PHOTO BY ELAINE MAYES own directorial debut with a documentary film about Rick. Steve and filmmaker Ira Opper spent the next 25 years trying to obtain financing. They even spent their own money shooting several interviews over those years and at times seemed close to getting funding, but it always fell through. So at some point, Steve either let go of the reigns or just got tired of the decades-long hustle. But there were two other reasons that turned me off to the idea. Every article I’d seen over the years featuring Rick Griffin always included the same five photos of him. It was as if those five photos were the only photos ever taken of his life. This left me with the assumption that there was very little documentation of Rick’s life. As a filmmaker, I need good documentation in order to make a film. How do you tell a story without visual evidence? You can’t make a film that consists primarily of talking heads. Can you imagine Dogtown without photographs and Super 8mm footage of us skating inside of empty swimming pools? I couldn’t have made the film. The other issue was that Rick died in his mid-40s. His early death extinguished the possibility of a third act. He was just about to exit act two and enter act three when he crashed into a truck. How do you make a film about a character with no third act? The third act is where we resolve the story of someone’s life, where we come to terms with their decisions and maybe walk away with a new perspective or the ability to relate to their journey. Without a third No. 151 act, there’s no closure. These were major problems as a filmmaker I didn’t know how to solve. And if there were solutions, then I felt finding them was above my pay grade. I therefore had no interest in getting on the phone with anyone trying to convince me otherwise. Strangely enough, I had always thought that Barilotti was a little naïve for wanting to make the film in the first place. But to be fair, I knew he had always had a soft spot for the early influence Rick had on his own life through the comics in Surfer Magazine. I will admit that I too had a soft spot for Rick’s talent. I first came upon his drawings in Surfer Magazine when I was an 11-year-old boy, which of course is a very tender and impressionable time in a young life. I learned to draw faces and people by studying the imagery of Mad Magazine, and I learned how to draw waves and surfers by studying the drawings of Rick in Surfer. To this day, I believe he captured the power and beauty of waves in ways no other artist ever has. There was a magical quality in his work that transcended the page as he drew with what seemed like a sixth sense, as if he could feel the water while drawing. I was transfixed by so many of his images. It’s fair to say that Rick Griffin was one of the first influences on my own budding artistic passions. Even still, as a filmmaker today, I couldn’t let nostalgia and sentiment be the motivating factors in deciding whether or not to make a film. I knew what I needed and I just didn’t see it. HOWEVER … had it been anyone else in the world other than Glen who was banging on me to take the phone call, I would never have agreed to it. But it was Glen and you just don’t say no to Glen E. Friedman. So a few days later, I took the call. It was a four-way call with the independent film producer Johnny RICK GRIFFIN INSPIRED DRAWING STACY PERALTA (AGE 11) SOUNDPROOF EYEBALL
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