Coming This Weekend: “Ultimate Sessions” – Surfline.com Surf News

Posted On: July 15, 2020

In our tenth installment of Surf Cinema Sundays powered by TheSurfNetwork we’re going to show “Ultimate Sessions,” included in your Surfline Premium membership. We’ll continue showing iconic surf movies every other Sunday. (Next up: “Rolling Thunder,” August 2nd.) If you’re not already Premium, sign up for a Surfline free trial here, and you can also stream/rent the film by going to TheSurfNetwork’s site.

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Ultimate Sessions isn’t really a surf movie. It’s a summary of surf movies. An abridged study guide, a Cliff’s Notes for 20th century surf cinema that outlines, according to the narrator, “ten of the choicest sessions from some of the finest surf films of the past 35 years, it’s the best of the best.”

Well, that’s debatable. Obviously, director Ira Opper and writer Matt Warshaw left no stone unturned in their search for the truly touchstone film parts worthy of a visual conspectus — which they then recreated with newer music and insightful commentary from the featured surfers and/or filmmakers. Their selections from the 1960s and 1970s are no-brainers, but as surf travel boomed in the ‘80s and ‘90s — and surf literature and film right along with it — at this point we could all find substitutions as good or better than what the creators settled on.

But perhaps that’s the point. You can’t build a house or compose a song or even make a sandwich without a foundation. In that respect, Ultimate Sessions is the skeletal framework, the E-A-B chords, the bread to scoring.

“Ultimate Sessions is an anthology of the evolution of both the surf film and surfing itself,” Opper explained upon premiering his 2006 film at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. “I would like the audience to leave the theater experiencing the sport’s most incredible sessions of the 20th century.”

Ultimate Sessions

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That was the goal, and Opper and Warshaw slam-dunked it. Eccentric Surfer Magazine writer Steve Barilotti put it best: “Epic swells, iconic surfers, unforgettable cinematography — these make up over one hour of the most profoundly exciting surfing ever burned to film. The title, Ultimate Sessions, says it all. These are the fleeting, never-to-be-repeated moments that define the essence of surfing’s soul.”

And that’s so important for any student of the sport, whether you’re eight or 80. Because considering this current zeitgeist — travel halted, sport hobbled, industry crippled — this is no time to dumb ourselves down. If anything we should use this prolonged moment of stasis as an opportunity to educate ourselves on how this thing of ours all started, how it evolved, and where we as individuals fit into the pendulum.

Even if we didn’t do the required reading.

Here’s how one teacher’s pet might interpret the Opper/Warshaw curriculum to another student who hadn’t done his homework:

“Dude, I heard the OG’s at your beach are giving you a hard time for being ignorant about your roots. If you can get off TikTok for a minute, I’ll enlighten you:

So, in the beginning, there was The Perfect Wave, Cape St. Francis, which Robert August and Mike Hynson rode all the way from 1965 to infinity for Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer. That was baseline for every ultimate session to come for the next 35 years. Those waves were pretty. And long. And clean. But it wasn’t Hawaii. So four years later, while filming for Hal Jepsen’s Cosmic Children, Jeff Hakman raised the bar at idyllic Honolua Bay, which was pretty. And long. And clean. But also big. The psychedelia-infused Shortboard Revolution was in full bloom at that point, but nothing was trippier than an actual trip. So, during a 1972 Indonesian surfari for Alby Falzon’s Morning of the Earth, Stephen Cooney and Rusty Miller christened Uluwatu with its first session.

But the allure of a local spot turning on for a few tuned-in drop-outs remained. And in 1974, Scott Dittrich’s Fluid Drive showed PT, Rabbit, and friends getting straight shacked in Burleigh Heads point surf that made Cape St. Francis look like a billabong puddle in comparison. But not everyone was as psyched as the Gold Coast guys on their local joint, and that same year, J. Riddle was so over the crowds at Malibu he journeyed south to Baja and found corduroy plumes in what came to be known as ‘Scorpion Bay.’

Ultimate Sessions

You still with me? Good. Free Ride was next, the centerpiece being Shaun Tomson’s classic session at Off-the-Wall in 1975, beautifully shot by Dan Merkel in the water and Bill Delaney on land. That same winter, Shaun, Rabbit, MR, and others revolutionized backside tuberiding at Pipeline, cementing their ‘Bustin’ Down The Door’ legacy. Now, that winter was so lit, it effectively sucked the energy out of the rest of the decade as surfing dollied itself up into a full-on professional sport. Meanwhile, Buttons was all ‘Shoots, brah, your boards are too long,’ and in 1983 the Hawaiian showed what a little less foam and a little more afro can accomplish at Off-the-Wall in Steve Soderberg’s Ocean Fever. It almost led us to believe that Hawaiians never travel, but then Dane Kealoha and Randall Kim stumbled upon chilly magic off the California freeway in 1986 for Scott Dittrich’s Amazing Surf Stories. Actually, the World Champ didn’t live too far away from where they were surfing. Tom Curren. You’ve heard of him, right? If not, this conversation is over. You’re a lost cause.

So anyway, since he was protesting Apartheid, Curren never got to surf his fantasy wave, Jeffreys Bay, until 1992. Filming for Sonny Miller’s franchise, ‘The Search,’ Curren consummated his union with J-Bay by experimenting with a variety of shapes. Then, while filming in the Hinako Islands the following year, he single-handedly reestablished the fish as a quiver staple in some bloody-big Indo bowls. But you can’t have an ultimate digest of ultimate sessions without including the ultimate surfer, right? Kelly Slater cherry-picked an all-star crew for a luxury boat trip to the Mentawai Islands for Jack Johnson’s September Sessions, which closed out the century in radical fashion.

So, that’s it. That’s the 20th century. Other stuff went down, for sure, but that’s the gist of it. The big takeaway. If you wanna know more, there’s no shortage of research available, but this should be enough to pass your entrance exam and keep all those eggy old dudes from burning you. Shit, the mere mention of the name ‘Dane Kealoha’ should earn you a set wave or two.”