Barefoot Adventure

"By 1960 I had the making of my surf films down to a science, which was, basically, work my guts out. If the film was done right it looked effortless.
People would say, "Boy, making that movie must have been a lot of fun." Somehow they'd be oblivious to the fact that I'd spent twelve hours a day for the last four months in an editing room and had skin the color of a man who's been locked in a closet for six years.
Getting these old films ready for video release brought back a lot of those memories. Like my other surf movies, the original elements of BAREFOOT ADVENTURE - film, narration, music - lay in bits and pieces in my attic.
Most of the film had been taken apart for use in other projects. Weeks were spent opening unmarked film cans and viewing old surfing footage in search of missing shots.
The shots, once found, were often held together by paper tape which, after 30 years, had turned to rock and fossilized onto the film. Removing the tape meant soaking the end of each shot in film cleaner for ten to twenty-five minutes until the tape softened from granite to mud and could be safely scraped off. I figure it took sixty hours of sitting in a darkened room, getting goofy from the fumes, just to remove the tape. I held up well under the strain, mainly because my son, Dana, did most of the work.
Looking at BAREFOOT ADVENTURE I am still amazed how good Del Cannon was as an amateur actor. Dana refers to Del as the "Sir Lawrence Olivier of surf films" which hits the nail on the head and shows that film cleaner fumes don't cause brain damage." - Bruce Brown