You Don’t Mock the Gods
The Story Behind Tom Curren s Offbeat New Search Vid
Sean Doherty
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“Curren’s in Mexico?”
Concomitant with any Curren project, this one began with an air of mystery. This wasn’t so much a search for Tom Curren. Nobody knew he’d even gone.
Two unmarked hard drives of footage turned up in the mail late last year at Rip Curl. Tom Curren, it turns out, had disappeared down to Mexico halfway through last year, shortly before the pandemic closed the border. He’d stayed in Mexico for three months with good friend, Buggs Arico who owns a joint at Salina Cruz. Australian filmer, Andy Potts had tagged along with cameras but no real plan to shoot anything. With the pandemic spreading through Mexico, shortly after they arrived the
Watch Tom Curren Surfing A Perfect Mexican Pointbreak
“Free Scrubber” might be the surf film the world needs right now. cinema // Jan 27, 2021
“In light of all of this mondo swell rampage and He-Man testosterone gnarliness, maybe there couldn’t be a better time to watch a fifty-year-old surfing a two foot point break,” says Vaughan Blakey, director in charge of making sense of a hard drive full of Tom Curren’s COVID sessions, aka “Free Scrubber”.
Vaughan needs little introduction here, but one thing to note us just how much he still loves surfing. You can hear it in his voice when he says that he got the footage of Tom Curren posted up in Mexico last year from Andy Potts and went “what the fuck am I even looking at!?” Vaughan says that Curren’s raw lines got him as “pumped” as they did when he first saw them as a boy.
Watch Now: Tom Curren Disappears to Mexico in “Free Scrubber”
Chronicling a three-month Mexican sojourn with the Santa Barbara legend
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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
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