Ben Marcus Rules

The world changes dramatically every 10 years. That’s truer than ever these days (See: the rise and rise of Tesla, and the rise and fall of Trump) but it was also true in that 10 years between 1959 and 1969. Watch Gidget and the people are pretty square, buttoned-down, doo-wopping and short haired. 

The big drama - other than Gidget’s virginity - is that the Great Kahoona - a Korean War veteran - doesn’t have a real job.

Shock! Shock! Horror! Horror!

Fast forward 10 years to 1969. In the surfing world, the Swell of ‘69 happened in the first week of December: Rincon was a smooth, legit 15 feet, and Greg Noll rode a monster at Makaha, then packed it up and rumbled north to Crescent City, putting the shortboard revolution and all those fucking hippies behind him. In that same week, the fan was killed by Hells Angels doing security at Altamont. Charles Manson was trotted out on the front page of the LA Times as the cult-leading monster, and the first draft lottery was held, forcing all fighting age American males to ponder: “Should I stay or should I go now?”

(Quentin Tarantino knows his history and was right to zero in on 1969 as a transitional time in Hollywood and American culture in Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood.

And Quentin don’t surf. And you know, when you think about it and add things up, you have to wonder if QT was inspired by Big Wednesday in the writing and structure of OUAT...IH?

Tarantino is famous for saying: “I love Big Wednesday so much. Surfers don’t deserve this movie. I worked in the South Bay and I thought surfers were jerks. Surfers don’t deserve Big Wednesday.”

But compare and contrast Big Wednesday to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and there are similarities: Just as Matt and Leroy and Jack are longboard-riding, nose-riding hotdoggers from the 1960s - feeling laughed at and left behind by the shortboard revolution - so are Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth tough-guy/cowboys out of the 1950s who are feeling left out and left behind by the new hippie Hollywood and cultural changes in the 1960s.

Rick Dalton doesn’t like hippies, and neither does Matt Johnson and a lot of his contemporaries.

Cliff Booth loves to put himself in danger, get in fights, get physical - much like Leroy the Masochist.

Structure structure structure. Are there other parallels? )

Denny Aaberg was 12 years old in 1959 and 22 years old 10 years later, which meant he was a classic Baby Boomer, growing up in Los Angeles, learning how to surf, and watching the world change all around him - and forcing him to face those changes, make life or death decisions, entertained/appalled/enlightened/inspired by the rapidly evolving cultural zeitgeist of American and Californian and Southern Californian and Malibu living.

Big Wednesday is Denny’s semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional, mostly-historical account of that era: 

“Our family moved to Pacific Palisades in 1949.   In 1953, when I was six, my mom started taking Kemp, Steve, and me up to the Malibu pier to go fishing.  While Steve and Kemp went out on the all-day fishing boat, my mom and I would fish with drop lines off the pier.  She liked to walk on the beach with me, too, up to the lagoon.  I wondered what those long things were leaning against the fence.  

Kemp started surfing at Malibu in 1956.  He'd take me along for the ride and sometimes push me out to sea on an old balsa board.  I saw all the characters hanging around Tubesteak's shack.  I got a board in '59 and surfed Malibu constantly for the next six years. 

 In the novel I was trying to capture the feeling of what it was like in those days.”

And he does: historically, accurately, emotionally, poetically. He nails that era, and makes us all wish we had a Wayback Machine, dialed to around 1956, when Malibu was the domain of a Happy Few, who had those big green south swell days all to themselves on their thoroughly modern Malibu Chips. 

 Cruise to the beach in a woody or a Corvette or dad’s Chevy Bel Air or an F100. Gas was 22 cents. A six-pack of beer was $1.64. America was a newly-minted super power and the economy was skyrocketing. The population of California was half of what it is now. Jobs were plentiful and when society noticed surfers at all, they were lumped in with beatniks, artists, homosexuals, Communists and other anti-society, non-productive, non-conformists. 

 As the squares zoomed past on PCH headed to the airplane factories, surfers were paddling out at 90 degrees. Surfers wanted not much. To produce only adrenaline, and grow only surf knots.

Big Wednesday is in a genre similar to what Quentin Tarantino did with Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood. Similar era, other similarities. This isn’t a cheap, knocked-out novelization of a movie designed to promote the movie, it’s a detailing of a story told on screen, in detail and emotional shades and depths the screen can’t get across.   

Just as QT’s most-excellent written version of OUAT...IH details the backstory on Cliff Booth’s dog and also details Cliff Booth - answering the Big Question: did he really kill his wife? - Big Wednesday plumbs the psyche and style of the main characters of Matt, Jack and Leroy. 

