Big Wednesday was not a casual surfing picture for John Milius; it was an intensely personal project about the Malibu world he had shared with writer Dennis Aaberg and friends including George Lucas. Warner Bros. agreed to finance the film in June 1976, but the production repeatedly drifted. In August of that year, Milius announced that he was postponing the picture because the script was not ready and planned to make Extreme Prejudice instead. He later reversed himself, choosing the surfing film after deciding that the story had become something he needed to make. That long gestation was followed by an expensive, technically difficult production filmed across California, Texas, El Salvador, and Hawaii, with the climactic surf sequences shot at Sunset Beach rather than in Malibu.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1970s
John Milius’s Over-Budget Surf Epic Became Warner Bros.’ Waiting Game for the Big Wave
Big Wednesday / 1970s
Big Wednesday was not a casual surfing picture for John Milius; it was an intensely personal project about the Malibu world he had shared with writer Dennis Aaberg and friends including George Lucas. Warner Bros. agreed to finance the film in June 1976, but the production repeatedly drifted. In August of that year, Milius announced that he was postponing the picture because the script was not ready and planned to make Extreme Prejudice instead. He later reversed himself, choosing the surfing film after deciding that the story had become something he needed to make. That long gestation was followed by an expensive, technically difficult production filmed across California, Texas, El Salvador, and Hawaii, with the climactic surf sequences shot at Sunset Beach rather than in Malibu.
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