Documentary:
the making of Southern California Son

I was in my twenties, a late bloomer to the moving picture format. I purchased my Super 8 GAF
camera around April 1974, with the purpose of shooting the La Jolla Pony League baseball games to
produce a documentary for the season-ending banquet. Our club, "REBA," finished in the middle of the
standings, garnering our share of the accolades. The picture was well-received, the banquet was a success.

the Ball Club

In the following months, I photographed my girl friends, various sea gulls,
assorted friends, surfers and my dog, in no particular order of importance.

In those days I was a gypsy, changing my La Jolla residence on myriad occasions: from the Red Rest
down by the Cove to the debauchery house on Cave Street, then up the western side of Soledad Mountain
to La Jolla Rancho Road, and finally down to the beach cottage at 6671 Neptune Place.

It was April 1976, and I would reside across from the Sea for the next six years, living with
various roommates, including men, women, neuters, dogs, cats and roaches. In the fall of 1976,
Chip Hasley and I traveled to Europe for three weeks. We took the Super 8 camera and filmed
ourselves getting drunk at the Heineken Brewery. We traveled through France across the rails to
Biarritz to find flat surf. We euro-railed southeast to St. Tropez and took a bus to a rainy
Mediterranean. The weather was miserable and the White Pointers were not to be found on the beach.
We left and moved into Italy and saw Florence, visiting Michaelangelo's David. The natives were
welcoming: Bon Journo! American? I love americans, so I give you good price! Student? Fantastico!
I give you student price!

That night we trained north into der Schweiz. We wanted to photograph the Matterhorn. As we slept, some
thief came into our compartment and took the bag which contained the camera and 34 minutes of exposed film.

Good-bye Kodak memories and hello real world.

Switzerland was a beautiful country. Too bad we didn't have the camera for the moving
pictures. The natives were sehr schon und sie mocht der Amerikaner.

the swiss-german blood-lines

Back in the States, insurance replaced the camera.

The idea of filming a scripted documentary settled itself into my mind. With the new Super 8 camera,
I shot more footage of girl friends, birds, dogs, surfers and Mac Meda parties at the beach.

In October 1977 the Department of Motor Vehicles wrongfully suspended Chip's California Driver's License
and we called them on it. We settled the case for a low four-figure sum and agreed to use the money to
purchase a used Beaulieu R16 sync sound film camera from Bel Air Camera in Westwood. Chip had recently,
transferred from Cal Berkeley to UCLA and was living at the fraternity house on Gayley Avenue.
My undergraduate degree from State was in English, and stories always swirled in my imagination.
Dwelling at the beach neigh on two years with my roommates and the surfing community always
around, nourished the idea of filming a 16mm documentary based on the life of a typical
La Jolla homegrown surf rat. It would be the story that every person growing up in this town,
from Jump to Diff to Butch to Darby to Ekstrom to Brud to McCloud to Ortner to Galloway had lived.
These thoughts danced in and out of my brain.

I didn't want to film the typical hard-core surf movie that showed endless waves of perfection in Hawaii or
Mexico or Indo, with an occasional shot of surfers driving around with flat tires or throwing pies in each other's
face or mooning the train at Trestles or eyeballing some girl's abundance falling out of her bikini.
I wanted the film to document the typical surfer growing up in La Jolla in an upper middle class family and
how he is torn between his need for the ocean and his need to look to his future away from the sea.

This idea of a surf movie interwoven with a documentary narrative evolved as we lived in a community where
many of us were born, all of us were nurtured, and the haunts of the denizens were known to all of us.

A local would just have to begin the sentence and his homies could finish it and give a brief
or lengthy dissertation about the person, place, or thing being talked about and its place in the
history of La Jolla from the inception of the town.

The talk could drift to the affair of the rich
plastic-surgeoned woman on the hill who drove the surf boy/man around in her Rolls when hubby was in New York
raking in the bread with his book-cooking, and each listener would add bits of knowledge to the story as it was told.

The camaraderie, the conflict, the conjugation, the energy, the peace, the boredom of
living in a small town were known by all. I wanted to document this lifestyle.
Show some brief scenes that would hint at a deeper significance that the viewers carried in their person,
evoking the knowledge and the memories with a moving picture or a spoken word.
And cut between these scenes the surfing of the locals.

