[Feature image caption: Me and my trusty Bolex. I’m shooting my film, Blue Horizon, with the same camera I used for Storm Riders. It’s the same sort that Bud, Bruce, Sevo, Val, and Greg Noll made their movies with. They are as reliable as a Timex. The unique thing about them is that they run on a spring, much like an alarm clock—no batteries or electronics. You wind them up and they go for 18 seconds. When they stop, you just wind them up again and get ready for the next shot. Dick Hoole and I tried using electric cameras when we made some money, but they’d always let us down in the field. I’ll take a Bolex any day. Photo by Art Brewer]

Aside from being a swashbuckling man of the world who speaks in an accent that’s part pidgin, part Aussie, part well-educated SoCal, and part psychedelic high priest, Jack McCoy is also regarded as one of the world’s best surf filmmakers. I first came across his movies in the mid-’80s. There was Tubular Swells, which made me want to run away to Indo, Storm Riders, which made me want to come from the land down under, and The Performers, which made me want to become friends with Rabbit, Kong, Crammy, and ultimately, McCoy himself, which I did about five years later.

I first met McCoy when he was living in L.A. Occasionally, I’d catch him out at Malibu, but for the most part, he was on the road, off making surf movies. In those brief moments he was around, he had that just-blown-in-with-the-wind, journeyman countenance that injected me with a healthy dose of wanderlust. Over the course of the next decade and a half, we crossed paths in about seven different countries, usually during big swells and with a helluva lot of good surfers present. Predictably enough, when I went to get in touch with him for this profile back in early ’02, he was, once again, on the road working on his next project with a couple of the best surfers in the world, one of whom became the 2002 world champ. After a series of back-and-forths over e-mail, we agreed we’d get the job done in Hawaii in December, which is what we’re doing now. 

The scene goes like this: McCoy’s renting a house that faces directly out to the lineup at Backdoor. He’s here to work on his upcoming film, the Blue Horizon, which we’ll tell you more about later. In a living room that’s furnished the way most North Shore living rooms are—utilitarian carpet, bamboo furniture, palm frond-printed drapes—McCoy is cleaning up cameras and lenses, preparing to receive his wife and two kids, who are set to arrive in a couple of days. There’s a bag of chips and a bowl of salsa on the table, an uncorked bottle of wine on the kitchen counter, and the next two days fully cleared to talk about McCoy’s rich and interesting life. And so we go.

*

Born July 31, 1948, Jack McCoy grew up the oldest of three kids in Kailua, an upscale neighborhood on the east shore of Oahu. His father was a radio and TV personality, his mother a housewife. In the late ’50s when Jack was eight, Papa McCoy pushed him into his first wave at Waikiki and from there the obsession began. Over the course of the next couple years, he would surf, bodysurf, dive, paddle, outrigger, and fish in the spirit of all things waterman. In ’59, at the age of 11, he went to his first surf film, Bruce Brown’s Slippery When Wet. 

“Bruce got up on stage and introduced his film and that planted a very romantic seed in my head,” remembers McCoy. “Growing up in Kailua, the wind prevailed onshore. But I can clearly remember this one day I was bodysurfing and the wind was offshore, and as I was swimming out, this little three-footer threw over me and, for that split-second, I was in the tube. It was like finding a secret place, and I’ve been in love with that space ever since.” 

A short time later, still in junior high, he met filmmakers Jim Freeman and Greg MacGillivray and began working in the “business.” As an after-school job, McCoy put up surf movie posters around town—similar to a paperboy but at the same time very different. In exchange for his efforts, he was given free admission to the films. 

“I was a poster gremmie.” This was around ’62, ’63, when surf movies were the hub of all surfing activity, where everyone would come together and collectively socialize and hoot and holler at the same things. It was an electric atmosphere. I saw some movies from Val Valentine, Bruce Brown, Bud Browne, John Severson; they were all pretty much the same. The guy who made the movie came and showed it. He got up before the show and gave you a little behind-the-scenes talk, and I always soaked up each and every word of this. 

Shortly thereafter, he graduated into film distribution, a job he shared with his enterprising young pal Randy Rarick, now director of the Triple Crown events on the North Shore. As partners, they handled all the new surf flicks that came through Hawaii. In 1970, they traveled to Australia for the world surf contest. It was McCoy’s first major trip abroad and he instantly fell in love with the place. Six months later when he was scheduled to head back to Hawaii, MacGillivray/Freeman got him on the phone and proposed he extend his visit to distribute their new film, Waves of Change. McCoy took them up on the offer, working for Peter Troy and Paul Witzig. For the next five years, he traveled up and down the Australian coast showing a shit load of different surf films, among them Seadreams, Five Summer Stories, and Saltwater Wine. 

