Inside the leg­endary surf film that inspired a generation

When Tay­lor Steele released his sem­i­nal 35-minute film Momen­tum in 1992, surfers watched it with rabid inten­si­ty. And then they rewound the VHS tape and watched it again. They learned the surfers’ names and styles. They stud­ied Slater in the bar­rel, Tay­lor Knox’s rail work and Kalani Rob above the lip. They lis­tened to the dri­ving punk and bought Bad Reli­gion CDs. And they watched it again, until Momen­tum 2 came out.

They imi­tat­ed the humour and would fol­low this core group as surf­ing grew from the fringes to cul­tur­al promi­nence. And then they watched it again, because at the time, there were no curat­ed YouTube chan­nels. There was no Spo­ti­fy to dis­cov­er new music. There was no Instagram.

“It was a beau­ti­ful time because peo­ple appre­ci­at­ed what we worked for,” reflects Steele, who has gone on to receive acclaim from far beyond the surf world. ​“They would watch it for as long as it took for us to make it. That will nev­er hap­pen again. Today, some­thing that takes a full year to make, peo­ple will watch it once and be done with it, or they want just the high­lights. It was an excit­ing time to make stuff because you felt the appreciation.”

When I meet him, he’s assem­bled with his old surfer friends in New York City. In just a few hours, the world will see Momen­tum Gen­er­a­tion – a poignant doc­u­men­tary by Michael and Jeff Zim­bal­ist, which spans 30 years of the group’s col­lec­tive rise. ​“I think that moti­vat­ed every­one to put ener­gy into those movies, the fact that they were going to be watched,” says Steele. ​“You knew it was going to be out there.”

Momen­tum Gen­er­a­tion is, at its core, a film about grow­ing up. The plot is as much about the char­ac­ters as the age it’s set in, chron­i­cling the friend­ship and careers of Steele, Rob Macha­do, Slater, Knox, Kalani Rob, Pat O’Connell, Shane Dori­an, Ben­ji Weath­er­ly and Ross Williams. From the ear­ly days, all piled into Ben­ji Weatherly’s fam­i­ly home, they over­came the intim­i­da­tion fac­tor at Pipeline. They made the world tour. They expe­ri­enced love, the death of a close friend, and heart­break. They became celebri­ties to their gen­er­a­tion. And they dealt with all of the strug­gles that came with that.

“It was like an onion,” mus­es Knox. ​“This movie just peeled away the layers.”

The inter­views, the reunion surf trip that pro­vides the final scene, and now the upcom­ing release of the new film, have all been rea­sons to bring the Momen­tum crew togeth­er again – and it has been a ther­a­peu­tic process.

Knox con­tin­ues: ​“Some­times, we didn’t pat each oth­er on the back and say, ​‘Dude, are you alright?’ But it’s good to be in the here and now, see­ing this. All that stuff has been stripped away. We don’t give a shit about any of that stuff. It’s not going to get in the way of who we are or our friend­ship ever again.”

The Emmy-nom­i­nat­ed Zim­bal­ist broth­ers, best known for insight­ful sports fea­ture docs like Arnold’s Blue­print, The Two Esco­bars, PELE, and Favela Ris­ing, are not surfers. But they grew up aware of the cul­tur­al rel­e­vance of the Momen­tum crew and Steele’s films.

“I think the most impor­tant thing about Taylor’s work, com­pared to when I was get­ting paid to free surf and do TV shows, was the legit­i­ma­cy that his movies bought,” says Weath­er­ly. ​“It was unde­ni­able. If you were in his movies, it’s because you were at that lev­el. For 10 years after, I was just get­ting by, but not as focused as I was for his movies, putting so much time and effort into it. If you were in it, it was unde­ni­able. It was the biggest thing ever.”

Steele is par­tic­u­lar­ly excit­ed that much of the footage he’d shot didn’t real­ly have a log­i­cal home until now. When the Zim­bal­ist broth­ers arrived at his Cal­i­for­nia ware­house, he filled their car with 500 pounds of Hi8 tapes. With no room left in the car, their assis­tants had to take a taxi back to the stu­dio. They sourced footage and pho­tos from 138 sources. ​“I didn’t have any space for all this stuff I shot, so it’s nice to see it get released with this project,” says Steele.

Momen­tum Gen­er­a­tion is an impor­tant film because it doc­u­ments a time right before the infor­ma­tion age, and before we could see what our icons were doing in real time. ​“The nov­el­ty of dis­cov­er­ing some­thing under­ground was real­ly excit­ing in your for­ma­tive years, your ado­les­cence and 20s,” explains Michael Zim­bal­ist. ​“So the scarci­ty of access of what these guys were up to just increas­es the val­ue of that VHS tape or that surf mag­a­zine. You trea­sured the few videos, the few pho­tos, the few songs that you have. They were that generation’s ver­sion of viral in all the right ways. That was impor­tant to them.”

As VHS gave way to DVD, the surfers moved to the next phas­es of their careers, and the world changed. ​“I think we were pret­ty lucky in that we had become estab­lished in the time before the inter­net,” explains Shane Dori­an. ​“We had this mas­sive gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple world­wide that all had surf­ing in com­mon who had seen these eight films. They’d been antic­i­pat­ing these films every year, for a decade. ]That was a plat­form and had peo­ple that were psy­ched on what we were doing, so when the inter­net hap­pened, we were able to have way more options because of Taylor’s films.”

It’s an impor­tant tale, bol­stered by the per­spec­tives of fam­i­lies and oth­er rel­e­vant surfers. The sto­ry will be of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to surfers, but the Zim­bal­ist broth­ers have told it in a way that will be extreme­ly relat­able to a main­stream audience.

“You’ve got to find the pat­terns that are true across all the char­ac­ters in order that the for­ward momen­tum is uni­form as it were,” Michael Zim­bal­ist adds. ​“You have to let go of the indi­vid­ual arcs for the sake of the story.”

Momen­tum Gen­er­a­tion airs on HBO on 11 December.