Breaking: “Secret project in the works. Highly cinematic, involves the ocean and #1 female surfer in the world!”

Can you guess?

Yesterday the great Hollywood film producer Brian Grazer (Parenthood, Backdraft, 8 Mile etc.) posted a very cryptic message on Instagram. “Secret project in the works… it’s highly cinematic and involves the ocean and the #1 female surfer in the world!” Sitting on Mr. Grazer’s right was the statuesque Keala Kennelly and what do you think this secret project could be? What are your best guesses?

I had lunch with Brian Grazer once. He is a voracious collector of stories, tales, anecdotes. Inquisitive would be the best way to describe, I think. Curious. He had, anyhow, read about my best friend and my Middle Eastern adventures. We met in his office. He was kind. We ate something forgettable and he peppered us with questions. At the end, he walked us out and we said goodbye. Before reaching the door, though, we heard our names shouted. We turned around and there was Brian holding a very rococo pair of G-Unit jeans.

“Are these cool?” He asked.

“No.” We answered in unison.

I am excited for whatever he is working on with Ms Kennelly and wish them nothing but the best. I very much enjoy pop culture’s dance with surfing and wrote about it in the eponymous Cocaine + Surfing (buy here). Would you like to read?

Pop culture’s dance with surfing is always a funny thing. I suppose if surfers had any sort of understandable depth, or any depth full stop, then Hollywood would have pounced on them as archetypes and figured out long ago how to capture the specifics enough to make a surf blockbuster, but have you seen Hollywood’s surf films? Have you seen Chasing Mavericks or Blue Crush or Point Break (either of them) or North Shore or Big Wednesday or The Perfect Wave or Soul Surfer or In God’s Hands?

The best of them are laughably bad. The worst are a forgettable cringe.

Hollywood can’t get the surfer even halfway right and I think it’s a proximity issue. Many in Hollywood, many directors and producers and actors, think they surf. Their glittering town perched on the Pacific causes them to believe they know what it all means because they walk out of Malibu homes, grab a goofy yellowed seven-foot pintail and go sit in the puddle out front.

But surfing and belonging to surf are two entirely separate things. Belonging to surf, in my definition, is to be part of the surf industrial-complex. Those who either work for a surf brand in some capacity as a photographer, writer, shaper, or who have at some point in their lives. Those who have so oriented their lives around surf that they watch World Surf League events while chatting about professional surfer form on message boards. Those whose productivity slowly drains away because they surf instead of working.

Those who have pterygiums.

And that is exactly what Hollywood is missing as it relates to the surfer. Pterygiums, also called “surfer’s eye.” What WebMD describes as “a growth of pink, fleshy tissue on the conjunctiva, the clear tissue that lines your eyelids and covers your eyeball. It usually forms on the side closest to your nose and grows toward the pupil area.”

Quite basically, pterygiums are scales. Scales that begin growing over the eye because surfers sit out in the water long enough thinking about where to put their hands and so God, in his transcendence, knows that they will go blind and puts scales over their eyes to protect them from the sun’s fiery wrath as it bounces off the water. They don’t generally cause blindness, but they cause blurriness of vision.

Surfers have scales covering their eyes. I have never met a director or producer with scales covering his and I have only met one actor who might be close to having them—Jimmy Caan’s boy, Scott. But almost every real surfer, every professional surfer or surf brand manager or executive vice-president to the bros has either full-blown pterygium or the beginnings of pterygium, or bones covering the inside of his ears, also known as “surfer’s ear.” He has chosen surfing over clear eyesight or over hearing. Sometimes over both. Scott Caan went one better, too. He chose to star in the remake of Hawaii Five-0, just so he could surf.

Can you imagine starring in the remake of Hawaii Five-0? For seven seasons?