Five Summer Stories

“Five Summer Stories” first premiered in 1972 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and was quickly deemed “the greatest surf film ever made.” The film’s unusual format—a montage of five-plus stories or vignettes—perfectly captured a fractured era in which an explosion of creativity and revolutionary change was shaking down the old order, taking the sport of surfing off into new and unknown territory. Although the film went through several (and increasingly popular) incarnations as it played in theaters over a seven-year span from 1972 to 1979, its fundamental story remained the same—that the pure, innocent joy of surfing was symbolic of humankind’s best possibilities on Earth without war or politics or environmental destruction. The film features music by the Beach Boys and Honk.