Dim The House Lights: Vale Jack McCoy

Lights down. Curtains open.

“I want to thank you all for coming to see my first surfing film,” said the man on the stage. “My name is Bruce Brown and I’ll be narrating the movie for you with some music I’ve added that will act as the soundtrack.”

The year was 1961 and Bruce Brown was touring his first film, Slippery When Wet. The venue on this night was Kailua Intermediate School, on Oahu’s east-side, where 13-year old Jack McCoy was in seventh grade.

From the moment the movie started the crowd, seated cheek by jowl on cafeteria-style benches, went crazy.

“I was hooked,” Jack wrote of the event later on, “laughing out loud at his jokes, oohing and aahing at the wipeouts, and applauding a great ride when coaxed by Bruce to acknowledge what he’d been able to capture.”

“Too soon it was all over. I wanted more. Everyone clapped and cheered Bruce for a good three minutes when the movie ended, well past the time it took him to go back, turn on the lights, stop the projector, walk back up to the stage and take a bow to thank us all for coming to see his movie.”

“I didn’t want the night to end yet soon we were in our car going home. That night I didn’t go to sleep for ages. I tried to replay the first and second half of the films in my head.”

“As I look back at it now, it was Bruce sharing the stoke that got me and planted the seed of what would later become my life’s work.”

Born in Los Angeles 1948, Jack McCoy moved with his family to Hawaii in 1954, where he began surfing Oahu’s windward east side while being drawn into the nascent surfing world. He handed out movie bills for travelling showmen like Bruce Brown and Bud Browne while competing in South Shore contests with the likes of Gerry Lopez and Dennis Pang.

Placing sixth in the opens of a state contest, McCoy won a trip to Australia alongside Lopez and Pang - his first visit to the country he’d later call home.

Two years later he moved to Australia for good, settling in Torquay where he opened up The Summer House, a health food restaurant. The menu was right on in terms of matching the prevailing culture, where macrobiotic wholefoods were devoured between joints packed like trumpets, yet it was only ever a means to an end.

Jack continued his roustabout work, plugging films for Alby Falzon, David ‘The Mexican’ Sumpter, and Americans Greg MacGillivray and Jim Freeman, who gave him the rights to show Five Summer Stories around Australia.

Jack on the hustle near Cactus, keeping the work/play ledger evenly balanced (Dick Hoole)

In the early-seventies, Jack teamed up with Dick Hoole, who he first met in Hawaii in 1969, and the pair formed a media team. Dick’s initial foray into photography was simply to prove to mates that he had surfed in Hawaii yet he had a knack for manual focus and was canny enough to note his surroundings. 

“It was like Young Talent Time,” says Dick of the blossoming surf scene, “everyone was interested in surfing.” And they needed photos. Jack moved up to Gold Coast, near where Dick lived, and the duo formed Propellor Productions - a name Jack came up with - selling photos to print media.

Working as a roustabout for surf filmers gave Jack enough insight into the process for his chutzpah - something the big fella had in spades - to take over. “Mexican brought out ‘On Any Morning’ and hired us to show it,” says Dick. “Jack and I looked at each other and said, ‘Fuck, if Mex can do it, then why can’t we?’”

Dick bought a 16mm Bolex off Pa Bendall from the Sunshine Coast - a Swiss-made camera with a wind up mechanism. “We weren’t graduates of Brooks Film Institute,” laughs Dick, “but we had the same camera McGillivray/Freeman used. That was all we needed.”

Connections also helped. Jack showed his old friend Gerry Lopez a photo he’d taken of Wayne Lynch at Uluwatu. Lopez had, to that point, been dismissive of Bali but after seeing photographic evidence he had an air ticket booked in a week, while Jack McCoy and Dick Hoole followed him there.

'Have camera, will travel': Dick Hoole and Jack McCoy - then known as Propellor Productions - packing light (Carmel Hunter)

‘Tubular Bells’, Mike Oldfield’s experimental album, came out in 1973, while ‘Tubular Swells’, Hoole/McCoy’s first feature film, was filmed in 1973 and 1974, then edited and released in 1975. “We edited it in my Mermaid Waters editing room in March 1975,” says Dick, “which was when the famous 28 day swell hit Burleigh.”

Hoole and McCoy - who’d by then dropped the Propellor moniker and stylised themselves as ‘Hoole/McCoy’, “because it was similar to McGillivray/Freeman,” says Dick - took the film on the road where Jack could indulge his bonhomie.

“Jack was a showman,” says Dick, “I’m more quiet but Jack’s a natural on stage.”

