A film within a film.
There are two families that come directly to mind as surf cinema royalty. The Browns (Bruce, Dana) and the Oblowitzes (Michael, Orson).
Oh, you are most certainly aware of Michael Oblowitz’s body of work, one of the finer of the last decade plus. His Sea of Darkness, whispered about in hushed tones from Sydney to Paris. His Heavy Water an award winner. His yet-to-be-released Sunny Garcia documentary certain to cement his place in history.
His soft core vampire porn for Showtime already having done.
His son Orson is a cinematographer, producer, writer, director of much note who also worked on each of his father’s surf films but hitting worldwide headlines, these past few days, for directing one Zach Avery in the 2018 horror film Trespassers.
Avery, whose real name is Zachary Horowitz, was recently arrested for running an over $600 m Ponzi scheme in which he raised money from investors in order to buy the rights to films that were to be purchased by Netflix and HBO.
A can’t miss deal except…. the contracts were allegedly forged, investors hung out to dry, Horowitz awaiting trail.
690 million United States dollars.
Wow.
The Los Angeles Times has called the classic Ponzi scheme “the most audacious in Hollywood history” and I reached out, directly, to Orson, who is from New York but lives in L.A. for the surf, for more.
“Fuck, dude…” he laughed a disbelieving laugh into the phone. “All I knew was the guy could not act. A terrible fucking actor. He came attached to Trespassers and I just assumed he was a rich kid who had put up some money to be in it but he was awful. A nice kid, though, and we spent a lot of time together on set then doing press. Went to London and all that.”
I asked Orson if he had any idea that he was working with a criminal mastermind.
“Not at all. I mean, once the story came out I just thought, ‘If you were bilking people for $600 million dollars how can you not act?’ My dad always thinks he’s the Prince of Darkness, cinematically, but I think he’s met his match.”
I would say so, seeing as Michael Oblowitz has never unwittingly directed a lousy-acting criminal mastermind unless we can consider Nathan Fletcher such.
Orson has another film coming out this summer, The Five Rules of Success, and I am looking forward to it but first shall watch Trespassers. It is on Hulu here in The United States.
What luck.
Can we turn BeachGrit into a Ponzi scheme?
$690,000,000.
Think about it, will you?
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Somebody’s getting rich, but it’s all based on air, false hope and greed.
I still have not seen Sea of Darkness… Anyone got a hook up?
Time for a hard fork and pivot towards creating NFT’s for the articles and comments.
Its Art, man!
the wrights book keeper could learn a trick or 2 from this bloke (allegedly).
We could start theoretically (abstractly?) buying Mick Fanning’s old apartments from one another without money ever changing hands in order to drive the price up until some rich but not too bright person falls for it and believes they are actually decent apartments in good locations and we split the money and run (or just hang around pretending we didn’t have anything to do with it or even know a thing about it)?
Come to think of it why stop at Mick Fanning, why not go all out and be the crew that drives up the prices of all the former pro surfers’ properties.
With Derek’s passion for real estate and wheeling and dealing in general and Chas’s connections and auctioneer’s flamboyance and persuasiveness, and of course our collective nous and nose for sharks and lessons learned from Mick’s and Tyler’s and Andy’s accountants, not to mention our nonjudgmental unequivocal eternal and infinite love and respect for all pro surfers on top of all that, we just might be in a position to pull this off.
Which Witz is which?
I have a cousin who will invest, he’s a Nigerian prince.
Was it WC Fields or PT Barnum who said “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
Do the math: $690,000,000 x .04 / 365 / 24 / 60 / 60 = $0.87 a second.
That much money at four per cent would earn 0.87 a second in interest, $52.51 a minute, $3,150.68 an hour, $75,616.43 a day, $27,600,000 a year. I think I did that right.
As Spicoli would say: https://www.youtube.com/wat…
I thought you were awaiting trial for the Wright family thing…
He lives in L.A. for the surf? That’s some funny shit.
Nice surf journalism. Talked directly to a source. But I still wonder – how good can this criminal surf?
Is there any way to watch Sea of Darkness?
It’s really good, but “Actionable” as an attorney would say.
Sea of Darkness’ honesty and frankness and transparency is what made it great, but also what buried it.
In the doco a certain surf boat operator talks about diving a sunken Chinese junk in Indonesia and salvaging all kine cool stuff from the boat, and then selling it on the black market.
That certain surf boat operator was afraid the Indo government would take exception and then certainly take all his surf boats.
