BACK OFF, JARVIS:

THE (UN)AUTHORIZED VHS
BEHIND-THE-SCENES OF POINT BREAK.

Story By
ED SOLT

The legendary surf movie Point Break returns to
theaters nationwide for special showings August
16 and 19, 35 years after its original release.
Starring a young Keanu Reeves and the wavy-headed
icon Patrick Swayze, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and
produced in part by her then-husband James Cameron,
Point Break would become a cultural milestone. It
turned the surfer’s aesthetic, lifestyle and lingo into
something even non-surfers could sort of grasp, while
its blend of action-movie bravado and wacked out
Zen-adjacent philosophizing about riding the perfect
wave gave it a lasting cult following well beyond the
surf world itself.
Before Point Break, Hollywood’s depiction of surf
culture was goofy and cartoonish, pretty much beach
blanket bingo-esque (besides maybe John Milius’s Big
Wednesday from 1978, which, although revered, was
originally a Hollywood flop and did not really come
into its own as a cult classic until decades later).
Point Break got it mostly right because it went to the
source: an ambitious AF, good-looking Hermosa Beach
surfer.
A young, towheaded Dennis Jarvis had alreadycarved out a pro surf career and had launched
Spyder Surfboards and surf shop. Looking for a little
Hollywood income and, who knows, maybe even get
his big break, he showed up at the Point Break casting
call, thinking at worst maybe he’d score a few scenes
in the movie. That didn’t happen, but if you know
Jarvis, you know he has a way of making something
happen—and somehow he walked away from the
casting call as the film’s primary surf consultant. By the
end of the shoot he not only was the guy who made
the surfing scenes legit, but also made all the boards,
and miraculously had also obtained free rein to make
a behind-the-scenes documentary. Jarvis found himself
in his mischief-loving hellbent and half-crazed element.
With a then-novel VHS video camera slung over his
shoulder, he captured an unfiltered look at the making
of Point Break. What started as a what-the-hell kind
of filmmaking adventure became a time capsule unlike
any other. At one point, the cherub-cheeked Reeves can
be seen directly facing Jarvis, flipping a double bird, in
the full spirit of the entire enterprise. Red Hot Chili
Pepper Anthony Kiedis—whose band would become
one of the biggest in the world two months after the
release of Point Break—is constantly playing to Jarvis’s
camera, dark-eyed and even a bit sinister at times, an
ongoing rock ‘n roll provocation. Gary Busey, always
a wildcard, looks like he might step right through the
camera lens and either punch or hug Jarvis, maybe
both. Swayze, fresh off Dirty Dancing and Ghost,
was the biggest movie star on the planet at the time,
and through Jarvis’s eyes shows up a little smaller than
expected but with a bigger swagger than anyone.
I met Dennis at his Hermosa Beach art studio and
surf factory and we dug into that VHS tape stashed
away dusty for more than 36 years in the Jarvis family
attic.
As the tape rolled, Dennis told story after story

Dennis: “Back then everybody in the South
Bay wanted a piece of Hollywood—it wasn’t
just me. This was the late 80s into the 90s,
and half the guys you knew were trying to
be actors, the other half were trying to be
models. Ted Robinson started out modeling
for Maui and Sons, just a local surf-brand
gig, and ended up going on to actually be
a real model. I went out for a kids’ show
called Wake, Rattle and Roll, killed the
audition, got hired—showed up two weeks
later at the shoot and they told me I wasn’t
on the list. Nobody could explain it. Turned
out it went to Pat O’Connell (professional
surfer, Endless Summer 2 star, President of
Florence Marine X—short and tow head- ed). It was a kids’ show, and I was too big
for it. I still give him hell. ‘Dude, you owe
me. I would’ve been the kids’ surfer dude,
might’ve had my own show.’”

with the same playful energy that made him the real-
life Dennis the Menace on set. Equal parts authorized

documentarian and lovable troublemaker, he
lightheartedly terrorized the cast and crew, who returned
the affection with plenty of laughs—and the occasional
one-finger salute. It was the kind of camaraderie that
can’t be scripted, preserved only because Jarvis kept his
camera rolling.

