Mucking With Movies: ‘Big Wednesday’

Let’s get the bullocks out of the way right away: This is my final Mucking With Movies for The Aspen Times. Shockingly, I haven’t been fired for turning in my columns late, trying to pick up girls with my press pass, or for the numerous times I snuck in cocaine jokes.

Rather, I got hired back home back East to be the mogul program director for Stratton Mountain School. It’s not quite my dream job, but I’m getting closer. But that means Mucking With Movies must be taken behind the woodshed, as understandably, the Times wants local writers for their local paper. As my final way to annoy my former editor and now the Times publisher, Sarah, I implored her to let me review my favorite all-time flick, “Big Wednesday” written and directed by John Milius and released in 1978. 

Once upon a time, I was sitting around with a film degree I hadn’t used in years and had fallen out of love with movies. While fighting off a rotten hangover, I started binge-watching Dave Bautista flicks. When I got to “Knock at the Cabin,” I started thinking about ending the marathon with a trip to the theater. However, I didn’t want to pay, so something connected in my foggy brain that maybe I could get somebody to pay for it.

I went to see “Blackberry” and wrote a review on spec sitting in my backyard smoking cigarettes on a sunny, spring day and making my roommate read every draft I churned out. I cold-submitted it to Sarah, and she told me she thinks she has space for a biweekly column, but I would need to see more mainstream movies. One “Fast X” review later, I got paid to write for the first time. 

I fell deeply in love with movies again, got to live out my irreverent dream, and perhaps most importantly, I wake up every morning and think about my 10th-grade radio teacher who told me I was talentless, and then I tell him he didn’t know what he was talking about. I’ve broken every rule I was taught about non-fiction writing. I used the first person, shared personal anecdotes, and made stupid jokes. You let me get away with it all — thank you, Sarah. 

The second person I thank is my dad, with whom this review will be intertwined. I would have never found “Big Wednesday” without him and probably never have fallen in love with film without him. I would have been one of those nothing human beings with no passion and no great curiosity about art and how enriching it can be. At the beginning of my ski career, every weekend, he would drive me about nine hours round-trip from Long Island, New York, to Vermont. To occupy me, he gifted me one of those old-school, massive DVD cases full of his favorites. I would watch four to five movies a weekend, one being “Big Wednesday”.

The film begins in 1962, before jumping to 1965, 1968, and finally for a main character reunion in 1974 for the childhood friends to surf the biggest swell their beach had ever seen. Using a trio of Los Angeles area surfers: local legend Matt Johnson (Jan-Michael Vincent), responsible leader Jack (William Katt), and reckless Leroy “The Masochist” (Gary Busey) as vessels to dissect the effect the Vietnam War had on America’s youth, it displays how fast time moved during that era. Remember, we’re talking about kids who went from drinking red wine in hammocks one day to being sent away to fight in a war they didn’t understand the next. Their maturation was somehow both stunted and accelerated. One of the film’s great scenes is in the processing warehouse all have to shuffle through to see if they’re “fit” to serve. Writer/director Milius utilizes scores and scores of extras here better than I have seen in any other film. Deploying them as pawns to display the dehumanization the draftees underwent as they moved from station to station like cattle. 

They return from war to a world they no longer understand. Their neighborhood diner, for example, has turned into a hippie haven that no longer serves the cheeseburger and spaghetti special they grew up on. Matt turns into an old man and then, yells at the waiter “I’m not your brother, and turn down that crappy music.” The film is an hour and a half of heartbreak and eventual triumph masquerading as a gorgeous yet simple surfer slice-of-life film. It is the paramount proof that great art can be about anything. 

“Growing up is hard ain’t it kid” — whenever there is a lull in the conversation, my dad and I quote that line. Most notably using it to shepherd us through tough situations. It’s something I whisper to myself often as I free-fall towards thirty. Spoken by their surfer/life mentor Bear (Sam Melville) to Matt, so succinctly it articulates the struggle of our lives. We have to fight to be happy, almost every day presents us with new challenges we thought ourselves incapable of achieving.

My body aches a lot more than it used to, I have athletes and mentees who look to me for answers, and now I have to sacrifice this column to chase bigger dreams. “Nobody surfs forever” — another poignant piece of advice from Bear, and nobody skis forever either. I’m sure I’ll always be cutting out to put the sticks on my feet, but it’s the metaphysical of it all. The time in my life when there was nothing to worry about but ripping powder and making out in liftie shacks is coming to a sharp end. 

I’ve written here before that it is not art that is important, but the things that art brings into our lives. It brought me Sarah, my unshakable bond with my dad, and it brought me you guys. And with that, I thank you. Thank you if you read, thank you if you laughed, thank you if you emailed me to argue about movies.

Just thanks. 

Critic Score: Enjoy movies, everyone.

Jack Simon is a mogul coach and writer/director who enjoys eating food he can’t afford, traveling to places out of his budget, and creating art about skiing, eating, and traveling while broke. Check out his website jacksimonmakes.com to see his Jack’s Jitney travelogue series. You can email him at jackdocsimon@gmail.com for inquiries of any type.