Big Wednesday
| Big Wednesday | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | John Milius |
| Produced by | Buzz Feitshans |
| Screenplay by | Dennis Aaberg John Milius |
| Starring |
Jan-Michael Vincent William Katt Gary Busey Lee Purcell Darrell Fetty |
| Narrated by | Robert Englund |
| Music by | Basil Poledouris |
| Cinematography | Bruce Surtees |
| Edited by | C. Timothy O'Meara Robert L. Wolfe |
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Production
company |
A-Team Productions
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| Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
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Release date
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Running time
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120 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $11,000,000 |
| Box office | $4.5 million |
Big Wednesday is a 1978 American coming of age film directed by John Milius. Co-written by Milius and Dennis Aaberg, it is loosely based on their own experiences at Malibu and a short story Aaberg had published in a 1974 Surfer Magazine entitled "No Pants Mance." The picture stars Jan-Michael Vincent, William Katt, and Gary Busey as California surfers facing life and the Vietnam War against the backdrop of their love of surfing.
The film tells the story of three young friends whose passion in life is surfing. The friends include: Matt Johnson (Jan-Michael Vincent), a self-destructive type who has a devil-may-care attitude; Jack Barlowe (William Katt), the calm and responsible one of the bunch; and Leroy "The Masochist" Smith (Gary Busey), whose nickname tells a lot about his personality.
Their surfing lives are traced from the summer of 1962 to their attempts of dodging the Vietnam War draft in 1965 (including faking insanity, homosexuality, and all manner of medical ailments), and to the end of their innocence in 1968 when one of their friends is killed in Vietnam. The three make the difficult transition to adulthood with parties, surf trips, marriage, and the war.
The friends reunite years later, after Barlowe has served time in Vietnam, for the "Great Swell of '74." With this reunion, the transition in their lives becomes the end point of what the 1960s meant to so many as they see that the times have changed, and what was once a time of innocence is gone forever.
Raised in Southern California, Milius made Big Wednesday as an homage to the time he spent in Malibu during his youth. Milius and his friends George Lucas and Steven Spielberg famously agreed to exchange a percentage point of Big Wednesday, Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind prior to the release of the three films throughout 1977-78. Spielberg in particular was certain that Big Wednesday was going to be a box office hit, opining it was like "American Graffiti meets Jaws", two of the decade's most successful films.
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Wikipedia