IN DENNIS’ WORDS:

Here’s how it actually happened, because the
story people usually hear leaves out the good
parts.
I get a call from my agent—this is back when we
still had cell phones but they were the size of a brick—
and she says they’re looking for surfers for some new
movie. I’m thinking, great, another dumb surf movie,
they always want a guy who can stand there and look
tan. So I go in. This is before Patrick Swayze was even
attached. Nobody had a lead yet. You want to know the
history of this thing? Before it was Point Break it was
called Riders on the Storm, and at different points they
had Charlie Sheen circling it, they had Johnny Depp
circling it, they had some other actor who plays cops in
everything attached to play the Gary Busey part. It kept
almost happening and then getting shelved. Almost got
made, got dumped. Almost got made, got dumped.
And the thing that actually saved it was Kathryn
Bigelow. She’d just come off Blue Steel and wanted the
script, and she was married to James Cameron at the
time, and from what I hear—and if you ask Peter Iliff,
who wrote it, he’ll tell you himself—Cameron had a
hand in rewriting a lot of it, even though he never took
credit. Once Cameron’s name was quietly attached,
that project was never getting killed again. That’s how
you go from a bank-robbers-and-gunplay writer to a
bank-robbers-and-surfers movie. She loved that beach
lifestyle angle.
So I go in for my audition. I’ve got maybe five lines.
I do fine, nothing special, and as I’m walking out I
notice something: nobody in that room surfs. Not one
person. So I turn around and I go, “Wait—you guys are
making a surf movie and none of you surf?” And they
just kind of look at each other. I said, look, I own a surf
shop. I’ve been on the cover of three surf magazines. I
know everybody in this industry who can actually ride
a wave. You need me.I stole that move, by the way. That’s the John
Ratzenberger story from Cheers—how he walked into
that audition, didn’t get the part, and on his way out
pitched them on why the show needed a barroom
know-it-all. And they wrote Cliff Clavin into the show
because of that pitch. I’d heard it in an acting class years
before and pulled it out of my back pocket without
even planning to.
They told me it was a small part, don’t get your hopes
up. By the time I walked in my door, my answering
machine was already blinking: you’re hired, be there
tomorrow. That’s how fast Hollywood can turn on
you—in a good way, for once.

BUILDING THE BOARDS
Two days later I’m up at the studio meeting Kathryn,
and she tells me straight up: we need boards, and we
need them now, we’re about to start shooting. So I go
back to my shop at Shoreline [on Cypress in Hermosa
Beach], get a couple of ghost shapers to help me rough
out blanks, and I build a board in two days flat. Bring
it up to her. She hates it.
She asks if I’ve read the script. I hadn’t. She tells me
there’s a line about the board needing to “pop,” so I go
home, put blue flames on it, bring it back. She hates
that one too.
At that point I just said, let me take a real stab at
what I think this thing should look like. Came up
with a design on my own, brought it back, and that
was it—she loved it. I ended up building four more
off that template, the ones you actually see throughout
the film. Eventually, the four lead actors—the surfer
crew—used to come by my house constantly. Kathryn’s
art department didn’t want anything to do with
designing their individual boards, so I sat the guys
down myself and had each one sketch out what they wanted.

Anthony’s design came out genuinely strange,
almost like a Jean-Michel Basquiat piece, so I brought
in an airbrush artist to translate it onto fiberglass. It
turned out great.
Anthony’s nose graphic had the real Basquiat feel to
it—that scratchy, layered look—and I had a silkscreen
shop print it, except they botched the registration and it
came out without the white backing the art department
wanted, so it didn’t pop enough on camera. Continuity
had to slap vinyl stickers over it for reshoots. If you
watch closely during the Bunker fight, you can actually
see the sticker flapping loose on the rail. That board is
the one I still own. It went up for auction years later and
the auction house figured it’d pull maybe eight grand. I
decided not to sell it that round. Good thing, because
a version of that board—the 6 ‘10”, the one people call
the Black Beauty—is the one that eventually sold for
$64,000. But that story comes later.
Once the boards were sorted, they still hadn’t cast
Patrick. I was already running around shaping and they
didn’t even know who their lead was yet. A couple of
days later I get another call—be at the studio at seven
a.m. I show up thinking I’m basically a surf consultant,
a hired hand who shows people which end of the
board is the nose. Turns out these people didn’t know
anything.

