Rip Curl Presents 'Free Scrubber' - Starring Tom Curren

Rip Curl HQ, Torquay, Australia: In early 2020 when the world was locking down in the beginnings of the Covid-19 pandemic Rip Curl got word from Tom Curren @curfuffle that he was heading to Mexico with old friend Buggs Arico to surf and avoid the carnage which was unfolding across the USA. Disease, riots, protest – a hot bed of change, emotion and confusion. As usual, Tom took to the ocean as a way of making sense of it.

We weren’t quite sure where it would lead. Soon after they let us know that photographer @andypotts would be heading down there too and that he would shoot whatever happens over a 6 week period – although it could have been longer – as no one was really counting as the waves blurred into the days and the days blurred into the waves.

Buggs has the Punta Conejo Resort south of the border @puntaconejoresort and it would prove a fantastic bolt hole to hide out: surfing and making music as time spun into a world of whatever for the trio.

Over the period Rip Curl had sporadic contact with the crew, sometimes from Andy trying to get home and back to Australia and back to the USA (that’s another story for another time), other times from Tom himself to wish us all well when things looked uncertain and to talk surf.

We know Tom worked on boards a lot, fin design, switching between a new Channel Islands twin fin model and his skimboard spacecraft quiver using the long right points as a laboratory for flow. He also played a lot of music, much of which appears in the film.

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.

A great Tom Curren edit does two things.

Firstly, it just lets him surf. You don’t tamper with the genius of the man and his surfboard. Just put him on a righthand point, roll the tape and get out of the way. Secondly, it needs to stop searching for him. For decades now filmmakers (and everybody else) have tried to paint some kind of definitive picture of Curren, the man, the surfer… and Curren has defied them at every turn. He now appears to be toying with them, creating a caricature of himself. He can’t be found, he can’t be interviewed, or he turns up on a smoking day riding a backyard skimboard held together by gaff tape. The metaphorical Search for Tom Curren is today a waste of time. He clearly doesn’t want to be found. There is however a loophole here. If you don’t set out to look for him, then maybe – just maybe – you might just get a glimpse of the man. The best way to find Tom Curren is not to look for him. This brings us to Mexico, last year.

With the pandemic roaring through California, Curren bailed south to Salina Cruz with long-time buddy, Buggs Arico who owns a joint down there. Soon after they arrived, the Mexican border closed and the local Federales cleared all the surfing gringos out of town… except for Tom and Buggs. They stayed for three months down there, on their own, the only surfers in town and with the point at Salina Cruz to themselves. Tagging along on the trip was Australian filmer, Andy Potts who had his cameras, but no real plan. A closed, three-month shoot with Tom Curren on a Mexican sand point however was too good an opportunity to miss. The cameras rolled.

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.