In ’72, he discovered Bali, a place that would figure into his future in a massive way. And when he wasn’t showing surf flicks, he shot photos and wrote stories for Tracks, the irreverent new surf rag headed by John Witzig, David Elfic, and Albert Falzon. 

“I learned so much about light, composition, and tone from shooting still black and whites for Tracks. We’d bulk-buy our film and we’d roll them onto the cassettes in the darkroom. Then we’d shoot our rolls, and we’d come home at night and develop our film and start making prints off of the negatives. We’d get this instant result of where we were going right and where we were going wrong.” 

McCoy’s life was fresh, exciting, and occasionally all colors of the rainbow. He was free to invent himself as he chose and he had a steady income coming from the surf movie business. But just when things were rolling smoothly, an unexpected curveball was thrown at him. Golden Breed, a big-wig surfwear company of the time, bought out the rights to all the new surf flicks and hired new distributors, bumping McCoy out of business. McCoy’s response to this was to pack it up, move to Victoria, and open a restaurant. 

“My motive was to surf all day and then go in and serve some meals. I was in for a rude awakening. I’d start work at six in the morning and not get home until two the next morning,” he remembers. 

With his large, gregarious personality, McCoy was a natural. Customers loved the food, and they loved Big Jack. But aside from the quality surf, Torquay was cold, sleepy, and limited opportunity-wise. McCoy decided to take his restaurant act up to the sunny shores of Queensland. Along the way, however, he suffered a life-changing ski accident. 

In an e-mail from the Gold Coast, Rabbit Bartholomew, a longtime friend of McCoy’s, remembers it like this: “When Jack returned from the fateful ski trip where he wore the ski lift in the head, he had been knocked out cold for a couple days and had a severe concussion. I approached him in the park at Burleigh about a month after the accident. It was perfect 6-feet, really a nice, clean April swell. Jack was just staring at these cylinders careening down the point and just going ‘Wow, that’s pretty cool. What is it?’ I spent weeks and weeks with Jack, re-introducing him to both the beach/surf environment and all the fun side events and happenings around the beach lifestyle. He was like a child, enlightenment beaming over his face as he embraced this newfound life with much enthusiasm, even if his speech and persona seemed very slow. It was neat observing his delight as recollection kicked in, but I am sure he was having way more fun when he remembered nothing and was experiencing stuff such as perfect surf and journeys down the coast for the first time. Jack was in this great state for some time, and I reckon it to be an enviable space.”

McCoy doesn’t say much about the accident or the rehabilitation, only that he had “a bit of amnesia.” But he does remember this: In 1975, six or so months after the accident, Dick Hoole put a Bolex in his hand and suggested they start making surf films. Dick and Jack had met in Hawaii back when McCoy was working with Randy Rarick. They’d traveled to Bali together, shared a common interest in still photography, and had even shown movies together. But neither had actually filmed surfing before. 

“Dick reasoned that we’d shot enough stills to be able to take pictures and that it wouldn’t be much harder shooting moving pics,” recalls Jack. 

With a hell of a lot of desire and open-mindedness (and maybe a little of McCoy’s post-accident wonder at the world), the pair winged it, spending the next year shooting the newest/ hottest on the Gold Coast and Indo, then on to Hawaii to capture what would later become known as the “Bustin’ Down the Door” era. 

“Boy, we made some mistakes!” laughs McCoy. “Dick and I had spent about a year shooting and then we reached a point where we looked at each other kind of wondering what to do next and Dick said, ‘I thought you knew how to make the movie,’ and I said, ‘I thought you knewhow to make the movie….’ I went to see a good friend and told him the predicament we were in, and he sat me down and said, ‘Jack, if your heart’s in the right place it will all come together. Just keep the faith.’” 

That good friend was Albert Falzon, who had recently completed his signature Morning of the Earth. He put McCoy in touch with David Lourie, an experienced filmmaker, who showed Hoole/McCoy how to edit, narrate, and mix music. A couple months later, Tubular Swells was a done deal. They showed it around Australia to enthused audiences and even managed to turn a profit. 

