On March 29, 2022, the surfing world lost iconic surfer, shaper, designer, and artist Dick Brewer, but his contributions can still be felt today in the form of surfboard design as well as historical and cultural influence. Now, there’s another way to interact with the legendary shaper’s life in the form of a documentary. The Shape of Things: The Dick Brewer Story, which documents the life and career of surfing’s “Da Vinci of design.”
Currently screening, the film premiered in Hawaii in July and won the opening night of the Honolulu Surf Film Festival, claiming both the Audience Choice and Best Feature Award. The documentary also debut on the mainland last weekend in San Diego at the La Paloma Theatre in Encinitas.
The film explores the mysterious, emotional life of Brewer and also provides a lens into surf culture at large from the 1960s to the present. Brewer’s career pushed the limits of big wave surfing and approaches to the sport, but in 1974, his life changed forever when a car accident on Maui resulted in the death of his son and severe injuries to his daughter and himself. This tragic event led to years of introspection, but Brewer ultimately emerged with yet another boundary shattering design: his invention of the tow board in the ’90s, unlocking the secrets of surfing XXL waves like never before.
The film utilizes interviews, narratives, and archival footage from countless iconic figures in the surf world including Garrett McNamara, Jericho Poppler, Jock Sutherland, Laird Hamilton, Buzzy Kerbox, Darrick Doerner, and Kai Lenny, to name a few.
I spoke with director and executive producer Bob Campi as well as writer Jim Kempton to learn more about the making of the documentary that profiles this iconic character. Campi is a four-time Emmy award winning cinematographer and an executive producer of several feature films and shorts. As a Director of Photography for Entertainment Tonight and NBC News for 32 years, Campi has traveled the world documenting history’s most impactful events.
Kempton is an award-winning writer and former editor-in-chief of SURFER magazine who co-wrote The Shape of Things. He is the author of four books: First We Surf, Then We Eat and Women On Waves. Currently, he is the President of the California Surf Museum in Oceanside, California, and has served as project director for a 70-foot surf exploration vessel, the Indies Trader, which traversed the globe in search of new wave discoveries while mapping the location and health of the world’s reefs.
For Campi, his career as an international photojournalist and technical producer for NBC News in the mid ‘90s gave him the opportunity to work on some of the most important stories in history.
“Having traveled the world, mostly in war zone environments, I had the opportunity to observe my colleagues, some of which were the most polished producers, reporters and anchors of the day,” he said. Experiences such as traveling to Tel Aviv in 2003 to surf in Gaza while on assignment gave Campi the time to hone his skills as a storyteller.
But his interest in Brewer stemmed from “a love for designs, shapes, artistic expressions, and the approach to surfboard crafting.” Which he says really stimulated his search for Dick Brewer.
“A number of factors contributed to telling this story,” he says, “the most complicated being the arrival of the global pandemic in 2022. The pandemic stopped the world, and with it, the entertainment industry.”
At the time, Campi’s career had merged into the world of digital cinematography, working on scripted television and feature films. “Our industry was greatly affected,” he said. “Personally, I was intrigued by the idea of finding Dick Brewer and telling his story and as I put the wheels in motion, I set out with my camera crew for an empty Hawaiian Island in search of his disciples willing to talk about the master of design.”
The pandemic was a blessing in disguise. Campi explained: “The surf culture is a small knit community, especially on the North Shore of Hawaii. ‘The Coconut Wireless’ as its called, a unique form social connectivity akin to the Islanders, and once we arrived, the word got out.”
“It was never a problem finding people to talk about Dick… the beauty of it all was we were all in quarantine. Every significant interview we needed was there, and nobody could leave the island, so we never had a shortage of people, most of them esteemed in surfing history themselves. They were all willing to share their stories about themselves and Dick’s life and career.”
However, for writer Jim Kempton, even with his extensive experience, writing a documentary screenplay is very different from writing a fiction screenplay. “With a fiction screenplay, you just write the dialogue that you want, and the actors say it.” With this documentary, the team had to source out people to discuss Brewer’s life and hope the responses would craft a compelling, accurate story. In total the team ended up interviewing around 50 individuals spanning the entire surf industry.
“I would talk to the interviewees for an hour to get maybe five minutes of what we wanted out of the interview,” Kempton said. “It’s hard for people. They don’t know what you’re looking for. You don’t want to tell them, ‘hey, say this.’”
This method, however, helped in maintaining authenticity when diving into such a vulnerable story of an icon’s life. Kempton said, “Dick had some real struggles in his life, like everyone does. No one’s life is as it seems on the outside, especially when it comes to famous people.”
Kempton had known Dick Brewer for a while before becoming friends with him, which also helped in writing the documentary. “I had gotten to know [Brewer], but it was when he was older,” Kempton said. “I didn’t really know him when he was in his prime because he was such an icon. As a kid, you’re intimidated to even be around those people.”
As Kempton learned what the shaper was about, he reflected on his wide influence. “He influenced so many other board builders. He was such an inspiration to so many people, in terms of his designs. He created the building blocks of what every other shaper has taken and used since the shortboard revolution. It was compelling for me to work on something about a figure that needed the story to be told because it’s affected so much in the way of what we ride and how we surf.”
What does Kempton believe people will take away from this film? “Every person has a life that is full of tragedies and triumphs, but so many people look at their heroes or famous people, and they imagine them to have lived a very different life than the actual life they lived,” he said. “They only know about the great victories and the great achievements, and they don’t know about the other part. This is a movie that maybe makes some of that more apparent.”
“My hope is that the takeaway from this film is an educational look into the artistic medium of a surfboard shaper and designer,” Campi said. “Our mission was to transition the generations: many surf films are produced telling stories about surfers, and in our case, we profiled a shaper.”
Profiling a shaper also allows people a specific storyline to follow to gain insight into history on a more general scale. “Through the lens of Dick Brewer, I began to transition through six decades of surfing history,” Campi said. “Each segment serves as a microcosm of its own individual history. The film has its historical foundation through the eyes of Dick, but audiences young and old have the opportunity to relate.”