‘Tubular Swells’ was a success so, with the help of David Lourie, they continued their momentum into a short film, ‘A Day In The Life Of Wayne Lynch’ and after that their full-length follow up. Released in 1982, ‘Storm Riders’ premiered at Sydney’s Opera House and was backed by a roll call of young Australian rock groups: INXS, Sunnyboys, The Models, The Church. 

“I read something where Steven Spielberg said that ‘music is 50% of the movie-going experience.’” Jack told Jamie Brisick in an article that appeared in The Surfer’s Journal. “I’d always felt that, but coming from Spielberg only confirmed my gut feelings.”

Securing the rights to ‘Down Under’ by Men At Work proved problematic, so after the umpteenth pleasant-but-pointless phone call to their record label, Jack went straight to the source. Saw them at Narrabeen Pub where he talked his way backstage, launched into a spiel, and after a quick vote - unanimous apparently - the band granted him permission to use the track. It’s Rabbit Bartholemew's finest five minutes on film.

Music would always provide the emotion to Jack’s films and in later years he repeated versions of his backstage bumrush to great effect, securing songs by The Foo Fighters and even Paul McCartney.

If viewers stuck around for the credits to ‘Storm Riders’ they’d also have seen a clue to Jack’s future direction: ‘Made in association with Rip Curl.’

In the early-to-mid-eighties, the surf industry was booming and marketing was becoming more complex. The larger surf companies, such as Rip Curl and Quiksilver, began funding movies that put their sponsored riders on the big screen. Later that year Hoole and McCoy - again with the help of David Lourie - made ‘Kong’s Island’ for Quiksilver. ‘Kong’s Island’ introduced Gary ‘Kong’ Elkerton to the world, hamming it up for the cameras with sidekicks Rabbit and Chappy, also Quik riders, in tow.

“It was a creative time, and Jack, as usual, blended in to all the happenings like a chameleon,” said Rabbit of the period. “He had mastered the art of having his subjects not even notice the camera, and was always on to the surf when it was pumping.” 

Ostensibly a ten-minute appetiser to The Performers - which was considered the first straight-to-video surf movie - Kong’s Island endured where the main attraction didn’t, and it introduced many elements Jack later employed in his films: Fictional, often silly, stories wrapped around real people and places. The surfing was documented with intensity, yet everything else was open to diversion.

Gary 'Kong' Elkerton - 'cleverly camouflaged in his red and white star suit' - with Chappy Jennings and Rabbit Bartholemew in 'Kong's Island'.

There were no fallow periods in Jack McCoy’s professional life, yet the mid-to-late-eighties saw him less productive than usual. He split up with Dick Hoole, moved to LA, the town of his birth, and considered filmmaking in a more studied way. Like a good student he began toying with the form. Jack’s sole output during this period was Surf Hits Vol. 1, Jungle Jet Set, a film that he was proud of simply because it was so different to anything else he did.

“Up until then,” Jack once said, “I made my movies in the same vein as the original surfing films, more of a travelogue with narration. “With Surf Hits we picked up the ‘All Rockin’, No Talkin’ formula using the music as a form of storytelling, and for the first time I started to play with computer graphics.”

Coming back to Australia in 1989, Jack teed up Quiksilver to fund a film project that would see him sailing across the Pacific, then rendezvous with world-class surfers and film the results. Quik pulled the pin on that idea - though a version of it would sail ten years later for the Quiksilver Crossing - which left Jack holding the can. The yacht was hired, provisions bought, and he’d even invited a female acquaintance.

Though he’d had girlfriends before, bachelor life suited Jack well - he travelled on a whim, answered to no-one - but that all ended following a blind date. Kelly was the younger sister of Tracy Simpson, who was married to Western Australian surf pioneer George Simpson.

The cross-Pacific sailing trip continued, it resulted in no film projects but solidified the relationship between the couple. Kelly, who had entrepreneurial zeal, played an influential role in Jack's next professional chapter - arguably the most important of his creative life.

When Billabong were organising a trip to the north-west desert, company founder and CEO Gordon Merchant made sure Jack - who’d never worked with Merchant or Billabong before - got a seat in the Troopy. There was no discussion about what to shoot or how it’d be presented. Jack then stayed a further week when Occy turned up.

A rough cut from that trip was motivation enough to send Jack on the next trip into the South Australian desert, and then also film some sequences on the Gold Coast.

“Pretty soon I'd done all these little sequences,” Jack told Swellnet, “and Gordon gave me a budget to make the movie for him.”

