The Hoole/McCoy team had sent cinema audiences wild with the 1975/76 release of ‘Tubular Swells’, but with ‘Storm Riders’ they were gunning for even greater heights – like an opening scene featuring maxing third reef Pipe set to the Doors classic, ‘Riders on The Storm’. Meanwhile, showcasing footage from unrevealed wonderlands was also an important focus for the dynamic duo of surf film making.
Covering the budget for big band tracks, like ‘Riders on the Storm’ wasn’t cheap. Dick Hoole had mortgaged the house to pay for what he wanted to become his ‘hero’ surf film. Originally, Jack and Dick wanted to name the film ‘Riders on the Storm’. Ultimately, The Doors management allowed them to use the song but blocked usage of the title, so Dick and Jack eventually changed the film’s name to ‘Storm Riders’.
By the time production begun on ‘Storm Riders’ in the late 70s, Nias had long since been discovered by Kevin Lovett, John Giesel and Peter Troy (back in 1975), but only a dedicated few had followed the trail of whispers and rumours to Lagundri Bay on the island of Nias, off the west coast Sumatra. Most surfers were content with Bali as their version of paradise. The hypnotic, reeling lefts of the Bukit peninsular were still relatively uncrowded and the Hindu Balinese seemed happy to accommodate this new tribe of wandering wave zealots. “We didn’t have much of a sense of adventure back then because Bali was our comfort zone,” reflects Dick Hoole.
However, when ‘Surfer Magazine’ released a 1979 issue with a dreamy, Erik Aeder shot of Nias, attitudes shifted. The geographic references in the feature were vague, and the location was alluded to in a semi-fictitious style, but it was enough to excite the imaginations of intrepid surfers and filmers who were hungry for virgin footage and perfect waves. “Erik’s shot had significant impact,” recalls Dick. “It was proof of some exotic un-surfed jewel ‘up there somewhere’.”
Around the time the issue of ‘Surfer’ featuring Nias was released, Hoole and McCoy were still hunting cream material for their surfing epic ‘Storm Riders’. Further confirmation of the wave’s existence arrived via a more underground source than a surf magazine spread. In the late 70s/early 80s, the only reliable place to get your film developed in Bali was The Bali Photo Centre. Not surprisingly the processing lab was an epicentre of activity for photographers and filmers who had grown enchanted by Indonesia and its waves. Invariably a few standout photos would be slapped up on the wall of the lab. One stood-out to Dick. “I saw this photo of a right hander that an overland photographer had taken. It made an impression because it was a right-hander and virtually everything in Bali, except for Sanur, was a left. I saw it and knew it existed, it was about the same time as the Erik Aeder photo came out in ‘Surfer’.”
While Dick needed more footage to make ‘Storm Riders’ pop off the screen, talented natural footer, Thornton Fallander, was eager to chase down a right no matter what the journey entailed. “All the goofy footers were in Bali – Lopez, McCabe Terry Richardson, Dorris Eltherington, Richard Harvey and Wayne Lynch in the beginning – all being attracted to these tantalising lefthanders that seemed tropical and less crowded than Hawaii,” remembers Dick. “He (Thornton) was pissed off that he couldn’t get as much screen time in ‘Storm Riders’. He wanted to get some right-handers.”
While Thornton, who spoke reasonable Bahasa Indonesian, was confident he and ‘Cool Hoole’ could pull off the risky adventure to the wilds of Sumatra, he still had to find a way to fund the expedition. At the time, the notion of a surf company paying for a freesurfing trip was essentially unheard of. However, Thornton somehow managed to convince a much younger Gordon Merchant that Billabong should back his speculative mission to the remote fringes of Sumatra in search of a mysto, Indo right. This was still several years before Gordon and Billabong really saw the big bucks roll in, and it would have felt like a gamble.
As it happened Jack and Dick embarked on separate treks through the wilds of Indonesia in 1980. McCoy travelled to G-land in east Java to shoot McCabe and Lopez, while Fallander and Hoole went in search of Lagundri Bay on Nias.
Although they had a rough idea of how to get to Lagundri, the sweet taste of adventure mingled with fear and uncertainty. “It was a long way out of our Kuta comfort zone,” explains Dick. “To venture out into the unknown, into Muslim territory, somewhere up near Banda Aceh to discover paradise.”
