Rip Curl Presents 'Free Scrubber' - Starring Tom Curren

The keyboard solo “Buggsy’s Nose Ding Lament” is a classic; and he scored the “Free Scrubber Theme” a jazz, fusion, electro track under the big day of waves at the end of the film when he got back to the USA. Songs which echo in your head when surfing after watching the film. Other artists Israeli Chicks, Mylee Grace and the Goons of Doom fit perfectly in the mix.

The resulting movie “Free Scrubber” – which was put together by @vaughandeadly and @nickpollet – pulls it all together in a way no one could have expected. Speaking with Andy it became clear that the story of their time could not be told in a documentary or linear way. It was just too much to expect, too hard to explain “if you weren’t there you would never know”. So with his blessing we took the footage and gave it to the boys to create “Free Scrubber” part surf film, part wanged-out comedy, part buddy movie, part Search trip all rolled into one.

The only mandate was make the intro explode the myth, show the sense of fun and irreverence in Tom and don’t cut any waves up – let the surfing flow from start to finish – Andy’s world class drone footage highlighting Tom’s approach. So we sent ‘em two hard drives worth of content and said “Go for it…”

Hot on the heels of our 2020 collaboration on “Postcards From Morgan”, we hope you enjoy it.

Below Sean Doherty, editor of Surfing World writes up Vaughan’s version of making Rip Curl’s “Free Scrubber” come to life.

Later in the year, two unmarked hard drives turned up in the mail at Rip Curl and were passed to filmmaker Vaughan Blakey. The footage from Mexico bent his brain. His first thoughts were to do nothing; just run it as it was. “You could have just run the raw footage and it would have been all-time,” he said. “With Curren it would have made perfect sense.” Instead, Blakey took on the daunting task of editing a Tom Curren film, a task made even more daunting by the fact he’d never actually met Curren. “The weirdest thing with me and Curren is that, after 25 years of working on surf mags, of all people in surfing there are two guys I’ve never met – Ross Clarke-Jones and Tom Curren. When I started working at Waves, Curren was already off making Litmus with Ank and Frank. He’d already disappeared.”

The fact that movies like Litmus and Searching For Tom Curren – filmed at the point when Curren departed the scene in the ‘90s and was at his most influential – have become cult classics weighed heavy. These early renderings of Curren and his surfing built a reverent, enigmatic picture of the man. Vaughan Blakey however doesn’t make those kind of movies. His surf films have been goofing it up since Kelly Slater was Groovy Avalon, and he’s become the master of the mongo-fun surf edit. So what to do with this? A Curren comedy? Curren can be hilariously funny, but his humour is so deadpan and high concept that it’s almost impossible to detect in real life, let alone capture on film. Andy’s footage was a mix of surf action and strange cinema verité scenes as Tom squirrels away on surfboards he’s modified from spare parts lying around. Typical Tom though. If the camera came out he’d stop whatever he was doing. Andy had to steal moments, but over the course of three months the camera became less intrusive, and Curren went about daily life as if unobserved. Under a white-hot Mexican sun, things got both brilliant and weird.

But like a Lynch film, there was also an unsettling vibe to it. The whole scene in Salina Cruz was already a little unsettling. For starters, the surf town was empty. The pandemic had cleaned all gringos out. There was also some bad juju with the locals, who were a bit on edge about them being there. But the unsettling nature of the edit comes largely from not knowing what the hell is actually going on. “I was watching it,” recalls Vaughano, “just going, imagine walking in on this scene. What is actually happening here? Would you find it funny? Would you be buzzing, or would you be going, ‘Holy shit, this is actually a little disturbing’? You just don’t know what’s actually going on.”

"Holy shit, this is actually a little disturbing? You just don’t know what’s actually going on.”

The edited result was right on the edge. “And that’s what I felt like I was watching the whole time. What the hell is going on here? What’s happening here? And it just had this great sort of balance of being really funny, but really out there at the same time.” Blakey twigged on what he needed to do. A great Curren edit needs to pose more questions about Curren than it answers.

The surfing in the film, however, spoke truth. “The waves he’s surfing are just these beautiful, playful little right points and his surfing... I reckon there’s turns in there that look identical, in zappiness and zippiness and positioning and just light-footed fun to some of the turns he was doing when he was young. He’s just so green-limbed, it’s amazing. You look at Curren and you can see it. You can see a pathway to a bright surfing future if you’re north of 40. Whereas with Kelly… no one can really relate to it. It’s almost like, ‘Why do you want to try that hard?’ But Curren’s surfing, for all the rest of us, it’s just like, ‘Yes.’ It’s a license to not try too hard. You can get on a wave and stand there and just enjoy the glide and make it look like the most natural thing on earth.”