However, what Gordon Merchant didn’t know was that Jack had grander plans than he’d let on. With Kelly’s confidence, he tipped in $10,000 of his own money into the project.

“I'd been thinking long and hard about what it was I could contribute to their company,” explained Jack, “and at the same time Aboriginal affairs were a big topic. The bicentennial had just passed. My wife that I'd just married was part-Aboriginal so I thought that it'd be a really good idea for Billabong to acknowledge where their name came from and also have a little moral within the story.”

The result was Bunyip Dreaming. A film that not only captured the zeitgeist but recast Occy - the then-failed pro surfer - as a bohemian desert traveller, plus a supporting cast of red hot pros from within and without the contest scene.

‘Bunyip Dreaming’ features the screen fades and graphic overlays he’d experimented with on Surf Hits, plus took the notion of continuity to never before seen levels in a surf film. The driving bass of Concrete Blonde’s ‘Over Your Shoulder’ opens the Munga Barry section, presented as a single session filmed at an unnamed wave.

After its release, the location of the wave became a guessing game, yet what viewers didn’t know was that Jack had Munga surf the same board, in the same wetsuit, during many different trips. “That particular sequence,” Jack explained many years later, “was shot over six months, at four different surf spots, in three different states.”

His subjects didn’t always understand the need for consistency, like when Occy cut his long hair during the filming of a later movie. A curveball that McCoy batted away with the creation of a fictionalised character ‘Rocky’, back in the old country trying to take on the world. A measure of Jack's adaptability is how well that skit works. As if it were the reason for the hair cut, not the other way around.

But back to Bunyip Dreaming: Jack finished the movie late one night, did the sound mix, and then took a copy to the airport and gave it to Gordon who was on his way to a trade show in California. The story goes that, in a hotel room filled with Billabong’s top brass, they pushed it into a VHS player and watched it five times in a row.

Perhaps that story is apocryphal but what happened next isn’t. Gordon called up Jack, paid him in full, and told him to work on the next film pronto. The VHS revolution was in full swing, surf movies were now enjoyed in lounge rooms not movie halls, and independent filmmakers weren’t exactly extinct but they had to think laterally to make their art.

Bunyip Dreaming was followed by The Green Iguana, Sons Of Fun, Sik Joy, and the establishment of the Jack McCoy style, plus his creative relationship with art director Graeme Davey and editor Calli Cerami, not to mention a partnership with Billabong that endured for two decades. 

As a crop of new, young filmmakers armed with cheap digital cameras shot beach action set to snotty punk music - a genre that democratised filmmaking and had no greater purpose than a pre-surf amp up - Jack maintained his vision, shooting 16mm film, capturing multiple angles, and storyboarding his films from top to tail. The nineties saw more surf movies made than ever, yet Jack sat alone in the Pantheon.

“I’ve always liked surfers with style,” Jack once told Swellnet, “contest results aren’t as important as surfers who can dance on waves.” Jack had many muses over the years: Lopez, Lynch, McCabe, and in Occy he had found another preternaturally gifted surfer who, at least at that stage in Occ’s career, was averse to the coloured singlet.

Stories filtered back from the tour of Occy flaming out yet again, but Jack presented him as a barefoot monk seeking desert therapy. Yes, it was artifice but like all Jack’s fancies there was a kernel of truth, and the public latched onto it. Shit hot surfing didn’t hurt Occy’s cause.

“Jack McCoy pretty much made my surfing career what it is today,” says Occy now. “If it wasn’t for him I could be oblivious. I made my comeback in the west with Jack.”

Occy and Jack filming sequences for 'The Green Iguana' on the Gold Coast (Joil)

The astute reader of this obituary may wonder what happened to Jack the Entertainer during the dark days of VHS. Where was the showman? Where was the stage?

The success of Billabong’s surf films brought cachet and not a small amount of goodwill from Gordon Merchant, who let Jack indulge some untested ideas. At the time, the ASP World Tour was itself exiting the bums-on-seats business model and entering the Dream Tour phase which began with Quiksilver’s first contest at G-Land in 1995. 

The times were ripe for conceptual thinking so Jack conceived the Billabong Desert Challenge which was both an opportunity for Occy to test himself against the world’s best surfers, but also a chance to run a novel competition. One that involved a broad range of surfers, expression sessions, nightly musical jams and various other happenings where Jack would hold court. And it’d all be filmed of course.

The Billabong Desert Challenge was reprised as the Billabong Super Challenge, then morphed into various Challenges set at locations such as Jeffreys Bay and the NSW South Coast, and released with film titles such as Psychedelic Desert Groove and Nine Lives.

