A Matter of Style with Steve Soderberg

Filmmaker Steve Soderberg is known for some of the best 1970s surf films, including A Matter of Stye, Ticket to Ride and Ocean Fever.

I always knew when Steve Soderberg was surfing at my local break -- an old black Toyota pick-up truck with a big American flag taped to the tailgate was in the parking lot. Every time I saw that truck, I would hurry down the stairs in hopes of catching a  glimpse of Steve surfing. It was an extra bonus if I got to surf with him. Steve has such a  rare, smooth style that made you think you were watching a live 70s surf film.  I rarely see Steve or his truck in the beach lot these days. His chronic back pain he has suffered from for years has gotten the best of him and he is no longer able to slide the glide he once did. But I am still hopefully that one day I will spot that truck again in the lot! In the meantime, here is a story I wrote on Steve for Ocean magazine in 2009. It's kind of a long one but it's an interesting and fun tale of one of the coolest and most talented people I know. So sit back, have a cup of coffee, tea, beer or glass of wine -- depending upon the time of day -- and enjoy.

In 1974-75, a young surf filmmaker named Steve Soderberg made the first of seven winter trips to Hawaii’s North Shore. It was an exciting time in surfing as a 19-year-old Shaun Tomson led a South African and Australian contingent of “busting down the door” surfers. This was Tomson’s debut in the mainstream surfing press. That era of surfing is still fresh in Soderberg’s mind.
“These guys were riding big hollow waves like they had never been ridden before. I remember walking out to Off The Wall in October ‘74 and seeing ‘Rubberman’ Larry Bertlemann just thrashing the place on that red single fin and actually increasing his speed out of his cutbacks more than anyone had ever done before.
Tomson at 19 on the North Shore was a real standout. Backside or frontside, he was real loose riding a stock- rounded pintail single fin. Also a sincere and polite person, Shaun was the kind of guy who remembered everyone and was easy to talk to. For a shy guy like myself this made filming more enjoyable. I seemed to get along best with some of the Hawaiians, probably because they were so laid back.Guys like Buttons Kaluhiokalani and Mark Lydell had such a hilarious sense of humor. When they were around it was a lot of fun. Buttons and Mark were so helpful in making any filmmaker’s movie more enjoyable. Intelligent and witty guys, they were refreshing because they took neither pro surfing nor themselves seriously.”
Much of the surfing, personalities and culture Soderberg captured during that time on his 16mm camera became some of the top scenes in his first film, A Matter of Style, which debuted in SoCal beach town theaters in 1976. The film—an epic tale of the last of the long lost soul masters, charging it with the grace and style that made them legends—became a surf film classic. Besides Pipeline, Soderberg filmed classic Malibu, Trestles, Baja, Blacks, and Honalua Bay. Local surfing stars in the film included Chuck Cockle, Ted Ferris, Bolton Colburn, Tim Lynch and Dale Dobson.
Surfer magazine called A Matter of Style “One of the best you’ll see,” while Surfing magazine labeled it “An important all time collector’s movie.”
Soderberg went on to make two other noted films, "Ocean Fever" and "Ticket to Ride." His films depicted surfing during one of its most exhilarating and pristine moments in time, giving a rare, adventurous and humorous look at the sport during its evolution in the 1970s and ‘80s. Soderberg’s must-see films offer a combo of slapstick humor and some really amazing surfing at breaks around the world, including French Polynesia, Fiji, New Zealand, Tonga, Western Samoa, and the Cook Islands, some of which had never been filmed before.

