrong,” says Matt.

“So what? That’s when you need a friend. When you're right, you don't need nothing.” 

Things are looking good for Bear. He has cashed in on the surf boom and is living the American dream with a swanky new shop promoting all his products - partly fuelled by Matt’s unrivalled surfing skills as his main rider. Surfing embraced post-war America’s twin cult of consumerism and individualism. The freedom embodied in straddling a surfboard and watching another perfect day tip whole into the glassy swell rested easily with a labour intensive surfboard industry using environmentally toxic materials in an era when such things were out of radar. Surfing understandably lacked a conscience in a golden age. Milius tracks the emergence of the quick buck in surfing and the exploitation of laid back surfers with raw talent who would be turned into stars, predicting the emergence of professional surfing and media hype that eventually created a global market.

“I wanna talk to you about a new board,” Bear says, consoling a self-pitying Matt. “I wanna make a Matt Johnson board ...”.

“I don't want that, Bear.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'll bring my board back and pay for them from now on.  I don't want to be a star. My picture in magazines, having kids look up to me. I'm a drunk. A screw up. I just surf because it’s good to ride with friends. I don’t even have that anymore.”

“How about those rails?” says Bear, trying to draw Matt out of his melancholy.

“You ought to know what I mean, Bear.”

“It’s not going right, and you can't understand it. Growing up’s hard, ain’t it, kid?” 

“Come on, Bear.”

“Those kids do look up to you, whether you like it or not… You’d better pick out a new board now, don't you think?”

The film climaxes with the ‘great swell’ of 1974. Bear, who has now gone through boom and bust, marriage and divorce, is obsessed with the coming storm and pulls out the board specially made for Matt to ride:

“It’ll be a swell so big and strong it will wipe everything clean that went before it. That’s when this board will be ridden. That’s when Matt, Jack and Leroy ... can distinguish themselves. That’s the day they can draw the line.” 

But the first pulse, according to Bear, is just “the lemon next to the pie.” It gets bigger and the epic swell reunites the boys for a tearjerker scene for men, putting aside all differences. This is where they will, inevitably, all “eat it” in the old surf lingo, but not before each has a moment of glory. Heroism is not grounded in war, either literally in Vietnam or in the lost battle against new ways (symbolized by Lopez and the shortboard), but in finding kindship through a common love of the sea.

John Milius was classmates at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts with George Lucas. American Graffitti (1973) was Lucas’ ode to his California youth, but despite a $11 million budget spent mostly on shooting the surfing sequences, Milius’ Big Wednesday did not rival the audiences of American Graffitti.  Milius’s Hollywood recognition came in the script for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). It was based on Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1902), that tells the story of a journey by a sailor, Marlow, upriver into the Congo interior, to track down a megalomaniac ivory trader, Kurtz, who had ‘gone native’ and adopted the role of a savage god. The story works on many levels – an observation on the ills of colonialism (the Congolese were disgracefully exploited by King Leopold of Belgium, for rubber and ivory); on greed and self-importance; and on madness induced by an inner and outer journey to a heart of evil. Transposed to Vietnam, Willard (Martin Sheen) tortuously follows the tracks of the mad Green Beret, Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who had gone AWOL upstream, and drawn around himself a rogue army.

Written into Coppola’s film by Milius is a scene where goofyfooter Colonel Kilgore’s (Robert Duval) chopper unit takes on a raw recruit who happens to be a famous surfer back home in California (Lance Johnson). ‘Lance’ is based on Malibu surfer Lance Carson, also the model for Big Wednesday’s Matt Johnson. In fact Denny Aaberg’s 1974 Surfer magazine article “No Pants Mance” – on Lance Carson – provides anecdotes for both films. Confused? Back to Apocalypse Now: Kilgore intends to go surfing while a north Vietnamese village is bombed. At ‘Charlie’s Point’ Kilgore discusses the finer points of board design with Lance, and asks him if he will go out and surf. Kilgore sniffs the air: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” and, when Lance shows natural trepidation at going surfing in the middle of a war zone, Kilgore fixes his eye: “You either surf, or you fight.” Lance thinks he will get killed out there, but Kilgore quells his fears, because “Charlie don’t surf.” Charlie (the Vietcong) could not touch the white Californian sports hero. Conrad’s story exposes colonial racism as ‘the heart of darkness.’ In a final twist of fate, the freshly unloaded bombshells cause a vortex to blow the wind onshore, dusting the morning glass into a choppy mess.

 

Big Wednesday is a personality test for the audience. Who do you relate to best? Matt, Jack or Leroy? Milius doesn’t actually ask us to choose, but to consider the interplay of these three archetypal males. Matt embodies cool, grace and natural talent but has a fatal flaw, he cannot adapt to the new materialism and finds solace in the bottle. He is the old school rebel, the ‘natural’ in an unnatural culture. Jack is not a natural, but an achiever, a worker, and certainly no rebel. He willingly enlists for Vietnam, he is an officious lifeguard, his surfing functional. Leroy the Masochist is a hell-raiser, out for a good time, and doesn’t give a damn either way about raw talent or hard work – he gets by through exercising a kind of animal faith, a simplicity. Put the three together, Milius seems to be saying, and you have the ideal man. Big Wednesday is undeniably sexist.

But beyond character, Big Wednesday, more than any other surf film perhaps, captures the unique relationship surfers develop with place. The character of the land. Stepping off the edge of the West Coast frontier into Pacific swell promises identity in freedom – being a ‘surfer’ meant you were turning your back on the mass of people as you stepped off the land mass. The construction of a surfer’s identity is framed through dialogue with a certain break. Malibu (‘The Point’) smoothes you out to produce seamless style, drawing a tight line, where the best left a feather trace. Santa Cruz hardens your edges, as you carve out a name deep in the wave face coming hard off the bottom. Demonstrating mastery of a place, becoming a ‘local’ or perhaps the hottest local for a time, is how all surfers start out in their minds. Milius captures this unique relationship between dream, desire and place. By this, I don’t mean aggressive ‘localism’, but a strong relationship between space, place and identity, where the more you step in the more you stand out. Surfers generations from now will view John Milius’ film as an historical oddity. It will go in and out of fashion, but its sentiment remains universal and eternal – it is a visual essay about varieties of bonding. I learned a lot from Big Wednesday. I’ve watched it in its entirety more times than I care to mention. It remains one of my closest friends and allies. Simply put, you wake up early the next day, the following Thursday – Thor’s Day - stoked and ready to go surfing, ready to make some local thunder and lightning.