Bright Lights - Manning Up on the North Shore: American Masculinity and the Early Surf Movies
Manning Up on the North Shore: American Masculinity and the Early Surf Movies
In the 1950s and early ’60s, a small, almost exclusively masculine community of briny fanatics suddenly discovered surfing and, in the process, helped turn an elegant, age-old islands tradition into a pop culture craze. Aside from the waves, one thing that brought these cats together was the occasional showing of rough-cut 16mm “surf movies” most people today have never heard of. In hindsight it’s clear that, celebrating the stoke in Elks Halls or rented auditoriums, those grainy sequences of young guys on hot Hawaiian breakers were kickstarting the larger surf boom that would soon fill every transistor with the Beach Boys and every theater with Beach Party.