Hoole/McCoy used the newfound confidence and cash to roll right into project number two, A Day in the Life of Wayne Lynch. McCoy had become friendly with Wayne during the restaurant days in Torquay, and ADITL was a perfect opportunity to explore Wayne’s world at home as well as sharpen their 16mm film chops. David Lourie was a big help once again showing McCoy all kinds of tricks that otherwise would have taken years to get a handle on. One of the highlights of the film is Wayne and Nat—the two gods of the time seated at opposite ends of the Australian surf pantheon, arch rivals yet saltwater brothers —jumping off a cliff into frigid, steel gray waters and paddling out to a treacherous, beefy right-hander. The slo-mo late takeoffs, on-edge bottom turns, and high-line barrel rides captured perfectly the glory and gusto of surfing at your threshold. It was surfing not as we know it, but more as we feel it. 

A couple of years later, McCoy became friendly with Spyder Wills and Greg Weaver, the then-kings of long lens surf photography. Weaver/Wills taught McCoy how to improve his “follow focus,” and for the next couple of months, McCoy would spend long days atthe Honolulu Airport, panning with airplanes as they’d take off and land while delicately twirling the focus ring to keep the moving subject tack sharp. All this served him well when he, Hoole, and Lourie made Storm Riders, a travel montage showcasing the best surfers, best spots, and best music of the era. Storm Riders premiered at the Sydney Opera House in ’82 to a thoroughly stoked crowd and went on to become the highest grossing surf film of the time. And though McCoy was happy with the visuals and the music, he was disappointed with the narration. 

“Due to our schedule, Dick, David, and I were off doing different things. I was not involved with the recording of the narration and I didn’t hear it until it was too late to change. We were premiering in two days and we had to go with what we had. But I learned a good lesson that I’ve lived up to ever since: At that time, I swore to myself that I would not send out a film until I was at least happy to live with what it was before sending out.” 

Next up was Kong’s Island, a kind of “Three Stooges Go Surfing,” with Gary “Kong” Elkerton as Mo, and Rabbit and James “Chappy” Jennings as Curly and Larry. The film blended serious surfing with a completely un-serious storyline, marking McCoy’s foray into fantasyland and proving once again that his films are all about good music. Then came The Performers, a document of Quiksilver’s legendary team riding the North Shore in the winter of ’83-’84. Rabbit Bartholomew, one of the stars of the film, remembers it like this: “The Performers year was all-time. Kong and Chappy were on the rampage and there were no North Shore events on the World Tour due to a boycott. I was ranked #1 and had Tommy Carroll up my clacker on the ratings, but without Hawaiian events it was 10 weeks of hard-core free surfing, filming with Jack, and partying with the ‘brahs.’ I had introduced Kong to Sunset and Darrick Doerner, and despite having his knee ripped open early on, it was plain to see that ‘Elko’ would be a force to reckon with at Sunset. It was a creative time, and Jack, as usual, blended in to all the happenings like a chameleon. He had mastered the art of having his subjects not even notice the camera, and was always on to the surf when it was pumping.” 

McCoy managed to do something else in his early films. He’d pull together million-dollar soundtracks on meager, independent budgets. 

“I learned years ago,” McCoy states, “that music is the emotion of the film. Sometime around the late ’80s, I read something where Steven Spielberg said that ‘music is 50% of the movie-going experience.’ I’d always felt that, but coming from Spielberg only confirmed my gut feelings. In Storm Riders, we wanted to use a lot of Australian bands. There were a few bands that were just about to get real big and one of them was Men At Work. We had a music producer who was in charge of getting us music and we had cut this sequence of Rabbit in Australia with the Men At Work tune ‘Down Under,’ which we felt was really appropriate. But we couldn’t get the rights and clearances and the deadline was fast approaching. The music producer called me up and basically said, ‘Anything shy of going to the Narrabeen Pub and approaching the band themselves, I don’t know what else to tell you.’ So, sure enough, off I went down to the Narrabeen Pub and kind of talked my way into talking with their manager and getting backstage and kind of telling the band what I was doing. Musicians obviously get stoked when other artists appreciate their music and want to use it in things like films. These guys polled unanimously on the spot and said, ‘Go for it; we’d be stoked if you used it.’ I’ve used the personal connection and ‘backstage OK’ many times since.”

*

In the mid- to late 1980s, McCoy went to visit his friend Garth Murphy in Los Angeles and ended up staying three years. Garth had used his skills as a home renovator to transform a broken-down Hollywood mansion into a celebrity bed and breakfast. Jack and Garth worked on some of McCoy’s unseen material and, in the basement of the B&B where he set up shop, McCoy produced Surf Hits Vol. 1, Jungle Jet Set, a montage of surreal imagery set to rockin’ music. He also fell in love with a Danish model. 

