In Australia by the late 1960s, the Beach Boys and Gidget were out, Durban poison, blotting paper acid and prog rock were in and surfing movies were the ultimate underground cinema. They combined abstract images with contemporary music; if the audience was a little baked, all the better. Films like The Endless Summer and Morning of the Earth promised a world beyond clocks and workaday mundanities. The ocean was its own reality, man.
“We would go up the coast with our girlfriends and stick handbills under the wipers on the cars at surfing spots and in the surf shops,” says film-maker David Elfick. “And then put up the sheet and the projector and people would turn up. It was always $2 in. At the end of it you always had all these wet $2 bills, because people kept their money in their board shorts.”
