To be honest, I went to the Noosa screening of the long-awaited 4K reprise of All Down The Line with mixed expectations.
On the one hand, I had ancient but pleasurable recollections of the four-wall roadshow release back in 1989, its memorable G-Land and Angourie sections, particularly the surfing of Tom Carroll and his acolyte, the 13-year-old Danny Wills, and I knew from watching a very brief trailer that the wonders of modern technology had given it a dramatic facelift in 4K for its re-release.
On the other hand, Paul Witzig’s swansong surf movie didn’t exactly raise the bar for the art form then, Paul having been brought into the project late to cobble its disparate parts into a whole for its funder, Quiksilver, then flying high for its 20th anniversary renewed love affair with the naughty genius that is Tom Carroll. I wondered, just a little, how that naughty humour would translate for a young audience in the woke age.
Well, it does and it doesn’t. There weren’t many groms in the Noosa audience, but I did hear plenty of youthful giggles over Willsy’s hero-worship exchanges with Tom, and with the team antics as they cruise around the Byron hills in a top-down red Caddy. So yeah, ADTL does have its wonderful moments, not to mention a fascinating backstory, which will be worth far more than the admission price if, like me, you enjoy joining the dots between random scraps of surfing history, because there are a lot of them in play here.
Let’s start with the enigmatic Thomas Victor Carroll, of whom I’ve been enamoured since meeting and interviewing him in 1977 when he was 16 but looked 12. The kid was an amazing surfer who could sometimes surprise you with his deeply hidden intellectual and artistic depth. But he was a bit of a bad boy too, and before he started his world titles run in 1983, he had been sacked by sponsor Quiksilver for partying too heartily. Then, after winning back-to-back titles, he found himself parting ways with Shaun Tomson’s South African-funded Instinct brand after doing the honorable thing and black-banning the African contests to protest the apartheid regime.
By the late ‘80s his brash but effective manager Peter Mansted had managed to secure Tom not only a new Quiksilver sponsorship but the first million-dollar deal in surfing history. Okay, it was over five years but a very big deal at the time, and Quiksilver wanted to blow it up bigtime. Like with a movie celebrating the million-dollar man!
Since Tom had been lighting up Pipeline for more than a decade, the marketing brains trust at Quik – then Bruce Raymond for international and Peter “Joli” Wilson for Australia – decided to focus on the perfect left of Grajagan in Java as the perfect canvas for a no-expenses-spared Tommy biopic.
Lens heroes like Dan Merkel, Jeff Hornbaker, Dick Hoole and Joli himself were called to action at G-Land but, despite the adventure of getting there in those days, and shooting a big and perfect swell, the material didn’t quite make a feature-length doco. That’s when the call went out to our oldest living surf filmmaker, the estimable Paul Witzig, who hadn’t made a surf flick in seven years and had gone back to architecture, but was still revered for his excellence at capturing the surfing spirit of the ‘60s.
The corporate-funded short, funny(ish) road trip surf VHS had just made its debut with the likes of Kong’s Island and Mad Wax, so Paul decided to follow that route and use Quiksilver stars like Ross Clarke-Jones and the emerging Danny Wills while they toured the north coast in a convertible, padding out the hero footage of TC at G-Land and Pipe.
With the exception of TC’s backside mastery at Angourie Point, most of the surfing is a bit last-century, which I loved for its historical value, but some may not. But the crispness of the 4K enhanced wave shots is undeniably magnificent.
Somehow it all worked, and it still does, for me even more for its time capsule feeling as we see Byron, Lennox and even G-Land as they once were.
More screenings to be announced soon.