For the filming of "Ocean Fever", Soderberg shot a young Tom Curren, along with the vanguard of California surfers, ripping rare spots in Mexico, including Todos Santos. Soderberg and the boys made five, four-day excursions to Todos for Ocean Fever and Ocean Fever 2. (La Jolla’s Joe Roper is also seen tearing it up at Big Rock in Ocean Fever, while a 14-year-old skateboarding wunderkind Tony Hawk was shot dominating concrete bowls).
“My trips to Mexico included David Barr, Bud Llamas, Joey Buran, Tom Curren, Todd Martin, Jeff Parker and Mike Lambresi,” Soderberg says. “I was really interested in filming some place that had not really been filmed before, and it sounded fun to go to an island off Mexico, especially one so close by. Todos, used by the Navy, is so small that you can walk around the perimeter of the island about 25 minutes and the only inhabitants are a lighthouse keeper and his family. Open ocean swells really hit Todos hard and you can actually see whitewater off the edge of Todos from the mainland nine miles away. Todos was an ideal place to feature surfers. During the El Nino winter of ‘81-82 Todos had the largest waves I had ever seen. Killers had easily 55-foot faces on very makeable walls similar to Waimea. No one on that trip had expected waves that big and the surfers had neither the necessary guns nor the big wave attitude to go along with them. To his credit Jeff Parker had the huevos to paddle out totally alone and catch a massive shoulder so we could get an idea of how gigantic the sets were. There were large waves breaking on every side of the island. When we went to leave the island I had to load all my camera gear and film into a 6-foot dory so this Mexican deckhand could paddle the dingy through the 8-footers on the east side of the island out to the waiting motorboat. My fingers were crossed as I had to swim out through the surf to the boat. Luckily my camera gear made it unscathed."
Soderberg also remembers well the dangerous reefs, sea snakes and abundant sharks he encountered while shooting film in the South Pacific. In Ticket to Ride, Soderberg is seen bailing out as a 10- foot tube engulfed the stalled boat he was in.
“Filming in remote South Pacific coral reefs was interesting. When I say ‘in’ remote coral reefs I mean in them, literally. A lot of times the only way to film was in the water standing on flimsy coral that often gave way and I’d fall two feet deeper, while the edges of the coral would lacerate my legs. Changing angles
could be a life and death decision as camouflaged stone fish were present as well as lion fish, crown-of-thorns star fish, and the not so occasional sea snake.
“At one point, a boat had dropped me off at a reef a few miles out that disappeared when the tide got full. By the time the boat came back to pick me up I was holding my equipment over my head standing in water up to my shoulders. Boats could be very important. One boat had dropped villagers offshore at a low tide dry reef to pick shellfish and hours later at high tide had forgotten to pick them up. By the time they got out to the reef there was nothing left of the nine people. Sharks.”

Soderberg filmed scenes for "Ticket to Ride" in French Polynesia, Fiji, Mainland Mexico, Rarotonga, Hawaii, New Zealand, Maui, Samoa and Tonga—all exotic places he had put in his stamp album when he was 11. The film, starring Ronnie Burns, Johnny Boy Gomes, Byron Wong, Buttons, Mark Lydell and Max Medieros, was released in 1987. The film also features Curren in Rincon and Pipeline, a standout Encinitas/Swami’s surfer named Billy Irwin, and Joe Roper. With that kind of rare footage and all-star line-up Soderberg couldn’t go wrong. The audiences, once again, ate it up.

While people in the beach towns were starved for surfing entertainment (there was no Fuel TV, Fox Sports or big budget surf videos made at the time), it still wasn’t an easy sell.Soderberg still had to pound the pavement and work 24-7 to get theaters booked and people to fill them with.
“As far as surf films as a business (I thought of it more as a lifestyle), the pay was laugh- able, the hours and investment were ridiculous, and the satisfaction of creating something which you loved, and hand delivering it to the audience, tearing the tickets, and running the projector was awesome,” says Soderberg, who, at times, lived on coconuts, peanut butter, and rice while waiting for paychecks. “It was a very personal thing—no fame or fortune— unless you call putting 14 staples in each of 200,000 posters and handing out over a million handbills throughout California and Hawaii glamorous. The more posters and handbills
you handed out, the more people would come to the show.”
Soderberg added that theaters demanded a great deal of money to turn over their auditoriums to surf filmmakers back in those days. Surfing audiences could be a rowdy bunch, so not only did surf filmmakers need liability insurance but they often had to pay an upfront damage deposit. Those were also the days when spoiled surfers did not stay on luxurious boats just off beautiful point breaks in paradise. Everyone was in it for the fun, adventure and pure passion.
“Going on the road showing a film, sleeping on floors at people’s homes or in the theaters themselves, became a way of life, as did packing everything I owned into storage while I was on the road or on surf trips so I wouldn’t be paying rent on top of all the other expenses,” Soderberg recounts. “There was a strong feeling of succeeding at any cost that kept me going to produce and finish and distribute each film. Beginning a new film was like enlisting in the service for the next four years. You were committed to eat, sleep, and live that new film. When people sense your dedication they are impressed and like to be a part of it. So many
people contributed to the projects by offering a place to stay, or handing out flyers, calling to let me know that their secret spot is firing, giving me a funny line to use in the film, or running a projector for me. There are so many people who I am indebted to, especially the people who let me stay at their houses year after year.”