“It was really living with Garth, Euva, and my girlfriend,” remembers Jack. “At that time, art and the art world came into focus for me. I credit Garth and Euva with giving me my art education. I lived in the basement of their Hollywood mansion and spent a lot of nights going to movie premieres and art openings, and to this day, I still credit Garth and Euva in all my films. When I get my films almost done, I watch them many times over and over, but each time thinking I’m a different person than myself. One viewing, I’m thinking I’m a Surfer mag reviewer—what’s he think of all this? Next viewing, I try to think I’m a 14-year-old grom—what’s he think of this movie? And every film I sit through and pretend I’m Stork (Garth’s nickname) and Euva, and it’s amazing the little changes I’ll make after each screening as I see things through different people.”

*

McCoy’s L.A. relationship and residency ended in 1989. Shortly after, he made plans to sail across the Pacific on a recently completed world cruising catamaran with some friends. He had proposed to Quiksilver the idea of exploring remote parts of the Pacific and Indo, flying in world-class surfers to various ports, and filming the resulting adventures, ultimately to become a movie. Still nursing a broken heart, he returned to Australia to pack up his belongings for the expected yearlong voyage and tend to the land he’d recently bought near Margaret River. But when a dear friend encouraged him to have lunch with her sister, an idea he at first resisted, McCoy’s world changed forever. 

“As I saw her walking up to me in this restaurant, our first ever encounter, this little voice inside my head goes, ‘That’s the mother of your children!’ And I’m the guy who was never going to get married, never going to have kids, just be a bachelor ’til the day I die and just roam the world and go surfing and do what I want to do. The typical, selfish male wombat theory.” 

Kelly was 28, beautiful, and entrepreneurial. And by the time lunch was over, Jack had invited her to join him on the sailboat voyage. Kelly said “yes,” but as can be expected in the lean economic climate of the time, the movie deal fell apart. 

“The day before setting sail, Quik backed out of the project and I was sitting on new cameras and film stock that hardly got used since the project was pulled. The temptation to pull out of the trip was strong because I’d had no work income. But I wanted to sail across the Pacific like I’d known the Polynesians had done many years before. It was sort of this dream to make a Pacific voyage ever since one of my childhood heroes, Joey Cabell, had done it in the early ’70s. Besides, this girl had flown all the way from Perth to come with me, so I couldn’t really let us all down.” 

So off went Mike Miller, Mike Doyle, Jack, and Kelly—a woman McCoy had only just met—on a three-week trip at sea. The film project may have gone south, but Jack and Kelly’s relationship rocketed skyward, and somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, on a night Kelly swears she remembers perfectly, their first son, Cooper, was conceived. McCoy went back to Australia with a new girlfriend and a baby on the way. Together, they bought a house in Western Oz and dove in head first to the domestic life. Two years later, Kelly gave birth to their second child, Indiana. But while the above makes for a great story, the abruptness of it all ended up backfiring down the line. 

“She and I were kind of thrown into this relationship,” explains McCoy. “Deep down I was still a little bit bitter and twisted about ‘my bachelor days are over and I’ve got a kid and I’ve got responsibilities,’ and there was an underlying current of her feeling—and rightly so—that I didn’t really love her.” 

Since the beginning of their relationship, six years at that point, McCoy had been doing what he’d always done: work and travel relentlessly. 

“I never had the time to let my love for her really grow,” explains McCoy. “We had this great façade as a happy family unit, but it wasn’t. Kelly was growing personally and knew that to stay together just for the kids was not good for them. I came home one day in about ’98 and she goes, ‘I’m leaving. I’m out of here.’” 

The story goes that over the course of the last couple of years, a family friend had taken advantage of McCoy’s absences and made a serious and temporarily successful play for Kelly. McCoy went into a tailspin—crying on shoulders, heartbroken, confused—and for a few months the family was separated. McCoy can look back now and see it in the natural order of things, but at the time he went through hell. 

“It’s not a good feeling when you see your kids driving around with some other guy: ‘Oh, hi Dad….’ I tried to handle and accept it but I knew in my heart it was not the way I wanted this relationship and family to end up. 

“But I dealt with it. And after getting too many different, conflicting opinions from all my close friends, I literally took the phone out of the wall and said, ‘I’m the one who has to sort this out, nobody else.’ I had to confront all this stuff—no drugs, no alcohol. I started doing a lot of yoga, a lot of meditation. I really had a hard look at who I was and where I was and what I wanted to do. And I realized, more than anything, that I loved Kelly more than any other woman in my life and that Kelly and the kids were the most important thing in my life.” 

During this time, Kelly had been doing a course called HolyOke—a 12-step program for people with, among other things, addictive personalities and rough family backgrounds. Jack saw a favorable change in his wife and ended up signing up himself. 

