Filmmaker and former Surfer Magazine editor Steve Barilotti is currently in production of his latest film, “Griffin”, a feature-length documentary exploring the life, art and times of legendary surrealist Rick Griffin. Barilotti is funding ongoing production through a Kickstarter campaign that runs through October 28.
Tall, blonde and strategically scarred, the Psychedelic Revolution could not have had a better avatar than barefooted surfer-artist Rick Griffin.
Equal parts goofball and mystic, Griffin managed to drift into key junctures of West Coast counterculture with uncanny ease. 1950s South Bay surfing, mid-60s Sunset Strip rock and roll, Virginia City Acid Jams, Golden Gate Gathering of The Tribes, The Watts Acid Test, Summer of Love, The Psychedelic Shop, The Oracle, Fillmore concerts, and a lifelong inner-circle relationship with the Grateful Dead. Griffin was both a player and oftentimes icon-maker for all.
By the time the 60s hit shoal water Griffin had inscribed an ornate handcrafted tag on three pillars of west coast counterculture: surfing, psychedelic rock, and underground comics. Actually, four if you include his sublime body of Biblical paintings for the Calvary Chapel, a breakaway evangelic Christian movement considered among the orthodoxy in the early 70s as “The Hippie Church”.
Which is to say it’s a long way from growing up young, white and upper-middle class as a surfer in Eisenhower-era Palos Verdes. It’s in that journey where I find my best story and film.
One of the taglines I’ve been playing around with is Griffin is “The Most Influential Artist You Never Heard Of.” But I’m not being flip. Griffin has had a profound if vastly underrated impact on modern pop culture. For example, the next time you pass a magazine rack check out the latest issue of Rolling Stone. Rick did the original logo for publisher Jann Wenner in 1968.
But way before that Griffin was Surfer Magazine’s primary illustrator, starting in the second issue, 1961. As a 16-year-old surfer and cartoonist, Griffin created “Murphy”, the young, eternally stoked, terminally misunderstood face of surfers during surfing’s post-WWII boom era. But in 1963, at age 19, Griffin suffered a horrific life-changing accident while hitchhiking up to San Francisco to catch a freighter to Australia. While in a morphine coma and not expected to live, Griffin saw fantastic apocalyptic visions that he would later channel into his art.
One of the film’s driving theses is that 50 years ago surfing wasn’t part of counterculture, it WAS counterculture. And surfers were a significant agent of change as they carried their boards and psychedelics up and down Pacific Coast Highway looking for waves. Griffin, a surfer and an artist, provided the critical signposts for a burgeoning youth culture which, for better or worse, is now culture, period. All the Ground Zero fringe movements that Griffin created art for have since become huge post-modern tribes and industries.
My goal is to make a film that I would be stoked to watch…the same way I was inspired when watching Dogtown and Z Boys a decade ago. The story as I see it is that Rick for most of his life was on an authentic, almost Arthurian grailquest for the truth…as a surfer, an artist and a deeply spiritual being. But he struggled with remaining true to that path, as this modern world can be a hard place for those refuse to sell themselves out for the proverbial 30 gold coins.
It’s been said that no two people ever met the same Rick Griffin. Rick’s Rashomon effect is what hooked me as a surf historian and storyteller. Concept: a modern-day shaman works to bring a cosmic awareness and a good laugh to our delusional existence within the Matrix through his art. Plus, I love a rebel.
So basically, NOW is your chance be part of this film on some level. You help to manifest it by bringing something cool to the party whether it be cash, art, photos, footage or stories. I’m working on the Stone Soup model. I’ll provide the kettle, you bring something tasty to toss in. I get to be the cook. That work?
Check out the Kickstarter site…there’s a little vid, some cool artifacts and hidden bonuses. Click around…drink the Koolaid…enjoy!
Steve Barilotti is a former Surfer Magazine editor, writer and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker.