And lots of other sueable stuff. The whole doco is a rolling felony and libel suit..
Maybe the best surf project ever, but buried like Andy Warhol’s San Diego Surf is buried.
And you remember what C____ M____ said about San Diego Surf? “its not a homoerotic surf movie, its a surf-erotic homo movie. honestly, as i recall, it was like Buster Keaton ate acid and had Abercrombie dudes double as the pump house gang. its a dilettante delusion man.”
Gotta love the Brothers M____. There aren’t a lot of people in the surf world who talk like that.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Martin Daly. Sell others up the river for crime as he runs off with spoils to become a hero in his own little mind. A royal fuckwit of the highest order.
He really only sells out Boyum in the remake and Boyum went make already. He didn’t do Chitty any favors either but he already went to hell and back before the movie came out. He’s gone now but was around until fairly recently.
He’s just a human being , doing the best he can.
And I don’t think he snitched on anyone or sold anyone down the river?
The point of Sea of Darkness is this group of surfers saw a fork in the road: Some went legit, some were criminals.
The crooks ended up dead or in jail or worse, while the legit guys prospered.
Is there a moral here?
Robert Frost and that:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
You have definitely got out of the movie what Martin was hoping you would. It was edited to look that way. Pretty sure the real story is much different than that.
Try to figure out why so much of the story seems to be about Boyum now. Oblower did not interview Boyum. He talked to Martin, Chitty, and some of the industry guys but never Boyum. The original story was far more about other people, not all Boyum.
Isn’t Boyum dead? That’s a tough interview. There was little fear of culpability in the original. Everyone was guilty of something, that’s what was suprising about it – and why it got yanked.
The Quiksilver people made sure “Sea of Darkness” was entombed under two metres of solid concrete; never to see the light of day, at least not in the original film festival edit.
May appear in a recut version with all the libellous material removed, but then – there’s not much of the story left, is there?
Somebody posted a bit torrent? link a couple months ago that worked. I was able to watch it. Wasn’t nearly as scandalous as I thought it would be. Surfers filling their fins with coke and getting arrested etc. Not really any big connection to the surf industry. Mainly the G land camp and Mike Boyum. Just seemed like one of those people to stay away from.
That’s not the original film, its been edited by Martin. And it has huge connections to the surf industry. Bruce Raymond and Jeff Hakman are pretty industry tied I’d say. So are many others in there. It just doesnt have the incriminating stuff in there.
The version I saw talked about Hakman. I guess individuals smuggling heroin in the seventies was not that surprising to me. Maybe whoever posted the link can put it up again.
Edit. I checked an email I sent my friend with the link and it doesn’t work anymore. I guess for me none of those surfers were anybody I looked up to anyway because it was before my time, and I read about Ricky Rassmussen getting shot in the face in a drug deal. I had also already heard about surfers from around here going to Peru and cutting big chunks of foam out of their boards to smuggle coke back.
Anybody willing to take that chance has a lot of guts thats for sure.
Pretty sure the versions floating around are all the same, edited by Martin’s crew but never saw any mass showing. It a bit disconnected with all the editing to remove the shit would get him in trouble. The version I have also has a stamp across saying “something Films”, Martin’s company I believe.
Hard to say. The link was pretty sketchy and I had to restart the movie three times. No stamp either. Who knows. I guess for me it would have been shocking if one of the eighties pros were smuggling drugs.
Wow we watched that at my apartamiento on PCH in August of 2009.
Forgot about that.
After watching a gazillion surf movies in 10 years at SURFER – and creating the Video Awards – I was so impressed with a non-superficial, startingly honest surf-adjacent movie I arranged a showing at C_____ F_____’s house in Point Dume and pestered the cognoscenti of Malibu surfisticates to see for themselves.
They also showed it in Santa Monica on Friday,August 14, 2009.
The M_____ B____s where there, I remember that.
This was the uncut version and I remember thinking at the time it was shockingly honest and very risky.
Guess I was right.
Kinda like The Manchurian Candidate. One of the best American movies ever made, but kinda got buried because it came out just before the assasination of JFK.
Some say Frank Sinatra bought the rights after JFK was shot and sat on it for many years but that’s not true.
I used to think Manchurian Candidate would have won a bunch of Oscars the year it was released.
But there was little picture that same year called Lawrence of Arabia.
Not really any connection to the surf industry?
One of the Bobs is in there, front and center.
