june-2010

090 BUSINESS
hen Bill Ballard set out to make his first surfing
movie, all he had really wanted to do was travel.
The year was 1993, and he had just ditched his gig
as a “professional student” after six years of college
and moved from central California to the Hawaiian
island of Kauai. He had no concrete game plan
but knew he wanted to surf and see the world. Of
course, he also needed to make a bit of money along the way.
“At that point, Kauai was filled with young surfing talent,” Ballard says. “So I
decided to buy some video equipment and, with absolutely no training as a filmmaker,
just set off with my friends to see what I could make.”
Over the course of a year, Ballard journeyed back to Southern California to the
breaks off of San Diego and San Francisco and then on to Indonesia, Japan and Australia,
surfing and filming most days and crashing with friends and acquaintances at
night. He was his sole crew member. And his gumption paid off.
When Ballard returned to Hawaii, he had a shoestring budget of $30,000
to print 3,000 VHS tapes of his footage, which he put together with music and
titled Insanity. “I loaded the tapes up in the trunk of my car, then drove the entire
length of California, selling them to whatever surf shops I could find,” he says. “I
managed to break even and move all 3,000 tapes, which was extremely successful
for a first film. That was enough to make me say, ‘Huh, I could actually make a
living out of this.’ I’d planned on going back to college to teach, but Insanity made
me stick to filmmaking.”
Ballard’s debut work went on to sell 15,000 units over the year. In 2001,
Imagine Entertainment and Universal Pictures tapped Ballard to be on the crew of
their 2002 surf movie Blue Crush, which grossed more than $51 million worldwide.
“To go from breaking even on my first surf film to working on one that made that
much money in less than a decade was crazy,” says Ballard, who has made a total of
26 films to date. “But that’s how quickly this market changed.”
Filmmaker Bruce Brown (The Endless Summer) was an early pioneer of surf films.
GO MAGAZINE JUNE 2010
EXTREME-SPORTS FILMS WERE
nothing new when Ballard got his start.
As far back as 1940, a young skier named
John Jay who had turned his lens toward
the slopes released Ski the Americas, North
and South. Jay traveled the country to present
the film personally, and his successful
promotional format—a ski film debut
coupled with a lecture—sparked a legion
of fellow skiers to follow in his tracks.
In the 1950s, filmmaker Bud Browne
became the first person to screen surf
movies commercially. The niche genre
then made its first major splash on the
national stage in 1966, when Bruce Brown
released The Endless Summer, a documentary
that followed two surfers on a quest
to find the perfect wave. Brown’s film
stands today as one of the most influential
action-sports movies ever made.
In 1949, Warren Miller founded
Warren Miller Entertainment and started
producing one feature-length ski film per
year. He adopted Jay’s movie-and-lecturecircuit
concept and took it to new heights,
selling out halls and theaters across the
country. Today, the Boulder, CO-based
company (which Miller sold to his son 20
years ago and is now owned by the Bonnier
“THERE ARE A LOT
OF KIDS MAKING
ACTION-SPORT
VIDEOS FOR THE
WEB BUT ONLY
A HANDFUL OF
COMPANIES THAT
HAVE A BUSINESS
STRATEGY.”
COURTESY OF BRUCE BROWN FILMS, ©2010 BRUCE BROWN FILMS, LLC