Matt Adler as Rick Kane, who became one of surfing’s most iconic characters. Photo courtesy of Matt Adler
In surfing, there aren’t too many movies that get it right. Those that do become classics. Movies like Point Break and Big Wednesday. Movies like Endless Summer. And movies like North Shore. It’s endlessly quoted and loved for its perfect amount of cheese. It featured a whole host of top-level surfers, like Gerry Lopez, Laird Hamilton, Mark Occhilupo, and Robbie Page, but the real stars of the show were actors, not surfers. Actors who surfed, yes, but actors first. Matt Adler and John Philbin, cast respectively as Rick Kane and Turtle, made North Shore into one of the most-loved and iconic surf movies of all-time. (Philbin’s wide-ranging interview with The Inertia can be seen here.)
Adler’s road to landing the life-changing role of Rick Kane was winding, but North Shore wasn’t the only classic he had a part in. Before that, he had roles in Teen Wolf and Flight of the Navigator, two of my all-time favorite films. I knew Adler was a surfer, which got me thinking about how a starring role in a surf film would affect one’s day-to-day surfing life, so I called him up to ask. And as the best conversations often do, ours meandered pleasantly through the course of his life.
Adler grew up in Los Angeles and started surfing in the mid-to-late ’70s during the Dogtown and the Z-Boys era. Surfing was growing up and had kickstarted skateboarding. It was morphing into a cultural movement that made a statement about who a person was.
“I started surfing when I was 12 or 13,” Adler remembered. “I had a friend who was a little older than me and he had a car. He was learning to surf, and I had an inherent understanding that surfing was cooler than just about any other sport, so I wanted to do it.”
That friend lent Adler a single fin, one of those classic ’70s boards without much rocker.
“I was tiny, maybe four feet tall,” Adler said. “He basically gave me this 6’4″ single fin, a board that I would covet now. It had kind of a wide point forward, and it looked like it would be perfect for huge point break surf. It had a pulled in swallow tail and it just looked so cool.”
Adler’s maiden voyage was, to my ears at least, something out of a dream: First Point Malibu in its heyday. But when it comes to surfing, no one succeeds right away.
“We paddled out to Malibu, and he goes, ‘Just do what I do,'” Adler laughed. “Then he was gone. I had no idea how to surf or how to get up or how to paddle, you know? I just sort of watched and tried. It took me several sessions to catch a wave or be in the right place. But even so, I was just hooked.”
Over the next few years, Adler continued surfing, like thousands of other Los Angeles kids. He had an eye on Hollywood too, like thousands of other Los Angeles kids, and soon landed a couple of commercials. Those led to a small part on a show called Trapper John, MD, a spinoff of M.A.S.H., and then came Teen Wolf. That was in the early ’80s, five years before North Shore was released.
“It was really great experience for me,” he said of Teen Wolf. “I made great friends on the set of that movie, and started to learn. It was like my first dance. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know where to stand or where to look or what anybody’s jobs were. It was all brand new, and I just loved it.”
Next was Flight of the Navigator, which served as a trampoline into the leading role in North Shore.
“The director of that movie was Randal Kleiser, who produced the North Shore,” Adler explained. After we’d finished Flight of the Navigator, I was back in Los Angeles, going on auditions. He called me and said, ‘Hey, Matt, do you happen to surf?’ I said, ‘Yes, as a matter of fact I do.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, that’s awesome. We’re gonna make this surf movie in Hawaii. Would you audition?'”
Adler, of course, said yes. He needed to make a video that proved he could surf because Universal Pictures didn’t want to give the leading part to a surfer who’d never acted before. But it was difficult to find an actor who could surf well enough, so Adler enlisted a friend’s help, lugged a giant ’70s camera down to Zuma Beach on a junky three-foot day, and got to work. Adler wasn’t sure that his skill level was high enough to be considered for the role, but once he saw the footage, Kleiser was convinced that he’d found his man.
“I was able to get a couple of waves and a couple of turns, and that was it,” Adler recalled. “I sent it to Randal [Kleiser]. He was like, ‘Oh, I can’t believe it. You really do surf.’ I guess they had a lot of people who couldn’t make a video and Randal and the director really wanted a someone to play that part that could bring more credibility and to have the surfing footage be authentic.”
And so Adler suddenly found himself on a plane heading for Hawaii, his heart in his throat and his nerves firing on all cylinders. He was an avid surfer, and like many young men his age at the time, had his surf heroes — many of whom were set to be acting alongside him in his first leading role.
“The first night that I was in Hawaii, prepping to shoot the movie, I went to dinner with Ken Bradshaw, Randal Kleiser, and Gerry Lopez,” he told me. “I think Mark Foo was at this dinner, too. Just imagine: I’m a 20-year-old who’s grown up surfing in Southern California. My room was full of posters of these guys. I can barely speak. I’m just listening to them talk about movies and surfing. And Gerry says to me — this is one of the first things Gerry Lopez ever said to me — ‘Matt, tell me this isn’t going to be another anchor around the neck of surfing.'”
The pressure, as you’d imagine, was immense, but throughout the course of filming, things got a little more comfortable. Not only because Adler got to know his heroes as humans, but because he realized something important: although they were surfers, he was an actor. They were acting in a surfing movie, so they, for the most part, were nervous too.
