Big Wednesday

With Gary Busey reduced to appearing in Celebrity Big Brother, I thought that this would be a good time to remind ourselves that he once had an acting career and starred in the greatest surfing movie ever made: 1978's Big Wednesday.  To describe Big Wednesday as simply a surfing movie is akin to describing Taxi Driver as, well, a film about driving a cab.  Covering a decade or so in the lives of the main characters, from the early sixties through to the early seventies, it takes in everything from the rise of the 'permissive society' through to Vietnam.  It's about friendship, ambition, hopes and dreams, life, death, mental illness and everything else.  It also boasts some magnificent surfing sequences.

I'm not a surfer - I've never even stood on a board, let alone ridden one - but it is one of my few regrets that I never learned to surf.  Coming from a land-locked county probably didn't help and I'm  far too old now to learn, (I've used up my mid-life crises on other things).  Instead, I watch films like this - just watching those guys riding the waves is exhilarating.  The film wasn't a box office success on its release, but has subsequently built a cult following.  It certainly rates as John Milius' best directorial effort, powerfully evoking a sense of time and place.  Subsequent films like Red Dawn and Farewell to The King come nowhere close to matching Big Wednesday, either technically or emotionally.  (Milius has found it hard to get either writing or directing credits in recent times, allegedly due to his gun fetishes and right wing politics - the John Goodman character in The Big Lebowski is supposedly based on Milius and said to be a pretty accurate depiction - which is a pity, as he has a stronger grasp of structure than most Hollywood writers and directors, not mention a sweeping sense of the epic).   The three stars fared little better than Milius in career terms subsequent to Big Wednesday.  Jan-Michael Vincent starred in a number of B-movies then moved to TV for Air Wolf, before becoming virtually unemployable due to drink problems.  William Katt went pretty much straight to TV movies.  As for Gary Busey, well, he did appear in the second greatest surfing move, Point Break, before sliding into the madness you can witness for yourself on Celebrity Big Brother.  I prefer to remember him in his prime, in Big Wednesday.