He uses those three like chess-pieces: Jack Barlow is the rook: straight man moving in straight lines - he’s a lifeguard, a family man, he volunteers for the Army. 

Matt Johnson is the Bishop, moving sideways and backwards, struggling with talent and fame and changing times and almost destroying himself.

Leroy is the Queen, in a way: Powerful, able to go every which way. Crazed.

Jack, Leroy and Matt are all based on people Denny knew, as are the Merry Men and Women around them, most of them with requisite Malibu nicknames: Malibu Grinder, Waxer, Crusher, Fly, Shopping Cart, Bear and the rest.

All of them are swirled around in the culture whirlpool that grew ever larger out of the 1950s and into the 1960s, and details how quickly life changed for everyone and the options they were faced with and the decisions they made.

Denny and all those Baby Boomers were produced after the smoke cleared at Dresden and Hiroshima in 1945 hit their 20s in the mid-1960s, and their evolution was a revolutionary bomb that changed everything very very quickly: From Patsy Cline to Janis Joplin, Moondoggie singing songs to Gidget to Manson slaughtering strangers because the Beach Boys wouldn’t listen to his music. Cars, clothes, drugs, music, language, attitudes toward government and war, the length of surfboards and how they were ridden.

It all changed, as abruptly as a giant wave jacking on a reef. Some handled it. Many didn’t.

Big Wednesday is Denny observing all that going from boy to man in Los Angeles, and somewhat fictionalizing how he and the people around him dealt with all that. With growing up. From the care-free, keg-party, crasher-busting days of the 1950s and then faced with the staircase set of adulthood: Growing up, leaving the beach, losing your tone and tan, fighting or resisting, getting married, paying taxes, moving inland.

Within all that, Big Wednesday is a history lesson about surf culture in general but Malibu specifically, as Malibu was perhaps the most significant stage for surf culture out of the 1950s and into the 1960s: Simmons, Kivlin, Quigg, Gidget and Tubesteak, Dewey Weber, Miki Dora, etc. etc. That true history is woven into the semi-fiction of the book, and so is illuminating on the historical level - because Denny is a surfer in his DNA and he gets it right (Although he did spell Tom Zaun wrong, but whatever)

(For me personally, the party scenes when Denny is a young grom reminded me of how damned much fun it was to be a surfer growing up in Santa Cruz in the 1970s. My mom - like Jack Barlow’s mom - was tolerant of kegger parties and poker parties held at our place on Plum and Owen in the Seabright area - and I think she enjoyed them too. And just how surf stoked we all were back then - surfing the east or west side from spring to fall, but praying for rain to fill in sandbars at the Rivermouth or Yacht Harbor, and light up Midtown. It was a blast and Big Wednesday captures the essence of that blast. 

And also, I had a wedding at Carmel Mission very similar to Bear’s: The wife’s side of the church looked like The Godfather, with all the dirty-finger ag family millionaire families of Steinbeckian Salinas in attendance.. My side of the church looked like Fast Times at Ridgemont High with Pleasure Point’s finest. But instead of Waxer scandalously forgetting the ring in Bear’s wedding, my rascal friends persuaded me to tape HELP!!! on the bottom of one shoe and ME!!! on the other shoe, so when we knelt in front of the Monsignor, the entire congregation saw that Exorcist-inspired message on the bottom of my shoes. Carmel Mission, baby. Very formal. $$$$$$Reception$$$$$ at Pebble Beach Lodge. Sorry, Joanne. Sorry Lou. My rascal friends made me do it. I should have flashed “Thank You.” Sorry, God.

If anyone wonders why God is punishing me - that’s it.)

Everyone who grew up surfing will find some parallel to their lives in Big Wednesday. Being a young surfer learning the Secrets of the Sea is a blast - a scary mystery at first, but something you grow into and it’s hard to imagine any pursuit more educational for young kids growing into teenagers then surfing - turning all that youthful energy into good health and adventure. Learning situational awareness. Personal responsibility. When to say yes. When to say no.

Lots of lessons, from the ocean, and the people around it.

Big Wednesday captures all that.  Although the movie bombed when it first came out, it has - like Point Break - aged like wine. Milius was disappointed by the bad reviews his very personal story got when the movie came out, but he said that for some reason, Big Wednesday struck a chord in the Italian psyche, and when the movie showed there, it made tough men cry. He got hugs from Mafioso.

Denny’s novelization might have the same effect. An emotional book, that captures the essence of surf stoke, and the lessons the ocean teaches to help us negotiate bombs on land.

Here’s how to order yours now for around $25. Click here.