FILM
Big-Wave Verité
Where The Endless Summer meets the Age of Extreme, a new surf flick emerges
By Johnny Dodd

'In the ocean, danger can come at you from all sides," says surfing writer- turned-surfing thespian Matt George, as if still in character as, in the words of his film's breathy press release, the "hard drinking, hard livin'...purist" he portrays in his upcoming big-screen debut. "The same goes for Hollywood. It's easy to get involved in a shark attack."

That may be, but right now the Tinseltown rookie seems, for lack of a better word, stoked. A beefy, Kojak-pated 39-year-old former senior editor of Surfing magazine, George cowrote (with director Zalman King) and costars in TriStar's In God's Hands, a 90-minute piece of dude veritë to be released in major U.S. cities this month. The movie revolves around three disenfranchised friends who, you guessed it, travel the globe in search of the ultimate wave. But in case you're hearing echoes of the clean-cut 1967 classic The Endless Summer, there is a decidedly nineties twist: These three are searching for very, very big waves. As in the kind of towering liquid monsters that, says George, "aren't so much about controlling some fear you might have as they are about controlling pure animal terror."

George's foray into celluloid terror-chronicling began back in 1996, after he wrote an article for Surfing on the darker aspect of riding big waves. Namely, death. Upon reading it, King, best known for such soft-core tours de force as 9 1/2 Weeks and Wild Orchid, phoned to say he was interested in turning the piece into a movie. "I told him, 'Great€send me $500 and it's yours,'" recalls George. King told him to write a script instead, despite his utter lack of familiarity with the form. Just three months later, the duo's handpicked cast of hard-core surfers, including Hawaiian big-wave artists Derrick Doerner, Rush Randall, Pete Cabrinha, and Shane Dorian (combined acting experience: zilch), took off with a 100-person crew for, among other wave-rich locales, Bali, Baja, Madagascar, northern California, and Maui.

If nothing else, explains George, he wanted to avoid creating the typical Hollywood surf flick. "Most are so hopelessly off the mark," he says. "They're only interested in portraying the goofier side of beach culture." Verisimilitude, however, does not come easy. In the waters off Maui's famed Piahe Valley, better known to big-wave aficionados as Jaws, the filmmakers did capture the actors plummeting down 40-foot-high faces — but not before Dorian, who plays one of the leads, got hammered by one of the aqueous monoliths, necessitating a Jet Ski rescue in which, ultimately, the Jet Ski was lost. And between run-ins with poisonous sea snakes, wizened shamans, and splintered boards, George himself broke two fingers in a choreographed street fight, two ribs while being dragged behind a seaplane, and an additional rib in a surfing mishap. "I was in a lot of pain," he groans.

Fractures aside, however, George has come out unscathed. In fact, since swapping print for film, life couldn't be more awesome. He's currently living on a 35-foot-sloop in Marina Del Rey and working on a handful of other writing projects, including a pilot for an NBC series about the paneolos, or cowboy surfers, of Hawaii. "Basically this whole thing has been like getting struck by a bolt of lightning," he says, appropriately embarrassed by his good fortune. "I fall asleep every night with a smile on my face."