While casting about for another project, her boyfriend suggested that Olson do something on women and surfing. That idle suggestion began an odyssey that took the New York-based freelance filmmaker to California, Hawaii and Fiji in pursuit of the perfect wave.

Olson began her research with a call to SURFER magazine in California. The editors there put her in touch with Debbie Beacham. Beacham, who won the women's world surfing championship in 1982, was on the board of the Association of Surfing Professionals, and still had many contacts with pro surfers.

In December 1992 Beacham and Olson went to Hawaii to meet the women on the pro tour. During that visit they shot some video for a demo tape in hopes of finding a big sponsor among the businesses affiliated with surfing. It was a tough sell. For the most part, they were ignored. "I really didn't get much interest from the surf industry," Olson said. "I couldn't believe what a small amount of coverage women's surfing got."

In the male-dominated world of surfing, the women's contests have traditionally been a sideshow. The prize money, for example, in women's surfing has never equaled the purses offered for the men's competitions. "There's always been a consistent disparity," Beacham said. However, that's slowly starting to change."

"It's evolved," Beacham noted. "There's a new dynamic. There is certainly more money now, and there's a different perception of women in general. Before we used to be tagalongs, and now we're leaders in our own right. The girls who are surfing now are looked up to. It's cool."

The surf industry may have ignored Olson's pitch, but more mainstream manufacturers were beginning to pay attention. Olson lined up several sponsors, such as Nikon and Speedo, to provide the seed money to get the project rolling. Although, she pointed out, corporate funding only paid for a tenth of the $100,000 it cost to produce the Surfer Girl; friends and family underwrote the rest.

Olson, an athletic 39 year old, explained the ins and outs of film finance while sitting barefoot at the breakfast table in a friend's New York City loft. For years before beginning her own project she had worked as production assistant, assistant camera person and general roustabout on other people's productions. But until then she had never tried to finance a major film project. "It was just sort of stages of 'OK, now I have to raise this much to do this,'" Olson said. "Filmmaking is so much about money, it's kind of a drag."

It's also about salesmanship. "You had to go on this dream," Olson explained, "just getting people to understand my vision of the project and support that vision."

Fortunately, Beacham was behind that vision 100 percent. Together, the two women convinced legendary water photographer Don King to handle the cinematography. "I saw his work," Olson recalled, "and I said 'This is the guy I've got to use.'" King was doubtful at first. "It sounded like a tough idea to get made," he said. No one had shot a film exclusively about women's surfing before and the best surfing beaches in Hawaii are crowded, King explained, so it would be difficult to get decent footage of women riding there. "But it turns out that (Olson) is a very determined person," King said.

Next, Beacham and Olson drew up a short list of the best female surfers in the world. A few top competitors couldn't make it. Current world champ Lisa Andersen, for instance, was pregnant at the time. The final five were Pam Burridge, Wendy Botha, Debbie Beacham, Jodie Cooper and Frieda Zamba. Rather than shoot in Hawaii, the decision was made to move the production to Tavarua. Tavarua is a tiny island in the Fijian chain that is famous for its crystal clear waters and huge surf.

Air freighting 12 people, cameras, lenses, surfboards and other assorted gear to the South Pacific was no small undertaking, but luck was with them. For 10 days in July of 1993 the women had the island almost entirely to themselves. And the waves grew larger each day. They used two cameras. One handheld water camera and another long-lens 16 mm unit mounted on a platform built over the reef. The platform, really just a shaky-looking scaffold anchored to the coral, had been built a year earlier by the Endless Summer II film crew.

There were only two ways to get the camera onto the platform: a half-mile walk over sharp coral at low tide, or a tricky transfer of gear from a bobbing skiff at high tide. This daily mission became more difficult as the waves got bigger.

"They built each day," Olson said. "But the last two days, when it was really big, I thought it might be a problem for the girls." It wasn't. They were out there every day, even when some of the men on the island had suddenly found reasons to stay out of the water.

"It was plenty big for everybody," Beacham recalled. "We all broke a board or two." King shot some of the most remarkable footage in the film from under the water. Wearing a mask and flippers and carrying a camera in a water housing that was secured to his wrist with a short leash, King dove under the waves and trained his lens on the collapsing cylinders as the surfers sped past. "All that stuff is shot at real slow motion -- has to be," King explained.

Not all of the movie is action. It is Olson's interviews with the athletes that sets Surfer Girl apart from other surf movies. "Donna's a very good interviewer," King noted. She really knows how to put people at ease and she's very calm and patient." In talking about their sport, the women reveal a lot about the peculiar motivations of surfers, and about courage.

Originally, the Tavarua segment was only going to be one of a three-part documentary on women's surfing, but budget concerns forced Olson to reconsider that idea. "The aesthetics of film is totally dependent on your budget," Olson said. "After Tavarua, I just said I'm going to work with what I have."

The film stock was transferred to videotape in California and Olson returned to Long Island, New York, to begin the process of editing. On the bus into New York City one day, Olson met a screenwriter who recommended video editor and surfer Mike Maloy. Olson and Maloy hit it off immediately, and in the spring of 1994 they set about editing hours of raw videotape down to Surfer Girl's brisk 45 minutes. The tape was edited on an Avid system and a soundtrack by the Sandals, The Aquavelvets, Santana, The Mermen and the Halibuts was laid down. Once the videotape was pieced together, the film stock was assembled with a series of matching cuts.

Surfer Girl had it's first public showing in Hawaii in November 1994. It had to be projected on video because the film print wasn't yet ready. "Everyone said to me that if it makes 5,000 in sales, that's a hit in the surf industry," Olson said. So far, Surfer Girl has sold about 3,000 videotapes and sales continue at a steady rate. If Surfer Girl hasn't exactly revolutionized the sport, it has been attracting notice outside the relatively small surfing community.

The video has been shown on National Geographic Explorer and the Discovery Channel as well as French and Polish television. Surfer Girl won a silver medal at the 1994 Chicago International Film Festival for cinematography, as well as the Long Island Film Festival and an award from the National Educational Media Association.

If Olson had a chance to do the project over again, would she do it differently? "There are things I wish I could have covered a little more," Olson said, "but overall I'm happy with it and I know from the letters I've received from hundreds, literally hundreds, of women all over the world that it has made a difference."

The following sidebar did not run in Dox, but did appear in the Stuart News.

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Olson has since moved on to her next project, an eight-part documentary on the world's waterways. Last March she and cameraman Don King spent two and a half weeks tracing the course of the Ganges River from its source in the foothills of the Himalayas down through the heart of India.

Three days into the trip, the film crew had a run in with a herd of elephants on the banks of the river. Olson and King were charged by an irate mother elephant. King got away, but Olson was knocked to the ground by the elephant's trunk. The filmmaker laid very still for a few terrifying seconds while the beast trampled the earth around her. When the mother elephant moved off, the baby elephant walked lightly across Olson's back. King, who saw the attack, thought Olson might have been killed.

"Her first words were 'I can't believe I got run over by a fucking elephant,' King recalled. "When I heard that, I knew she wasn't hurt too bad."

"The wind was just knocked out of me," Olson shrugged, "but I came away feeling like I have a whole new lease on life. Now I really look at what my purpose is and how I should be spending my time."

Olson saved the T-shirt with the baby elephant's footprint on the back and the expedition down the Ganges continued. "We were there," she said. "We had to keep going."

Rob Cummings is a freelance writer and part-time surfer who lives in New York