Surf Movie Tonite!: Surf Movie Poster Art, 1957-2004

By Matt Warshaw

Book Overview

Surf movies have always attracted a certain kind of audience: passionate, committed, and, quite often, stoned. The posters that advertised these low-budget movies began as colorful notices stapled onto beachside telephone poles in the early fifties. They were full of promises"See the biggest wave EVER ," "California pointbreak perfection "and surfers pounded in, wanting to see the best surfers on the tastiest waves. A splash hit when it debuted in 1966, The Endless Summer , with its ultra dayglo view of beach life, proved that surf movies had made it big time. Four decades later, surf expert Matt Warshaw brings to wave riders everywhere this singular collection of more than 140 amazing and rare posters, covering everything from the bubbly optimism of Gidget to the psychedelic inventiveness of Pacific Vibrations . Including worn ticket stubs, photos of old-time premieres, and a side-splitting history of the surf movie in all its shaggy glory, Surf Movie Tonite brilliantly illustrates the intersection of beach and film culture.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811848736
• ISBN13: 9780811848732
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: Chronicle Books
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 9.0" x 12.0"
• Age Range: 13 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 8 to Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

very cool

This book is very cool. I like leafing through it. It is not literature, just fun.

Surf City Poster Mania

If you ever attended a surf movie in the 50's/60's and wished you had collected or kept those posters, this is the book for you! This book is a trip back to a time of carefree innocence and a time of pure enjoyment. A fantastic collection that is very complete.

Poster Me Wet

Warshaw, Matt Diligent and prolific writer, editor, and surf historian; former pro surfer (ranked 43rd in the world in 1982), editor at Surfer magazine in the late 1980s, he moved to Berkeley in 1990, took a degree in history (Phi Beta Kappa), and eventually settled into a San Francisco neighborhood just two blocks from the pounding peaks of Ocean Beach. There Warshaw embarked on his writing career, producing a series of meticulously researched and nicely-illustrated tomes: Surfriders: In Search of the Perfect Wave (1997), Above the Roar: 50 Surfer Interviews (1997), Maverick's: The Story of Big-Wave Surfing (2000), and Zero Break: An Illustrated Collection of Surf Writing, 1777-2004 (2004). His greatest contribution to surf history and culture to date, however, is his sidewalk-cracking compendium, The Encyclopedia of Surfing (2003), to which he and a small staff devoted three hair-raising years of research and writing. Warshaw's latest book, comic relief in this man's oeuvre, is Surf Movie Tonite!: Surf Movie Poster Art, 1957-2004. An exquisitely mounted oversized softcover volume, it chronicles surf culture through its films - more precisely through the posters advertising its films - over the past 40 years. The posters range from the earliest Bud Browne movies, through the heydays of the '60s cinematographers, to the bad and better of Hollywood productions, to the video uprising of the '80s, to the DVD cult films of today. Throughout, Warshaw's descriptive captions are diverting and witty, his contemporaneous extracts are on point, and his introductory essay is both breezy and pithy. See also: Another one for the ages. - Drew Kampion for The Surfer's Path [surferspath.com]