Doug Pray Captures the Long, Strange Surfing Safari of One Family in Surfwise.
By Terry Keefe
9 kids. 2 parents. One camper. Three decades. And lot of surfing. Dr. Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz was a successful physician living in Honolulu, when he decided to drop out of society, home school his children, travel the world on a shoestring, surf every day, and keep his family on an extremely strict diet and health regimen. The journey of the Paskowitz family is the subject of the new feature Surfwise from documentarian Doug Pray (Hype! and Scratch). For some, “dropping off the grid” the way the Paskowitz family did would seem to be the ultimate American dream. For others, the equivalent nightmare. Surfwise reveals that it turned out to be a lot of both.
Pray himself wasn’t a surfer and admits to knowing little about the surfing community, much less the Paskowitz clan, when he was approached by the producers to direct the film. Recalls Pray of how he became involved, “I was initially most concerned that they wanted me to do what would essentially be a tribute film. Doc is an amazing guy and he’s widely regarded in the surfing community. He has very profound thoughts about health and diet. But I didn’t see the whole story right away. It wasn’t until I started hearing about the incredible lives of these 9 kids and how they felt about their upbringing now, that it all started to come together for me. This wasn’t a surfing movie. It was much more complex than that. It was a movie about raising your kids. About fatherhood and motherhood.”
The interviews with the adult Paskowitz children reveal a whole range of emotions towards their unconventional childhoods. Some are still very much with the program, believing that it was a great way to grow up. And others seem filled with anger that they lost opportunities to develop social skills that they’ll never get back, and they complain of the career limitations that their lack of institutional education saddled them with. What they all are is very honest about their opinions, which Pray says was a big blessing for the film. “Nothing is stifled with them,” Pray explains, “They’re all these amazing personalities. And they’re very candid.”
A particularly disturbing part of Surfwise occurs when the eldest son, David Paskowitz, who has grown up to be a musician and singer in a number of bands, sings to the camera a very dark, heavy metal-themed song that he has written about his father. It turns out that the interview session with David was actually the first of the film. David is the first-born son who took on the role of “captain” of the family, but had since become estranged from them. And there is quite a bit of torment within him revealed during the interview. Elaborates Pray on that initial interview, “It just so happened that David was a fan of my films Hype! and Scratch. I’m not saying to toot my horn, but just to say that it’s a total fluke. If I were Errol Morris, he probably wouldn’t have been interviewed by me. It made the film. The bottom line is after that first day, I said, ‘Wow, we’ve got a movie here.’ It sounds so mercenary, but I am a filmmaker, and I know you need conflict to tell a good story. But it also meant that I had a lot of work to do, because I wanted to show both the good and the bad. This is a great family. This isn’t Capturing the Friedmans. The hardest thing for me wasn’t shooting the film, but balancing it out in the editing room. So that people can go on the journey with the family and see their dreams. And to understand that there is always a price to pay for dreams. But to let the audience figure that out for themselves, and not to trash the family.”
Surfwise is currently in theatrical release in Los Angeles and New York. Check out the website here: www.SurfwiseFilm.com for show times and more information on the film.
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