“You can call it a mid-life crisis or just the sort of thing you go through in a family separation,” says Jack. “But I cannot tell you how important that period of my life was. I met amazing people who I thought I’d never have anything in common with, but at the end of the 12 weeks we became good friends. I’d like to think I finally got in touch with who I was. If you can do that, I like to think I did.” 

Jack spent the next year getting his mind back on track again. It was a rough period but things slowly improved, including his relationship with Kelly. And when he went to Sydney to finish Alley Oop, his first film since the troubled times began, it all fell into place. 

“I saw myself with my family back together. I saw me in my bed with my wife and my two kids playing, and that to me became the most important thing in my life. A month later, Kel and the kids were coming over for a ‘kid visit.’ I had made arrangements for me to stay with a friend and for them to stay at this apartment I rented in Palm Beach. And so when I went to pick them up from the airport, Kel says, ‘I’d really like you to stay here with us.’ …I was so blown out, you could have knocked me over with a feather.” 

This was the turning point, and the McCoy’s have been living under one roof since. Emotionally, they’re a vibrant, happy family. Physically, the foursome is bursting—all fit, healthy, and handsome. And financially speaking, things have never been better. The $500,000 fixer-upper they bought six years ago on the Northern Beaches of Sydney is now worth upward of a million bucks. And with the kids well in school, Kelly and Jack have used the extra hours to work as a team—collectively running the business, monitoring the website, and organizing the Billabong Challenges. Which brings us to another important relationship in McCoy’s life. 

“In 1989, I started working with Billabong, one of the most enjoyable experiences of my filmmaking career. From the start, Gordon Merchant and I developed a really great one-on-one relationship.” The first film was Bunyip Dreaming, then The Green Iguana, then a long series of Billabong Challenge vids. With the help of editor Calli Cerami and graphics man Graham Davey, the films had vibrancy and spark to them, far more playful and special effects-filled than what was flooding the marketplace at the time. And because he had the luxury of working with the same cast of surfers over and over, he got to know them well, and tapped into their personas and personalities, stretching the “cameraman/surfer” dynamic into something that more resembled “director/actor.” 

“I don’t think you can make a decent surf film without understanding your talent,” explains McCoy. “Any director will tell you he studies the work of the person he’s going to work with. To film someone, you need to know them, to understand. When I’m working with a surfer I’ve never worked with before, I always try to watch them surf a little bit beforehand, see where he does his turns, see where he likes to go on the wave. ’Cause when I’m in the water, I need to know instinctively what the hell he’s likely to do next. Not only for my safety but his as well. My water camera weighs almost 30 pounds—to hit someone with that lump could really hurt.” 

After a two-decade layoff following A Day in the Life of Wayne Lynch, McCoy returned to the biography form with Occy: The Occumentary. Again, dazzling graphics, rocking music, and razor-sharp surf action were on the bill of fare, and the film marked the no-holds-barred reemergence of Mark Occhilupo as a surfing force. What could have been a tiresome exercise in celebrity surfing instead came across funny, arch, and altogether real.

One surfer McCoy has worked with extensively is Mark Occhilupo. The collaborations began in Western Australia with an epic sequence in Bunyip Dreaming and continued in The Green Iguana with spiraling Desert Point. But just when the pair were really getting their groove on—razor’s edge close-ups, comedic sketches; the kind of work that relies heavily on trust from both sides—Occy went into overweight-and-reclusive mode, putting things on hold for a couple of years. And when he finally decided to make his way back to the surf world, McCoy was right there to help him out. 

In a meeting at his Sunset Beach cottage, Occy had this to say: “Jack really helped me for my comeback. He’s really motivating, always so psyched. When I took about four years off the tour, the first thing Billabong made me do when I came back was go and see Jack. I went to Jack, and I was like 17 stone (240 lbs.), and everybody probably thought I had bubble wrap under my wetsuit but that was really me. He was really good. He didn’t make me feel like I was really overweight, which I was, but he just made me feel really comfortable over there in Western Australia. He cooked me perfect vegetarian food in a really comfortable environment and made me feel like training again, which I did over there. We started filming a little—not too much because I wasn’t in shape to. But I ended up staying about two months and I came back and I had lost a fair bit of my weight and I was psyched on surfing again.” 

McCoy and Gordon Merchant began conjuring ways to get Occy back on the contest scene. Together they came up with the Billabong Challenge—a series of events to be held in off-the-beaten-path-but-high-quality-surf venues and an opportunity to mix Occy with guys like Slater, Dorian, Sunny, Machado, et al. The Billabong Challenges were a huge success and McCoy thrived with that as his subject matter—a gang of surfers all living together as family, but all competing against one another as arch rivals. Some say the format helped inspire the ASP to hold their events in the best waves with longer waiting periods, rather than the most accessible parking lots on a set day. Ultimately, though, they served their purpose in reviving Occy back to competition-mode. 

