The wild life and times of sugar scion Bunker Spreckels is explored in new documentary

BUNKER77 (Takuji Masuda, 2016)
Wednesday, November 16, IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St., 2:45
Thursday, November 17, Cinépolis Chelsea, 260 West Twenty-Third St. at Eighth Ave., 7:45
www.docnyc.net
bunker77film.com

Former Japanese national surfing champion Takuji Masuda documents the wild life and times of sugar scion Bunker Spreckels in the bumpy, oddly titled Bunker77, which is having its New York City premiere November 16 and 17 at the DOC NYC festival. Born in Los Angeles in 1949, Spreckels is described in the film by friends and relatives as “radical,” “original,” “unique,” “dangerous,” and “fun,” a blond beach bum and party lover who rode waves around the world with his specially made short boards. “That was his international persona: the hunter, the surfer, the playboy, the jet-setter, the martial artist, all in one,” skateboard legend Tony Alva says of his friend and mentor. Spreckels’s grandfather, Adolph B. Spreckels, ran the Spreckels Sugar Company and, with his wife, Alma, helped develop the cities of San Francisco and San Diego. After Spreckels’s parents, Adolph B. Spreckels II and former actress Kay Williams, divorced, his mother married Clark Gable, who helped raise Bunker and his sister, Joan, for five years. Bunker always did things his own way, but his life spiraled out of control once he turned twenty-one and gained access to his multimillion-dollar trust fund, caught up in a storm of drugs, alcohol and women. He tried to become a rock star and a screen idol while skateboarding and surfing in California, Hawai’i, Australia, and South Africa. His story is told by such surfing legends as Laird Hamilton, Vinny Bryan, Bill Hamilton, Rory Russell, Nat Young, Herbie Fletcher, Spyder Wills, and Wayne Bartholomew; childhood friends Curtis Allen (son of cowboy movie star Rex Allen) and Ira Opper; Surfer magazine photographer Art Brewer, associate editor Kurt Ledterman, chief editor Drew Kampion, and publisher Steve Pezman; longtime girlfriend Ellie Silva; and journalist C. R. Steyck III, whose extensive interview with Spreckels near the end of his life is sprinkled throughout the documentary. Masuda also includes home movies, photographs, relevant clips from Gable films, and scenes from 2005’s Lords of Dogtown, in which Johnny Knoxville plays Topper Burks, who is based on Spreckels, and 1961’s Blue Hawaii, in which Elvis Presley plays a character eerily similar to Bunker. “You can definitely have too much fun with too much money,” Bartholomew says, while Steyck adds, “He was a dangerous man, mainly dangerous to himself.”

Bunker Spreckels struts his stuff in Takuji Masuda’s BUNKER77

In the works since 2008, Bunker77 features terrific footage, but it’s also scattershot and often confusing, especially when it comes to Bunker’s real name, his desire to be in Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising, and the making of his own hallucinogenic epic, End of Summer. Writer, director, and producer Masuda gets some big-time power behind him — the executive producers of the film are Oscar-nominated actor Ed Norton, Red Hot Chili Peppers leader Anthony Kiedis, Sundance programmer Trevor Groth, and Emmy and Oscar winner Stephen Gaghan, while the coproducers are Joan Spreckels, Brewer, Steyck, and John Gable, the son of Kay and Clark — but the film feels rather thrown together. The different elements don’t form a cohesive visual whole, loosely constructed from too many disparate sources. (There’s even brief animation.) In fact, although surf photographer Dave Homcy is credited as cinematographer, there is additional cinematography by eleven others, and six editors are listed in the credits. Still, there is plenty of awesome surfing footage, and the story of Spreckels’s rise and fall is bizarrely fascinating. Bunker77 is screening November 16 at 2:45 at IFC Center and November 17 at 7:45 at Cinépolis Chelsea, with Masuda on hand to discuss the film.