Its not Quik, Martin bought the rights to the movie a number of years back because there was way too much incriminating stuff on there for both him and his friends. He still needs to operate in Indo and having a story out there that lays out the drug smuggling operations they were involved in (or at least close to). I think he paid about $900k or so for the rights. The movie still exists but the most recent version I have has been edited down to remove the most incriminating info. Still a good watch but its not the original.
wow salvaging a junk and selling shit on the black market, naughty naughty!
Not even close. Its about drugs, not salvaging.
I always thought it was about drugs but expressed surprised just now because it’s the first time I’ve heard about the Chinese junk. Was reading recently about Douglas Latchford and the Cham Padmapani statues the National Gallery of Australia is supposed to be giving back to Vietnam, so it rang a bell.
They are all originally divers for the oil industry which led to salvage diving when they weren’t on the rigs. All this was occurring in Indo but their story is much more related to hauling black through the area with 60′ on the waterline (ie Dave Barnett and the Rader).
Well I could be wrong about salvaging the junk and maybe it’s all about smuggling junk.
But the original was pretty danged good.
A lot of good story tellers.
One of the people – Boyum? – was captured by a helicopter thrownig a net in some exotic island in the South Pacific.
Curious why you are leaving Martin Daly’s name out of your writing? Its not like this is a secret.
Well it isn’t any more, innit?
Considering the movie was released in 2008, yeah. It hasn’t been a secret for 13 years and anyone who spent time in northern Indo already knew anyway.
Crypto is my ponzi of choice. Been an exhausting week recruiting.
So Ponzi.
Gonna be bigger than the 2000 tech bubble
Very cool.
I’ve downloaded some sort of crypto buying app, but haven’t done anything with it yet.
Seems like the bitcoin train left 10 years ago.
10 monghs ago in this crypto phase
It’s not like I didn’t tell ya to get on it.
U woulda 5 timesed you’re shekels and its not even real.
Totally fake Ponzi bonanza.
Once the mom’s and dad’s start buying its over.
A Millennial Chain Letter. Investing in air.
Crypto is all built on faith, greed, false hope and need.
But I have Doge anyway, and when I win at online poker, they pay in Bitcoin.
People online bitch that Tesla is at $700/$3500 and the market cap is like $666B but they have no problem with Bitcoin at $60,000 and a $1T valuation.
It’s air. There’s nothing there. Nothing behind it.
Royal scam.
Is this Chas’ not so subtle way of telling us that Project Ibelli is a ponzi scheme?
Because I’m a nice guy, I’m prepared to sell my BeachGrit privileges for a quarter mill.
So that is the going rate for a Mod these days? Or are you selling it at multiples of earnings?
I’ll settle for a flat 200K.
300k will get the buyer the entire Hurluley empire and holdings.
Hhmmm
Surely to be classed as ‘surf cinema royalty’ you should only make surf films that many have seen, change many lives, and stand up many years later.
Those whose attempts at surf cinema that have never been released or at least seen by many and who also make vampire thrillers and general horror movies shouldn’t really be in the same category as a Bruce Brown, let alone an Alby Falzon or Paul Witzig.
Anyway, to the main course, the Ponzi scheme.
Will the commentariat be cut in on the ill-gotten gains ?
With our predominantly anonymous contributions it could be easier to pull off and just put all the blame on Derek (if that really is his name) and a few others.
I was told that Chas Smith is infact your own nom de plume, is that true ?
Sea of darkness is fuckin good tho
Which one?
Uhhh there’s two? The crusty bootleg one
You got it. There’s the original film festival version and the chopped up version you saw.
Shit am I missing all
The good parts
It kind of is a Ponzi scheme, for attention seekers.
I love it.
last one in gets ignored – hell!
This has the making of BG making us fork money so they can sponsor Caio Ibelli.
But I guess next to this – Chaz and David Lee are saints only managing to swindle 7500$ from hard working Americans.
The Trespasser
Great Brazzo flick, Gnarly. Sexy.
https://youtu.be/milP1haHLt8
so much tongue action!
So juicy
Jump the shark Chas. Turn Beach Grit into a Phonzi scheme.
Read this while trying to log into my ancient work computer which has trouble connecting to my internet because I have to work from home this week due to one case of Covid in Perth. Didn’t understand a thing you said Charlie. So the son knew someone that ran a scam, and got scammed? Where exactly do sharks, the Brazilian storm or Ashton Goggans fit into all this? Did I miss something??
Surf cinema royalty scam-adjacent!
Ah yes, how foolish of me to forget that all one needs to legitimise themselves is to be adjacent