“Sunny was one of the loveliest people I ever met. And when he wasn’t, I steered clear of him…”
Today’s guest on Dirty Water, episode thirty-one, is the South African-born movie director Michael Oblowitz.
He is the king of straight-to-DVD films including two thrillers with Steven Seagal, both shot in Eastern Europe, and the vampire schlock film The Traveler, made in Canada, with the once very famous Val Kilmer.
More to our purposes, Oblowitz, who now lives in Sherman Oaks, California, created the two greatest surf documentaries the world has never seen, Sea of Darkness, about the birth of the surf industry via drug trafficking, and the ten-years-in-the-making Sunny Garcia: Death and Taxes.
Over the course of seventy-one minutes, Oblowitz talks about surf fights, being a celibate bisexual and about life for Sunny after his failed suicide attempt.