“I’m very proud of the challenges,” McCoy says. “That’s one small thing in the surfing timeline that I feel I have played a small part in contributing to.”

In 1998, McCoy made Occumentary, an epic documentation of Occy’s sometimes sad, oftentimes funny, and eventually triumphant and inspiring life story. One year later, Occy went on to win his first world title, which brings up another fact of McCoy’s film career: he’s always been ahead of the pack in picking the next big thing. 

“I grew up watching Ricky Grigg, Peter Cole, Fred Van Dyke,” he explains. “You knew that when Jock Sutherland was coming up and Jeff Hakman was coming up, they were going to be the next guys that were going to step in line; and then Gerry Lopez, and then Reno. And then when I’d go back to Australia, you could see guys like Nat, Ted Spencer, and Wayne Lynch were going to be the next talents. I just like to think I know a good surfer when I see one.”

Another bar-raising aspect of McCoy’s films is the elegant water shots. His super-sharp 16-mil work shows every dimple on the water, and when Occy, Sunny, Parko, or Luke do a slo-mo slash in your face, you literally blink your eyes as the spray hits the lens. This comes in part from McCoy’s intimacy with the surfers—knowing what they’re going to do next so he can be in the right spot at the right time. This also comes from the fact that McCoy’s a big boy, so swimming with the oversized water housing is a lot easier for him than it would be for someone 5’8″ and 140 pounds. 

McCoy’s films are marked with awe, wonder, and imagination, sometimes peppering in a mystical, cosmic slant, and always with a healthy dose of humor. The essential elements are world-class talent, world-class waves, and world-class music. In Storm Riders, you get to hear Jim Morrison’s eerie voice set to surf action, a beautiful juxtaposition that interprets the lyrics literally, something McCoy does a lot of in his films. For example, in The Green Iguana, Damien Lovelock sings “You see a cloud, I see a rainbow, we’re both looking out the same window.” McCoy shows his son Cooper walking on a beach with clouds in the sky. Where there’s no rainbow he superimposes one, and where there’s no window he puts one in there, as well. Later in the song there’s a “ha ha ha” that comes in the lyrics. McCoy scribes it across the screen the same way Batman and Robin comics might have a “kapow” written to emphasize a kick to the jaw. In Kong’s Island he does something similar with Rabbit’s surfing. Where Rab’s surfing real loose and rubbery, McCoy inserts twangy sound effects to exclamation point what you’re seeing on screen, a direct connection between audio and visual. 

McCoy has a very genuine interest in his surfers that goes beyond just how hard they can hit the lip. He reveals who they are, what they’re about, and sometimes he’ll even go so far as to fictionalize them into a vision of his own making. For example, when he was in the midst of shooting The Green Iguana, Occy showed up in Western Australia to shoot with a fresh new hair cut, which destroyed the continuity of the previously shot, shoulder length-haired Occ. How does McCoy solve this problem? He simply writes in a short skit that involves Occy back in “The Old Country” seeing his twin brother “Rocky” going off to take on the world. The gag makes sense of the short hair, adds a lightheartedness that parallels Occy’s personality, and for the rest of the film you get Occy’s alter ego “Rocky” doubling for Occ. 

There’s a slowed-down, poetic appreciation of surfing that’s thoroughly soulful and more and more a rarity in an age of immediate gratification, cum-shot-inspired surf flicks. McCoy will bring a sense of adventure and discovery, a kind of pageantry, if you will, to something as simple as making your way out to the surf. In Storm Riders, he has Wayne Lynch towing his board behind his windsurfer to get out to a mysterious reef, as well as Rabbit running through parks, across beaches, and over jetties to surf his local spot. It’s a kind of “smell the roses” message that’s refreshing and illuminating. 

And then there’s the quest to get things right, no matter what it takes, which is something McCoy’s become famous for. Talk to any of the surfers he works with and they’ll tell you he’s an animal, that his energy reserves are never-ending. They’ll tell you not only does he push himself, but he also pushes them —sometimes further than they’re prepared to go. A few even say he’s a pain in the ass, a slave driver. But in the end, when they see their hard work transformed to the screen, all are always grateful to McCoy. 

“He’s hard to work for because he’s such a perfectionist,” says Occy. “But I’d have to say that I’ve really enjoyed working with him because time in and time out he produces results.” 