Timing their run to coincide with a full moon and a rising swell, the duo flew to Medan and then bussed overland to south Sumatra, relying heavily on Thornton’s language skills to navigate through a new world. “Thornton was really the driving force, and his Indonesian was even better than mine,” remembers Dick. Despite handling the first part of the journey well, when it came time to make the final crossing by boat, they ran into trouble with the captain they’d commissioned.
Faced with big tides and rising swell the panicked skipper was determined to turn around, shortly after leaving port, and made his feelings clear in blunt fashion. “The captain of the boat got violent and produced a gun because we were demanding that he keep going, but he was saying ‘no it’s too rough’,” recalls Dick. “We eventually had to sit behind this little island and wait out the swell that we’d gone all that way to get.” Finally arriving at the port near Nias, it was soon apparent to Dick that they were not the only surfers who’d snuffed out the location of Lagundri.
“We eventually got to Teluk Dalam. We obviously weren’t the first ones because even the beamo drivers know who you are and find some way of bleeding some money out of you and taking you to the holy grail.”
When Hoole and Fallander eventually made it to Lagundri, the setting lived up to expectations. “It was pretty unique. There are very few places on the planet like Nias,” insists Dick. “It was the natural footer’s tropical paradise. It is one of those rare jewels in the surfing universe that sparkles extremely brightly.”
Meanwhile, the half a dozen guys already there, who were convinced they’d found heaven, weren’t exactly ecstatic to see Dick Hoole roll up, lugging his cinema-quality camera gear. “To the few hard-core surfers that were there when I arrived with the camera I was known as ‘Dick Hole, the biggest c&%t in the universe’ because I’m the guy that fucked Nias for everyone,” admits Dick.
Despite the coarse reception, Fallander tore the point apart and Dick ducked and weaved around the cantankerous surfers to capture the action. On film, Nias was a knockout – all those sheer blue faces shimmering against a palm tree backdrop. Once Hoole checked the footage and showed it to Jack McCoy and David Lourie (who’d been brought in as a specialist editor) , they knew they had something special in the can.
Enchanted by Lagundri and eager for more footage, Hoole returned with Thornton and Joe Engel in 1981 to finish shooting ‘Storm Riders’. The rapturous footage of the two natural footers threading the sparkling almond-eye barrels would ultimately become the most celebrated section of ‘Storm Riders’.
The film premiered at the Opera House in 1982 and although it featured several glorious moments, it was one wave of Thornton Fallander’s that had the crowd screaming the loudest. “That was pretty iconic,” recalls Dick. “Particularly that shot of Thornton, that one wave where he does the complete manoeuvres and the cutback… When we went back there later, they had named it the Thornton Fallander memorial cut-back section in honour of him.”
After the Opera House premiere, ‘Storm Riders’ toured the cinemas around the globe and went on to become an instant classic. The Nias section established a new benchmark for the ultimate fantasy wave. After seeing the film, many fell under the spell of Lagundri, abandoning all other life-plans to travel to the sparkling, Sumatran right with the almond eye tubes. As for the disgruntled journeymen who had enjoyed a fleeting and innocent romance with the wave, Dick Hoole accepts his role in destroying their dream. “I’m guilty. No one had blown the lid on it before me and that was the code of conduct back then. But we had a commercial agenda and a lot on the line, so it seemed like a justifiable idea at the time.”
With the edit for ‘Storm Riders’ finished, Dick and Jack were under pressure to leverage its commercial appeal, not forgetting that Dick had mortgaged his house to help fund it. In a savvy turn they convinced the film’s Australian narrator, Marcus Hale, to use an American accent to make it more popular with the bigger US audiences. Hale was a keen surfer and trained actor who had little trouble bunging it on in a generic American twang.
Dick may have copped flack from a sorry few, but he takes solace in the fact there are many others who are happy to show their gratitude. “There’s probably a few people that would still like to whack me if the opportunity came up but when the movie came out it was so successful that for every one of the guys that wants to whack me I found out I’ve got 100 new friends I didn’t know that I had that, saw the movie, went to Nias, it changed their life and they fell for a dusky maiden and they think I’m great and they want to buy me a beer.”