Soderberg, who grew up in Manhattan Beach and Rolling Hills, was first hooked on surf filmmaking after seeing Bud Browne’s “Surf Happy”. Soderberg, who was 13 at the time, had ridden his first wave that same week on a friend’s balsa Velzy-Jacobs board.
“The excitement that surf movies brought was unique to anything I had ever seen,” he says. “It was pure, unadulterated, untainted stoke. From that night onward I knew what I wanted to do in life.”
At 15, Soderberg bought a Kodak Brownie 8 mm camera and started filming surfing off the Manhattan Beach pier. He continued to make home surf movies throughout his teens, concentrating on the local Irons brothers, Donald Takayama and David Nuuhiwa. Soderberg bought his first 16mm in 1972 when he moved to Del Mar with then wife Penny. Soderberg’s friends would have surf movie nights at their homes and would invite all of their friends,who donated a buck or two at the door.
“A lot of people in La Jolla and North County, especially Del Mar, really supported me during the early years,” he says. “Although I was locked into a 40-hour-a-week job (as a mailman) and worked all the overtime I could get to pay for equipment and film, I used every spare minute for filming whenever I could find good waves and excellent surfers.
“When the waves were up and good, I would often run my route as fast as I could and have my wife meet me with the car and my cameragear at lunchtime and race down to La Jolla to film. Afterward I’d race back to the mail truck in Del Mar and drive it back to the Post Office in time to punch out for the day.”
Although Soderberg put passion before profits, he eventually became burned out. As one of the last guys to make non-corporate independent surf films, Soderberg didn’t make another one after the 1987 release of "Ticket to Ride." Hollywood had come out with its own version of surfing and the surf culture with movies like "North Shore," while the 16mm surf film was replaced with video. It was an end of an era for
made-for-theater surf films.
“Back then, it wasn’t just the Quicksilver team on an island in Indonesia,” he says. “The older films showed what was going on in surfing for the next two-to-three years; you’d see the different changes in surfing and you would see it evolving. There were many different moods and styles. Take a film like Going Surfin’ by Bud Browne. It’s hard to watch that film without wanting it to never end. It had surfing over many years—the ‘60s and the ‘70s. With those films you would really get a wide variety of surfers, places and time periods. They were more like an event. The guys who made them were committed. It was serious
stuff. The surfing now is so fantastic, but those days when surf films were like minor epics, are over. They’re not going to come back.”
Soderberg pointed out that surfing is so much bigger than it was back then—the audience has changed; the surfers have changed.
“It has changed so much that it means so many different things to so many people. I was lucky when I first started seeing surfing in the '60s. It evolved and became a lifestyle, and people devoted their lives to it. It’s so crowded now. You almost have to go to primitive areas to get good, uncrowded waves. When we went to Costa Rica (earlier this year) it was full of European girls covered with tattoos, with their surfboards, smoking on the beach. Ten years ago it wasn’t like that. Times have definitely changed.”
There was another reason Soderberg bid farewell to his camera.
“I could have traveled all over the world and made better surf films and made more money but I had a son and he was my main focus,” he says about Dane, now 30. “I’m much more proud of him than any of my surf films.” (Dane was named after famed Hawaiian surfer Dane Kealoha).
Soderberg does, however, hint that he would make another surf film if his body was up for it (after back surgery 15 years ago, he still has chronic back pain).
“I got away from it from it 20 years ago, which is what I needed, but the combo of the longboard renaissance coming back along with shortboarding would be great to film. I never got to film longboarding.”

So what would a modern-day Steve Soderberg surf film look like?
First of all, he says, it would need a theme, which would be the search for the longest, most perfect wave. Naturally, he would have the budget he wanted. He would film in places like Peru and El Salvador. And, the film would include the very best surfers in longboarding and shortboarding.
Music, of course, is another necessary ingredient to making a stellar surf film.
“Music was always the inspiration for me in designing the different moods of a 90 minute surf film,” Soderberg says. “To this day when I hear certain songs I picture surfing or some mood of the ocean. I start filming the perfect surf movie in my mind to go with the music.”
But, today, Soderberg is lucky enough if he can even surf. I see him less and less at the beach these days.
Soderberg, who now lives in Encinitas with his second wife, Sandy (also a surfer), spends a lot of his spare time in his tropical backyard garden, where strings of shell necklaces hug the necks of avocado and palm trees. Soderberg calls his backyard a “work in progress.”
“We’re lucky aren’t we?” he says about living just minutes from the beach.
In 2000, Soderberg was in so much pain that he wasn’t able to walk or do much of anything for about nine months. He thought he’d never surf again.
But, alas, he manages to occasionally saunter down to the Cardiff Campground and rip a few sliders. It’s less painful for Soderberg to walk down the stairs backwards, despite the occasional smart-ass remark.
You wouldn’t know Soderberg has such chronic pain if you’ve been in the lineup with him. What a smooth operator. Much like his surf films did for so many viewers, surfing still keeps the stoke in Soderberg, 62.
“Sometimes when you can hear the waves pounding at night and the skies are clear and the Santa Ana’s solidly predict a sunny crisp early morning, the photographer part of me can be found howling at the moon and not sleeping well as thousands of beautiful waves break on reefs, sand and points throughout the world,” he says. “I know I’ll keep surfing as long as I’m still vertical. In spite of the restrictive pain, there’s something about not knowing if the next wave is going to be your last that makes you give it everything you can. I’ll go down surfing. For me there’s just no alternative.”

The Soderberg Slide

Steve Soderberg and his beautiful wife Sandy