“I make no apologies for wanting to do things right,” Jack says. “Admittedly, I have a much higher image of these guys than they have. Ultimately it’s about me making them look good. But some of them don’t really get it. I’ve had ’em say to me, ‘What’s running ’round a tree have to do with making a surf film.’” 

McCoy’s quest for perfection came to a glorious crescendo a couple of years back in Tahiti. More than likely you’re familiar with it. When Laird Hamilton caught that monster of a wave at Teahupoo—you know, the one that looked like some kind of sick joke involving Photoshop manipulation but, in fact, was real —McCoy was right there in the spot. From its early, only-detectable-by-jet-skistage right through to the kick out and tears that followed, the shot was perfect, and shows up in TO’ Day of Days, a movie he released in 2002. Which brings up an interesting point: McCoy comes from the old school of soul and soft rhythms, yet he still thrives in today’s generation of fast cuts and short attention spans. 

“An average cut for me back when we did Tubular Swells was four seconds,” explains McCoy. “Now I’m dealing with sometimes four frames. MTV, with that quick cutting, telling complete stories in a three-minute song, has conditioned our receptiveness to information that’s being delivered quickly to us. However, I’m not only trying to communicate with the faster pace of today’s films; I’m quite happy to show a good slo-mo shot of, say, Andy Irons doing a square bottom turn, tuck into the tube, stall, no-hander tube ride. When I show rushes of my new film, the kids exclaim, ‘that’s how Andy does it,’ after watching his dance slowed down. The average surf video—not surfing film—is rocking along at a pace that hardly ever allows you to enjoy the art of our sport.”

*

It’s late afternoon. The big ball of fire is slowly making its way toward Kaena Point, and the water over Pipeline has that hue of gold that elevates surfing to high art. The waves are now three times overhead, the best in the world are getting their last licks in before dark, and, as can be predicted, the proceedings have moved out to the backyard; Jack with his camera and me with my tape recorder. Earlier in the day, the rest of the McCoy clan arrived from Sydney, and out near the water’s edge, Kelly and Indiana can be seen building sandcastles. A few yards down from them, Cooper—12 years old and a chip off the old block—is standing behind a camcorder on a tripod. That’s right, folks, the torch is being passed, and after a long barrel from Dave Rastovich, a close family friend, Cooper whistles across the beach to Dad and flashes a “thumbs up” confirmation that he got the shot. McCoy smiles with the pride of a man who just climbed Everest, or at least a man who is within view of the crest,which is more or less where he’s at with his film-in-progress. 

“Growing up here in Hawaii I was so star-struck with surfing, and it gave me an opportunity to see surfing from its commercial birth,” he explains. “I don’t think 95% of the surfing public understands anything about our historical past. And to understandwherewe’re going,we need to knowwherewe’ve been.” 

Between filming waves, shouting instructions to his son, and ushering his wife and daughter into the outdoor shower, Jack gives me the gist of the Blue Horizon, his upcoming epic scheduled for release in 2004. “The idea is to introduce my film to an audience of keen surfers that will share the stoke of a good ol’ surfing film. The opportunity to sit in an audience and share your efforts with them on the big screen is the greatest reward for what has been my life’s work.” 

Blue Horizon tracks the sport’s origins and compares surfing for fun to surfing for dollars with David Rastovich as the soul star and Andy Irons as the professional. When Jack began the film, a world title was only a vague twinkle in Irons’s eye. Needless to say, things could not have panned out better. And when the last set before sunset comes, and Irons gets what appears to be the best barrel of the season, and Jack gets it, and Cooper throws his hands in the air to show that he got it, and Kelly and Indiana are hooting from the shower to let us know that maybe they didn’t “get” it but they indeed “get it,” I conclude that things could not have panned out better for the McCoys as well. And the last words I hear before leaving them to their night only confirm this feeling. It’s Cooper, in an excited, boyish voice. “Dad,” he says, “can I check my footage after dinner?”

The Still Photography of Jack McCoy

Captions by Jack McCoy

Michael Peterson had been untouchable in all the events at the time and was clearly “the man” in Australian surfing. He had sort of taken over from Nat. This shot was after he’d won everything there was to win and he was in his schizoid period. I’d worked with Wayne and understood how surf stardom could put undue pressure on a young man. I was living at Fingal, just south of the Gold Coast with my girlfriend and her mom at the time. MP would not talk to many people at the time, but he did come down to our house and get rainwater from our tank; he thought that was the only way to go. He’d spend hours hanging out there under the mango trees speaking about conspiracy theories and how you had to eat fresh veggies.