Dancing around the edges of the contest arena brought Jack into close contact with Derek Hynd, one-time world #7, one-time coach of Occy, and perennial blue-sky thinker. Drawn by his ongoing notion of surfing as a festival gathering, Hynd used Jack as a sounding board when developing IS Surfing, a rebel surf tour that, despite a Hebridean Surf Festival in Scotland, remained conceptual. Hynd remained in Jack’s orbit, coming up with the tagline for Blue Horizon: Two Journeys, One Path, and also appearing in the film.

Before Blue Horizon, however, was The Occumentary. Three years after planting his seeds in the desert, Jack’s tree bore fruit. Occy could still mix it against the world’s best surfers, so on the shoulders of Jack McCoy did Mark Occhilupo get his second wind - and surfing got its first fair dinkum fairytale. Occy lost weight, re-registered with the ASP, surfed the Qualifying Series, won it, and then also won the Championship Tour too.

Jack may have favoured surfers who were stylish but he wasn’t immune to a wonderful story, so in Occy’s Phoenix-like rise he had all the ingredients for an epic surf film, arguably his opus. Though released to video, The Occumentary still managed to do that rare thing: maintain surf credibility while also crossing into the mainstream.

The film also marked the rebirth of another kind. Eight years into their marriage, Jack and Kelly hit a rough patch, the family had separated and with two diverging paths stretching out before him, Jack chose the one that led home. He worked on himself, Kelly too, and shortly afterwards, the family was again united at the hearth.

Does image noise matter when the turn is this damn good? Occ jamming in the desert from the opening sequence of 'The Occumentary'

It’s hard to pin down exactly what caused it, but around the turn of the century our viewing habits changed. Surf movies again appeared on the big screen, often as part of a surf film festival. Jack had maximised his opportunities during the VHS and DVD days, even defined his career in that era, yet the communal screening was Jack's natural habitat. Hundreds of surfers in one place, watching the same film, which was introduced by the person who made it. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Jack McCoy.’

At his first film festival, Jack screened To’, which documented Laird Hamilton’s ‘millenium wave’ at Teahupoo, plus a range of films from younger filmmakers like Justin Gane and Matty Gye. The emergence of festivals was a boon on two fronts: Jack’s work was again seen on the big screen - huge Teahupoo on a fatback television? Nah… - and he was in his element, on stage, stoking out surfers. After each show he’d give away prizes and call grommets up on stage for a chat.

In 2004, Jack again had to display adaptability when Joel Parkinson declined the starring role in a forthcoming film that, at least in Jack’s mind, had already been realised. As a Plan B, he was given Andy Irons and Jack’s idea for Blue Horizon, a narrative that contrasts free surfing against contest surfing, was given a world title injection.

The noughties were Jack’s cinematic era. Yeah, Free As A Dog is fun but Blue Horizon and A Deeper Shade Of Blue were meticulously crafted and left a longer impression. After forty years of producing great art, Jack was breathing the rarified air, but that's perhaps not the best choice of words.

A lung condition wizened Jack, and also forced reflection. Latter years were spent curating his life's work the only way he knew how. “I’ve been so fortunate to live the life I have and thought it’s time to hit the road one more time.”

Those words were written by Jack in 2019. “One more time” turned into five more tours, talking story, connecting with other filmmakers, and spreading the stoke to a new generation of surfers.

Jack's last tour was the twentieth anniversary of Blue Horizon. I took my 12-year old twins to the Wollongong screening but unfortunately Jack couldn’t make it as he had a bad turn the night before.

We spoke the next day and I mentioned the look in my sons’ eyes when the chords to Foo Fighters’ 'All My Life' began at the start of the film. Locked in, emotionally connected, just as he’d intended. He was thrilled to hear it.

Jack continued the tour. He fronted shows on the Gold Coast, Lennox Head - where he met up with Dick Hoole - and the Sunshine Coast. Two days later his lung condition got the better of him and Jack McCoy died, aged 76. He's survived by wife Kelly, daughter Indi, son Cooper, and three grandchildren.

In 2022 Jack and I began a project that was never realised but it seems fitting to make his words public now. They circle back to that night in 1961 when he first saw surfing on film in Bruce Brown’s ‘Slippery When Wet’.

“Thanks Bruce for lighting the flame in that little grom. Little did I realise that I’d also go on to make my own films with the same objective - to share the stoke.”

Lights on. Curtains drawn.

// STU NETTLE