Originally, Chip was to be the protagonist of this narrative, but he wasn't crazy enough for the part.
The denouement I had scripted called for our hero to leap the eighty-eight feet from Deadman's cliff into the
Pacific Ocean, where it was twelve feet deep at the high tide. Chip was not a stuntman. He was a history major.
A man more of words than actions. He was scripting his own film, called "The Caretaker," in which he was to star.
He couldn't risk his limbs for my documentary. Chip's father, Chuck, was the original President of the
WindanSea Surf Club in the early sixties. Chip had seen it all, grew up with it--been there, done that.
His playing days were over--now he wanted to manage.

If this film had been made at the turn to the sixties, Butch would have been the ideal lead.
I remember watching the Vikings play a day football game against Kearny. Either 1959, when he had been
removed from the team, or in October of 1960, just after he graduated from La Jolla High. My memory isn't
sharp on the year, just that it was a hot day in the fall and he was walking along the 440 track that circled the
football field, moving along the southeast corner of the field, in front of the cement bleachers
where us spectators sat.

football/baseball field, circa 1959--the scene of the crime,
with the excitement taking place at the upper left of the football field

There was a shout from up behind and Butch looked over us,
leaped the iron rail separating the dirt track from the cement and ran pell-mell up the cement seats,
taking two at a time. When he reached the fifteen foot high chain fence that secured the field
from Fay Avenue, he was over the top in three seconds, landing on his adversary.
Teachers and security, running through the gates, slowly made their way to the combat.
The football game was secondary. I couldn't separate the fight from the crowd and after a while it was over.
I didn't know the outcome. That wasn't important. That it had happened was the significance of the event.

The door shuts, the pedal goes to the metal, words I did not understand are whispered and not responded to,
the laughter rolls through the car, resonating in the wooden interior, and we hang on for life as Jim sprints
that baby through two blind intersections. The car stops, Jack and I tumble out into the fresh air,
gawking at one another, and then the car is gone, leaving us in the cool La Jolla night,
wondering what might have happened.

Still a thirteen-year old eighth-grader waiting for the first kiss, afraid and excited by the girl that holds me,
so tight at the Beach Club cotillion. What was I doing in a car with eighteen year old men whose dicks were always
sniffing out those new cherries that I still dreamt of?

Wondering, trembling, questioning, and ultimately doing Nothing but walking back to my adolescence.

These were my actors, guys who never thought about tomorrow. When the brawl was going on at the party,
my guys would ask if it was a private fight or if they could join in.
I didn't want actors. I wanted the person who lived the life I was to film.

Chip was too much like me. Thinking with the big head most of the time. Reasonable. Logical. In life for the long haul.

Enter Bruce Byerly from stage right. Track and field star at La Jolla High School in the mid-seventies, waterman,
surfer, blonde haired, handsome, constant companion of beautiful women, and----fearless.
The prototype La Jolla Surfer. "Jump off Deadman's? Me? No problem."
"You name the date and time, you make some payments on my car, then you roll the cameras!"

The Jump

This movie was a documentary about growing up in La Jolla. One surfer was interchangeable with another.
Their lives shadowed each other.

"If I don't know you, I probably know your father and mother or older brother.
Maybe I know your sister, maybe carnal knowledge of her."

"You graduated in '64? So did my older sister, but she never mentioned you."

"Wasn't much to mention, I surfed til second period then skipped school after
lunch, so I hung only with the surfers."

"My daughter graduated in '96"

"Didn't your father go to La Jolla in '44?"

"Yeah. I had Rossney as a teacher, did you?"

"Did Coach Edwards grab you by the neck?"

"Yeah, I saw them at his house with his kid."

"You graduated with Eveleth? He coached me in basketball!"

"Yeah. Small world, isn't it?"

"It's La Jolla."

"Where'd you learn how to dance? "

"Beach Club cotillion."

"No, that other dance I seen you doing."

I learned that on the reef at Simmons."

"Me too! See this scar, winter of 68."

"Mine is winter of 91."

"My friend's dad, he was out the day Simmons bought it. Sad days in the town."

This was our story. The collective consciousness of all the local surfers growing up in La Jolla
- in San Diego - in Southern California.

That's it, that's the title: Southern California Son.