This sequence was actually shot by Dick Hoole, my partner and great friend. It’s Thornton Falander at Padang on one of those perfect days 20 years ago. He’d walk out there at low tide, climb up this rock, and sit there till it got high enough for guys to go out and surf. He’d be surrounded by water six feet deep. I’d then swim out and do the water shots. Dick would then have to wait till low tide again to climb down off the rock to come back to the beach. He’d be toasted, but we’d be so stoked at what we’d shot that we could hardly contain ourselves.

I’m stoked to see the 15mm and 16mm shots that seem to be the “flavor of the month” making a comeback in the past couple of years. All the great photogs had an extreme wide angle at one stage or another. After Dick and I made some money from Tubular Swells, we bought ourselves Nikons with motor drives.

I bought a Nikor 15mm at the same time. It cost a fortune, but I’d dreamed about it for years. I got a housing made and I shot with that 15mm everywhere, much like guys do today. All you photogs who are trying to copy Scott Aichner (the current master), I’d suggest to take up another fresh look that will set you apart from the rest of the pack. This shot was taken 20 years ago back in my “every shot 15mm lens” period of Made Kassim at Dreamland.

Sunny Garcia back in the Green Iguana period, skinnier and looking grumpy; still one of my favorite surfers for his power and determination. I hope he channels his energy and local popularity into something positive for the kids in Hawaii who look up to him.

Tom Carroll one afternoon at Sunset. He’d just come from surfing Pipe and came by Big Mike’s house and was about to run down to Sunset for the late. I grabbed my camera and swam out to try and get a shot. He paddled out past me and gave me this animated look, I shot it and it was the best shot of the session.

Occ during the Iguana daze. We had a visit to this village with Gordo where Occ and Gordo wanted to try the local stone called betel nut. The local chief had invited them and instead of just chewing it, which takes several chews before you get high, they made a meal out of it and still nothing happened.

Wayne Lynch in his shaping room. I came buy for a visit and he had these bandages on his hands. He was windsurfing down the coast and got his fin caught on a line. He put his sail down and tried to untangle it when he was hooked by a treble in his hand. He ripped it out and swam back to his rig, bleeding big time, in some of the most white pointer infested waters in the world and lived to tell the tale.

G-Force George Greenough. We had a mutual friend named Bowser, one of four brothers who are top cray fishermen on WA’s rugged west coast. At one of the fishing contests George won hands down, which pissed the professional fishermen right off. George caught five different species—and one sea gull—in an hour.

Ross Williams at Pupukea, in front of Martinson’s house, mid-’80s. I stepped out onto the back porch and popped one off—before auto focus cameras—when you actually had to focus the lens. All you auto Japanese finger burners, try and manually shoot those cover shots. Come on, let’s see what you’re made of. (Yuk, yuk.)

Occ during the comeback years. He ripped when he was overweight and I told him so; this pic is the proof.

This was during the mid-’70s Stubbies contest. With the banks at Burleigh perfect from the cove to the pool, waves like this entertained us with the best surfing as close to shore as Pipe. As the audience, you felt right there. Another perfect morning, great swell, light and oily conditions. Bruce Lee on his Murray Mars Bar (said with all due respect).

From Dreamland to Ulu, before Tommy Suharto and his gang surfed the Buduk. It’s virgin still in this shot taken back in the early ’80s. I’d walked all the way down from Ulu to get this shot.

Brenden Margieson in the west. He’s the coolest guy to work with. I dig his surfing and am happy to have helped make people aware of this amazing guy. “Don’t call me Margo.”

Waves and lines I have known. No two are the same. That’s what keeps us all interested.

I clearly remember taking this shot of GL one afternoon at G-Land. I think it might have been my first trip. I was studying backlight, and telling myself that you didn’t need that much detail in a shot, especially if the subject was a surfing icon. His eight-hour go-outs were legendary and to have introduced him to Indo and be able to go on surf trips with him and a few of our friends would have to be some of my best surfing memories ever.

MP. This is one of the first rolls I’d shot with a 35mm lens. It was after my obsession with the 15mm super wide. I was living at Dick’s house between Tubular Swells and Storm Riders. Back then, we had to send our slides to Melbourne to get processed. It took a couple of weeks and when I came home from the beach one day, Dick told me our slides had just come in and I can still remember his smile on his face when he told me I had a jewel of Michael.

Shaun Tomson, Goldie. There was a Toes on the Nose photo contest in Surfer mag, several years after noseriding faded away with the short board. I sent this one to Pez and never heard anything again about it until one day it appeared on the contents page of Surfer. I got about 25 bucks for it and was bummed about never seeing the results of the contest. Common you guys—where’s my prize?