After 30 years in the entertainment business, Ira Opper is finally seeing his life’s goals come true. “My plan was to live at the beach, surf, and dress like a gardener. I’m pulling it off, but it took awhile.” Don’t let the gardener part fool you.
These days, Opper is considered one of the top documentary filmmakers in the sport of surfing. He has garnered four EMMY Awards and a Telly Award for his work in the exploding world of surfing and action sports. His Opper Sports Productions boasts the world’s largest library of surfing footage, and has produced over 50 surfing documentaries for the Outdoor Life Network alone.
Above all, Opper has managed to survive and flourish within the enigmatic and fickle industry of surfing, whose popularity over the past 20 years has seen more ups and downs than Wall Street. His newest project is “Longboard TV,” one of the flagship shows on Fox’s just-launched Fuel TV network. Indeed, surfing is as hot as ever, with such mainstream cross-over projects like the “Boarding House-North Shore” and “Surf Girls” reality shows, last summer’s chick movie “Blue Crush,” and Sheryl Crow surfing in Hawaii in one of her music videos. In Paris, Chanel models are walking down the runways with surfboards.
Once considered a “Wild World of Sports” oddity and the subject of cheesy B-movies, surfing is now a multi-billion dollar industry that is drenching the world like an out-of-control tsunami. Ira Opper has been busy documenting the wave for all to see.
“It took a lot of time for surfing to break out of its shell and crack the mainstream,” said Opper, 54, from his high-tech studio in the basement of his Solana Beach, CA home. “Until recently there wasn’t a vehicle to make that transition. There have been a lot of advances in technology that have allowed me to do that. I was a TV producer, and it took a long time for the TV world to change. With cable television and multiple channels, eventually there was a home for surfing.”
Opper recalls pitching action sports-related projects to ESPN when the all-sports channel was in its infancy. “They called these non-traditional sports ‘trash sports,’ and I was considered a trash producer when I first got started. Nobody could relate to skateboarding at all. I got rejection letter after rejection letter. It was too coastal, kids didn’t watch it. ESPN took everything we worked hard for, all the ideas that we used to pitch, and exploited it into what would become the X Games. The X Games wasn’t an ESPN innovation, it was an innovation of all the independent producers trying to create content for the new cable sports networks.”
Opper says that although ESPN was able to “bully” their way into so-called “extreme sports” like skateboarding, snowboarding, and BMX, they didn’t have the same success with surfing. “To create good content, you really have to understand surfing. Even a good TV producer couldn’t go off and do a good series on surfing. It would look dumb and dorky and unauthentic. It’s a unique sport among sports. In my mind it’s the only extreme sport. To me, BMX looks like a paperboy competition. You have a bitchin’ bike and some dirt…c’mon. TV tried to figure out surfing, and it took ‘em forever. They finally deferred to the guys that really understood it. Surfing was always a hard sell.”
Opper was one of the few surfers TV networks turned to, and the result was surfing’s first magazine-format show on ESPN, “Surfer Magazine TV,” a partnership with the popular print publication of the same name. Later came “The Surfer’s Journal” documentaries that aired weekly on OLN. Meanwhile, Opper and longtime collaborator Justin Krumb produced videos for the core surfing audience, and accumulated a wealth of archival footage that is sold to other filmmakers, and the same TV networks that showered him with rejection slips just a few years ago.
Opper admits it was a long road to becoming what some people refer to as surfing’s “Ken Burns with attitude.” Growing up over the hill from surfing’s famed Malibu in Southern California, Opper got hooked on surfing at an early age. An interest in TV led him to a degree in broadcast journalism from Arizona State University. He founded the video production house Innovision in Santa Barbara, producing police training videos among other projects. Later he became a local program director for Cox Cable. His entry into action sports came with producing pro beach volleyball on ESPN. One of Opper’s favorite early gigs came in 1977 as location coordinator for “Big Wednesday,” the big budget coming-of-age surfing movie starring Jan-Michael Vincent.
“Sometimes I’d wake up and wonder how I could keep it going,” Opper recalls. “We’d do other projects like the pro beach volleyball and the Hot Water jet ski tour for Prime Network. We did snowboarding and skiing. I remember being on this vertical face of ice, digging out a level spot for our tripod. Our cables would freeze. The skiers complained about waiting around and getting cold. Then they would whoosh by in five seconds and we’d pack up and do it all over again. I weighed that against going to Hawaii or Tahiti and the prospect of capturing spectacular surfing by chance. The choice was obvious.”
Opper had a few things in his favor. In the mid-90s, surfing and other “action sports” were experiencing a renaissance. Kids around the country were putting down their balls and bats and picking up skateboards, snowboards and surfboards. It didn’t matter if they understood the nuances of riding a wave; it was all about lifestyle. Quiksilver and other surf/skate brands began permeating suburban malls. And it wasn’t just for guys. Women’s surfing began exploding in the late ‘90s, opening the sport up to a new, more savvy consumer base. The mainstream media picked up on the trend, and today surfing is being used to sell everything from cars to cameras.
Meanwhile, technology was experiencing a revolution of its own. The Internet and advancements in computer hardware and software enabled surfers to produce their own grass-roots web magazines and videos with low overhead. Opper, who for years had toiled in large studios with massive amounts of equipment, embraced the new technology. To market his videos and film library, he launched Surfhistory.com. He produced the first surf movie specifically tailored to the emerging DVD platform. Opper Sports Productions’ 2-minute clip of one of the best days in California surfing history was picked up by Internet sites worldwide and drew thousands of potential customers to his own site. Any grass shack with a satellite dish and TV can watch Opper’s new surfing series on Fuel TV.
“I no longer need a 4,000-foot studio with a million dollars worth of equipment and 15 people running around to produce a TV show,” Opper explains. “Now I’ve got a Macintosh, two or three guys, and some freelance writers. We can produce content more comfortably, and technically show off what high-end video is capable of. We edit in a non-linear digital environment. Everything’s compatible with the Internet, so we can put clips on the web site instantly. When you can literally communicate with hundreds of millions of people on a friggin’ Macintosh in your basement, it’s a unique time in history. Talk about strange bedfellows…we’re equally passionate about surfing and technology.”
