Stylemasters
Greg Weaver and Spyder Wills were two of the premier surf filmmakers in the 1970s. The duo was responsible for some of the landmark works in the surf movie genre. Weaver and Wills shot The Forgotten Island of Santosha, Pacific Vibrations and Big Wednesday.
Greg Weaver started surfing in Southern California in the 1960s. Spyder Wills grew up near Lake Tahoe and learned film making while serving in the military in the early 1960s. Wills and Weaver first met on Kaua’i in 1969, where Wills was filming Pacific Vibrations for Surfer Magazine.
Later, when Weaver was plotting the Santosha project with brothers Roger and Larry Yates, he suggested they hire Wills as cinematographer. The film took them to Samoa, Fiji, New Zealand, Madagascar and Mauritius. It was on Mauritius, at Tamarin Bay, that most of The Forgotten Island of Santosha was shot.
Stylemasters DVD
In the winter 0f 1976-77 the pair reconvened on Oahu’s North Shore to start Stylemasters, a document of the scene that brought surfing into the modern era.
The project took three years of shooting to complete. Weaver and Wills were did it on a shoestring — filming in 8mm, living on food stamps, busing tables and surfing, as Weaver says in an interview in the Extras section of the DVD. “It takes a while to make a movie come together,” Weaver said.
It was worth the wait. There’s great footage of Shaun Tomson, Rabbit Bartholomew, Buttons, Bertelman, MR, PT, Dane Kealoha, James Jones, Bobby Owens, Mark Liddel, Michael Ho and a very young Tom Carroll. The venue is some of the best waves in the world: Backdoor, Sunset and Pipe.
The narration is informative, but a little intrusive. Apparently aware of that, the filmmakers included a “bluebird” or un-narrated version on the disc. To complete the package, there’s a set of insightful interviews added to the Extras. Wills and Weaver catch up with legends like Gerry Lopez 30 years after Stylemasters was shot to get the inside take on what was going on then. Taken as a whole, Stylemasters is a disc well worth owning.
For more on the peripatetic careers of Weaver and Wills, see Chasing The Lotus by Gregory Schell.