Matt Adler as Rick Kane, on his way to becoming one of surfing’s most beloved characters. Photo: Courtesy Matt Adler
“Once we were doing acting scenes, then I was more in my milieu, and I felt much more confident doing that than I did paddling out to Waimea with Ken Bradshaw and Gerry Lopez and Mark Foo. That was an incredible experience that I treasure and I’m so lucky that I got to do, but that was… uncomfortable for me. I would imagine that some of the other guys were really, really nervous to be on camera trying to shoot a movie.”
One of the greatest things about North Shore is that it’s not a film that should have worked. It was wonderfully kitschy, full of slightly wooden acting (looking at you, Laird), and incredible amounts of cheese. But it did work. It felt immediately nostalgic. It had that certain indescribable something that makes a film a cult classic.
“That’s what happens to a cult movie,” Adler chuckled when I asked him if he had any idea why North Shore became as popular as it did. “Those moments become touchstones where people in the audience go crazy after they’ve seen it 50 times and they still want to see it again. I don’t have an explanation. I had no idea it would become this, especially since it bombed in the theater. It made zero money. It was gone in a couple of weeks, and then, you know, this thing happened. I can’t explain it.”
When the movie was first released, the premise was, to be frank, ridiculous. A kid from Arizona wins a contest in a wave pool, takes his giant check for $500, and goes to “ride the big waves of the North Shore.” Wave pools in the 1980s were not the wave pools of today. The wave pools of today were not even considered possible, save for in the mind of some sci-fi obsessed surfer. In a funny little bit of trivia, the shooting location that was supposed to be Big Surf in Tempe, Arizona in the movie has become the Palm Springs Surf Club. Adler recently got the chance to give that wave a shot, and all these years later, it was a hard thing for him to wrap his head around.
“Kalani Robb got in touch with me to go down and surprise his partner, Cheyne Magnusson, and surf that pool with those guys,” Adler said. “We pulled in and it’s the same place. I couldn’t handle it. My mind was so blown. It’s interesting, you know? Look at the wave pool in the movie and then look at the footage from Palm Springs Surf Club now. That’s the evolution of the wave pool.”
To make things even stranger, in a moment reminiscent of that first dinner in Hawaii, Adler was joined at the Palm Springs Surf Club by Caity Simmers, Sierra Kerr, and Italo Ferreira.
“It was this full-on pro lineup,” Adler laughed. “They wanted to surf the hollowest, gnarliest waves. It was a little bit of a hellscape for me, but it was an incredible experience.”
As it turned out, North Shore was a look into our present. A time when a kid who grows up in a wave pool very well could become a champion surfer. Adler and John Philbin are fast friends to this day, and they spoke about that a few years ago.
Although they didn’t know each other before North Shore, they became lifelong friends. Photo: Matt Adler//Instagram
“John said, ‘You know, the whole premise of the movie North Shore is going to come true,'” Adler said. “‘There’s a kid who’s going to have learned how to surf in a wave pool and will become a world champion. It’s gonna happen.’ The premise of the movie was so far-fetched that no one would ever have thought that. And now it’s happening.”
The idea of a North Shore sequel or remake has been floating around for years. Adler is not a fan of that idea, despite the fact that it would likely be a payday for him since North Shore would not be North Shore without him. But as Point Break proved — as well as countless other remakes — adding to a classic almost never works.
“I’m not one of the people who wants to see a North Shore 2,” Adler said. “You’d think I would, but I don’t. How often does anybody ever make a decent movie that’s a sequel to something that’s so beloved or cultish and how many times does that work out? Does it not just dilute the strength and the magic of the first one? I just don’t see any good that can come from it today. That’s the truth. It’s a nostalgic cult classic, and who wants to mess with that?”
Adler during a trip to the Telo Islands. Photo: Matt Adler//Instagram
These days, Adler and his wife, Laura San Giacomo (of Pretty Woman, Quigley Down Under, The Stand, and Just Shoot Me!) are devoted to a noble cause, an organization called Momentum Wheels for Humanity.
It’s extraordinarily important work done by a dedicated team. Founded as a grassroots effort, Momentum Wheels for Humanity collects used wheelchairs in the U.S. and restores them to manufacturers’ standards before sending them all over the world to places where professional occupational and physical therapists volunteer to individually fit people in need.
“We procure, assess and deliver mobility devices for people around the world who don’t have access to wheelchairs,” Adler explained. “It started out as a very humble, small organization with a warehouse in North Hollywood. We would collect people’s used wheelchairs and crutches — anything we get our hands on — and we would refurbish them. I’d be in the warehouse refurbishing wheelchairs that we would then get FedEx to donate a container and a flight to Nicaragua or Indonesia or Guatemala. We would set up these seating days to get kids literally off the floor, kids who are disabled, and give them a way to get to school and out into their community because now they can.”
Like any valuable grassroots organization, Momentum Wheels for Humanity has grown into something amazing.
“It evolved over a long period of time,” Adler said. “Now we’re a major NGO in Ukraine and war torn countries with amputees, people who were injured in war.”
The current administration’s crippling cuts to USAID, however, have thrown a wrench into their very important gears.
“Ninety percent of our funding comes from USAID,” Adler explained. “We are literally shut down. It’s just awful. It really is. It’s awful what they’re doing. People have no idea how much good is not going to be done. The ripple effect is that people are going to die. People are gonna die from this.”
To donate to Momentum Wheels for Humanity, click here. You can find other ways to help here.