MEETING PATRICK

The first time I actually laid eyes on Patrick Swayze, I
was walking the Manhattan Beach Pier with the casting
director and Catherine from the art department,
scouting locations for the surf shop set. Catherine
points at a building, then looks past me and says,
“Oh—here he is.”
I turn around and there’s Patrick Swayze walking up

the pier, and my honest first thought was: his head is
enormous. That’s a real thing, by the way—you meet
enough actual movie stars and you start noticing their
heads are always bigger than you’d expect, and they’re
almost always shorter in person. But the second thing I
noticed was his hair, kind of wind-tossed, and I turned
to Catherine and said, “That looks like Matt Archbold.”
She had no idea who that was. I told her—surfer, one
of the best going, from down south. And she just filed
that away.
That comment mattered more than I realized at
the time, because casting kept circling back to that
“authenticity” thing, and once they had that reference
point in their heads, it opened the door for me to start
pulling real surfers into the movie. I got Christian
Fletcher down for the open casting call on the beach. I
kept pushing for a guy named Dino, one of my favorite
surfers at the time. And Rick Pagano, who became a
real friend through all this, had a stack of headshots on
his desk one day and I pointed at one and said, “That
guy rips.” It was Vince [Klyn]—the actor who plays
War Child. He got the part. I jokingly remind him to
this day that he owes me.
Understand, a casting person technically has zero
power to actually hire anybody. All you’re doing is
whispering in the right ear, pointing the director’s
attention where you want it to go. But when you’re
the only person in the building who actually surfs, that
whisper carries a lot of weight.
Here’s the part nobody believes: Patrick Swayze
never stood on a surfboard once in that entire film. Not
once. He got paid extra because he claimed he’d surfed
back in Texas, but when it came time to shoot, that’s a
stunt double the whole way—you can watch the way
he moves in the water shots and it’s clearly not him.
Keanu, though—Keanu actually got up. Caught two waves

for real, on camera, because Kathryn wanted
proof he’d learned. It was laborious getting him there,
but he did it himself.
James LeGros—plays Nikki’s older brother, well,
technically the sidekick—never really took to it. He’d
stand up occasionally but you could tell he didn’t enjoy
those days out in the water. Bojesse Christopher actually
rips, still does. John Philbin surfs well too, which is
exactly why he’s the guy directors call whenever a script
needs an actor who can actually surf a scene instead of
fake it.
Lori Petty was a whole different story. I was out there
trying to teach her balance and the mechanics of the
pop-up, and she had this very curt, nightclub energy
about her that didn’t match the ocean at all. That’s just
who she was off the clock.
My job, as Kathryn put it, was simple: make
them look like they could surf, even the ones who
fundamentally could not. So I’d swim out in a two-mil
short-sleeve suit—I was in the best shape of my life
during that shoot—and just hold onto these actors in
the lineup, coaching them through it wave by wave.

There was one day, two-foot mush, nothing
dangerous on paper, and I got caught in a rip pushing
James into a wave. I was out there for what felt like
an hour and a half, completely gassed, sideways in the
current, and a lifeguard rolls up in his truck and yells
down asking if I’m okay. And I remember thinking
very clearly: if this guy gets out of that truck and swims
out to save me in front of the entire crew, I am done. I
will never live that down.
So I said I was fine. Waved him off. Put my head
down the way my dad taught me—arms out, body-surf
position—and just kicked and kicked with my face in
the water until I felt sand under my feet. Stood up like
nothing had happened. Heart absolutely pounding.
Somewhere in the middle of all this I started carrying
around a camcorder—the production bought it for me,
along with a stack of tapes, because I think they liked
having someone document the day-to-day. So I’ve got
hours of this stuff. Gary Busey rambling. Anthony
Kiedis making fun of me.
Gary was a character, exactly like you’d expect, but
genuinely fun to be around. I was the twenty-something
surfer kid wandering around with a camera, and I was
an easy target. If I’d been watching myself from the
outside, I probably would’ve made fun of me too.
Keanu and I went down to fish near Cabo after
wrap one day—hungover, both of us. He hooked into
a beautiful dorado, every color you can imagine, justglowing. We both wanted to let it go, but the guys
running the boat weren’t having it. We watched all that
color drain out of it in about ten seconds. Ruined the
rest of the day, honestly. We went back to drinking.
That wasn’t unusual for that stretch, actually. Once
the shoot wrapped, Keanu didn’t have another job lined
up yet, so he’d just show up at my house—sometimes
knocking around nine in the morning—and we’d start
in on red wine way too early and get properly hammered
together. This went on for a few weeks straight. Then
one day my phone rings, and I pick it up, and some
guy goes, “Is Keanu there?” I hand it over without
thinking much of it. Keanu steps outside to take the
call, and when he comes back in a few minutes later
he’s got this look on his face and goes, “I just booked
Dracula.” Turns out the guy on my phone was Francis
Ford Coppola.
That’s the kind of thing that happens when you’re
the guy with the surf shop and the extra bedroom—
you end up hosting these random, enormous moments
in people’s careers without ever quite realizing it’s
happening in real time.
People ask if I regret not going to film school, and

