Coming This Weekend: “A Sea For Yourself” – Surfline.com Surf News

Posted On: October 6, 2020

In the next installment of Surf Cinema Sundays powered by TheSurfNetwork, we’re going to show “A Sea For Yourself,” included in your Surfline Premium membership. We’ll continue showing iconic surf movies every other Sunday. (Next up: ‘Bella Vita’, October 25th.) 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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All you ever hear these days is, “it’s gotten so crowded.” Hell, I’ll have already said it myself a half-dozen times before this story’s posted. But upon viewing the late Hal Jepsen’s second surf film, A Sea For Yourself, you’ll quickly realize, “Well, I guess it was crowded back then, too.”

There are moments, however — between all the human cholesterol and fiberglass shrapnel — that are pure magic. The pumping kind. The empty kind. Doesn’t matter if you’re talking 1971 or 2021, it’s out there. Always has been, always will be. You just have to go, uh… see for yourself.

From the demolition derbies around the original Dogtown deathtrap, POP Pier, to the lonely, roping rights of Ventura’s California Street; from North Shore burnathons to Maui meditation chambers — Jepsen left no stone unturned in his two-year quest to juxtapose chaos with sublimity, documenting everything that was anything in the world of surf during the early 1970s. Which evidently included the Big Surf wave machine in Arizona (yeah, they had ‘em way back then), Hobie Cat tow-ats, the Shortboard Revolution’s dysfunctional anorexic phase, and the slow birth of full-neoprene protection. Naturally, the colder Hal’s crew ventured, the less surfers they encountered.

While Hawaii, California, Australia, even South Africa had been extensively covered by the day’s surf filmmakers, what Jepsen and his star surfer, Jeff Hakman, stumbled upon in September of 1971 was nothing short of revelatory, anchoring Hal’s very deliberate theme, which the narrator delivers from the get-go: “The ultimate pleasure of surfing for most surfers is riding good waves by yourself and sharing them with your friends or with not too many others.”

Surfline rang up Hakman for some backstory.

Photo: Jeff Divine

Surfline: How did you come to meet Hal Jepsen?

Jeff Hakman: Roy Crump came to me and said, “Jeff, I have a friend by the name of Hal Jepsen that would like to come and do a movie in Hawaii.” Hal had never been here before, he just had a passion to make a surf movie. So Crump introduced us and we communicated, then Hal came over to the North Shore in the Spring of 1969. He didn’t know where the spots were, he didn’t know anything. He just got off the plane and he was pretty green. But Hal was a really nice guy, so I took him to Haleiwa and Sunset and Pipeline and showed him where to shoot, then I took him to Maui to shoot Honolua Bay, and after about five weeks he’d gotten all that footage for Cosmic Children. That season was so good, it was like beginner’s luck. Hal had lucked into all this surf, so he thought, “Wow, Hawaii must be like this all the time!” Which it isn’t [laughs], but it was when Hal was here.

That first film, Cosmic Children (1970), was an instant hit and facilitated your next adventure together, A Sea For Yourself, which is jam-packed with ‘70s superstars — from BK and Ben Aipa to Jay Riddle and Terry Fitzgerald — ripping everywhere from Peru to Kauai. Which trip stood out for you?

The following September, Hal came up with the idea to go to France, so we hopped on a plane and flew to Germany because it was the cheapest. We arrived in Stuttgart, bought a little Volkswagen for $350, and started heading towards France, not knowing anything about the place or where to go. Back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the only way you could find out about stuff was to talk to people that had been there, because there were no travel brochures, and there definitely was no Internet, and the information was really selective. There were just these little tribes of people from South Africa or Australia or wherever who’d tell you where to stay and where to surf, but if you didn’t know those little groups of people, you wouldn’t bother to go. All we knew about France was Biarritz. That’s it. So we started heading through that black forest in Germany, and they didn’t have all the auto routes in France like they do now, so everything was little back roads. Coming down from Paris we saw a sign, Hossegor, which I’d heard somebody mention once, so we turned off the route nationale, drove into Hossegor and parked right at La Graviere.

Jeff Hakman. Photo: Jeff Divine

Most surf films from that era featured all the obligatory Hawaii, California and Australia footage, but that Hossegor section was something else entirely.

I remember that moment very well. It was September 1st. There was that beautiful, late-afternoon French texture, it was about seven in the evening but still light out, and there was nobody on the beach. And I mean not one single person. Because back then, the end of August was like, “lights out, party’s over.” Everybody leaves the coast at once and goes back to Paris or England or wherever they’d come from. The waves were perfect — six or seven-foot, backlit green barrels spinning along the sandbar — and there was one guy out surfing. His name was Mike Miller, and I knew him really well. We used to surf Sunset and Waimea together, and he was out there all by himself… with no clothes on. He was totally naked!

No way! Where were ya on that clip, Hal?

Yeah [laughs], I was like, “Holy shit, look at this place, man!” It was like a dream, so I went out there and Mike told me, “Yeah, I’ve been here for about a month or so, and it’s fantastic!” I asked him, “Hey, could you show us where to stay and stuff?” and he goes, “Yeah, Jeff, don’t worry about it. Just surf, then I’ll show you everything.” So we never made it to Biarritz [laughs]. Between the tides, the offshore winds, and all the different sandbars, we just went, “How long has this freakin’ place been here?” Because back then, Hossegor wasn’t really well-known at all, it was more of an off-the-roadmap spot. So we got a little apartment and just stayed there for the whole month of September. And that’s where most of Hal’s footage from France was taken.

Jackie Dunn, Pipeline. Photo: Jeff Divine

Yeah, that Biarritz footage is pretty forgettable compared to the La Grav stuff.

You know, we only ended up going to Biarritz three or four times, just to go to restaurants and stuff. We surfed that big left, La Barre, which was the most famous surf spot in France in those days. They didn’t have much surf culture back then, it was really raw and the French roots were still very strong. Very few people spoke English. There were probably only three French surfers, and eight surfers total, in Hossegor: Jean-Louis Bianco and another French guy, a couple Australians, Mike Diffenderfer, Gerry [Lopez] might’ve been there, too… Nobody spoke to each other, but for some reason there was a little migration from Hawaii that year. Not before, not after, just that particular year. I think it was 1971.

How did that time in France parlay into your career as a businessman?

Oh, I had such a magical time that year — everything from the waves to the food to the lifestyle to the pretty girls — France was so different it was almost mystical. And I definitely met some good people, so to answer that, when I had the chance in 1984 to do Quiksilver over there and have the license, it was a slam dunk for me. I just went, “Get paid to go to France? Yeah, I know the place! I’m in!”

Any last words about Hal Jepsen?

Hal was a little bit of a visionary. Even with his first movie, I thought calling it Cosmic Children was a little out there, but he was dead set on it, and it actually worked. Hal was very passionate. And he was a little offbeat. He traveled to the tune of his own drum, and that’s why he did some of the stuff he did [like adding those trippy effects and Arnie Wong’s “Karma” cartoon], and that’s what made him unique. I have really good memories from making those movies with Hal. Those were special times, when you could still find uncrowded, unexplored areas in a place like France. Everything’s so sophisticated now with the Internet and all the technology, and… I guess it’s an improvement, but at the same time some of the adventure’s been lost. Finding a spot for the first time and surfing it with just a couple of friends, I’m glad I got to experience that.

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