“I guess it’s good to see that if a cul­ture begins to bog down in it’s own self-consciousness that some kids are going to call bull­shit on it and start a rev­o­lu­tion.” — Rick Grif­fin, 1989

The Film: “Grif­fin” is a feature-length doc­u­men­tary that explores the art, life and eccen­tric spark of one of the world’s least known and most influ­en­tial 20th Cen­tury sur­re­al­ists. Over the time-warped span of the 1960’s, one-time teen car­toon­ist Rick Grif­fin cre­ated defin­ing icons for three pil­lars of west coast coun­ter­cul­ture: surf­ing, psy­che­delic rock and under­ground comix.

In each of these Ground Zero move­ments Grif­fin was con­sid­ered a vision­ary savant who mas­ter­fully infil­trated his pas­sions and relent­less spir­i­tual quest through com­mer­cial art…often sub­vert­ing banal 50s adver­tis­ing trade­marks into mind­bend­ing psy­che­delic man­dalas. Grif­fin cul­ti­vated a charis­matic, rock-star per­sona and dur­ing his hey­day was cel­e­brated in Life Mag­a­zine as one of the “Big Five” of psy­che­delic poster art. Later, a born-again Chris­t­ian, he would illus­trate the Gospel Of John in the ver­nac­u­lar he knew and loved best…the comic-book. But by 35 he was all but for­got­ten. At 47 he was gone, killed while roar­ing his Harley down a North­ern Cal­i­for­nia back road. But Griffin’s art lives on, his mes­sages and cos­mic sign­posts firmly encoded in our post-modern DNA.

The Plan:

Phase One: Get­ting the Story (Pro­duc­tion) From present to mid-2013. Phase One pro­duc­tion has been ongo­ing since early this year to acquire legal rights, archival assets (art, footage, mem­o­ra­bilia), key inter­views and to assem­ble my sup­port group and pro­duc­tion crew. A three-person team con­sist­ing of myself, a direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy and a sound engi­neer will com­plete inter­view pro­duc­tion within six months.

Phase Two: Craft­ing the story (Post-Production) Mid to late 2013. Edit­ing, HD trans­fers, music acqui­si­tion, ani­ma­tion, sound mix, color grad­ing and final out­put for the­atri­cal and broad­cast release.

Phase Three: Shar­ing the story (Dis­tri­b­u­tion) Early 2014 The film’s pre­miere is planned for early 2014 fol­lowed by sched­uled mix of film fes­ti­vals, DVDs, video on demand and cable TV.

The Team and Resources: This film has the full coop­er­a­tion and sup­port of Ida Grif­fin and the Grif­fin Estate. That means access to rare archival pho­tos, footage and mem­o­ra­bilia as well as Ida’s invalu­able mem­o­ries and per­spec­tive. Beyond that I’ve enlisted an advi­sory board of influ­en­tial Grif­fin afi­ciona­dos from within the surf­ing and enter­tain­ment indus­tries to assist me with all facets of story, pro­duc­tion, media and mar­ket­ing. These include: Greg Escalante, co-founder Jux­tapoz Mag­a­zine; Steve Pez­man, pub­lisher of The Surfer’s Jour­nal, Doug Pray, award-winning film­maker (Sur­f­wise, Art and Copy), Drew Kam­pion (author and for­mer Surfer edi­tor) and John Clark (lead ani­ma­tor at Sony Studios).

Please sup­port this project at: www.kickstarter.com