the honest answer is no, because I basically did a ten-
month version of it on that set for free—actually, I

got paid for it, which is even better. I made a point
of cornering anyone who’d talk to me. What does a
cinematographer actually do all day? What’s a script
supervisor for? I had one script supervisor who told me,
“Dennis, I think you could direct. All you really need is
a good cinematographer and a great script supervisor,
because we’re the ones who make sure you’re capturing
the moments your director actually wants.” That
stuck with me. Years later, when I started making my
own films and producing things like the Teen Choice
Awards, that conversation was rattling around in my
head the whole time.My advice to any kid who wants to make movies:
don’t spend a hundred grand on film school. Spend that
same hundred grand living broke on a set somewhere
as a lackey, shadowing everybody who’ll let you. You
cannot buy that education in a classroom.
WHERE IT ALL LANDED
Twenty-five years after the movie came out, I get a
call from Fox—this is before Patrick got sick—asking
if I’d build surfboards to give away for the anniversary.
I made two Black Beauties and three Bodhi boards, ran
around and got the whole surviving cast to sign them.
While I was up at William Morris getting Patrick to
sign one, he turns to me and says, “Dennis, we’ve got
to make that movie.” Meaning a sequel—his idea being
that Bodhi never actually died, that he swam to the
bottom, held onto a rock while the big set passed over
him, and came up alive around the point. We talked
about it on and off, never quite connected the dots,
and then he got his diagnosis and spent the rest of his
time fighting pancreatic cancer.
After he passed, I got a call from his wife, trying to
raise money for pancreatic cancer research. I reached
out to everybody I still knew at Surfer and Transworld,
called in every favor I had, and we put that 6’10”
board—the real one, from the actual film—up for
auction. It sold for sixty-four thousand dollars.
That’s when it really hit me how much this thing
means to people, decades later. I get calls asking for

replica boards for weddings—actual Point Break-
themed weddings, guys in masks carrying a Bodhi

board down the aisle, crying when I hand it over. I got
a call from a guy’s wife in North Carolina who wanted
a board finished before his retirement, and the timeline
slipped, so instead I hand-inscribed something on
the bottom for them. That thing’s hanging in their

living room now with a certificate of authenticity,
my signature on it as the guy who actually built the
originals.
I try not to make too many replicas. I want them
to hold their value, and honestly, I want them to keep
meaning something.
Funny enough, none of this ever did much for my
actual surfboard business. People assume being “the
Point Break guy” must have sent Spyder Surfboards
through the roof, but it didn’t move the needle. What
grew that business was a completely different chapter—
Tom Curran riding for us, and later Ross Williams and
that whole Momentum-series crew of the nineties.
Point Break is the one people still stop me to talk
about—thirty-five years on, and there are still strangers
who want a piece of it, still willing to fly a board across

the country, still crying when they hold one in their
hands. You’d think after this long, a movie about a
bunch of surfing bank robbers would’ve faded into a
joke. Instead it just keeps getting bigger. I got to be part
of that. However corny it could have turned out—and
believe me, it could’ve—I like to think a few of us in
the room pushed it a couple notches away from corny
and toward something people would still care about
three and a half decades later.