The most popular film in the history of the Newport Beach Film Festival, which begins its 18th run in April, has found a home on the small screen.
Dirty Old Wedge, director Tim Burnham’s action-sports documentary about Newport Beach’s world famous surf break, is part of the lineup on Amazon Outside TV’s SVOD Channel, which you can access via here now and soon on Apple TV, iOS, Roku and Android.
Besides being the biggest ticket-seller at the 2016 Newport Beach Film Fest, Dirty Old Wedge got an unheard of five festival screenings due to public demand. Burnham’s first project sold out three screenings before the festival even opened last year!
As I wrote at the time, Dirty Old Wedge is a damn fine movie—homerism be damned! It gives a historical perspective on the man-made wave phenomenon, props to the original (and very, very few) body surfers who first braved the wall of saltwater in the late 1950s/early ’60s and exposure to the “Wedge Crew” who protected the break for decades. Burnham, who grew up in Newport Beach and went on to graduate from Mater Dei High School and Cal State Long Beach, decided to make Dirty Old Wedge when his friends Keith Malloy and Mark Cunningham mentioned all the Wedge footage they could not fit into their own film, Come Hell or High Water.
An environmental consultant with “zero” filmmaking experience at the time, Burnham essentially recruited the experts needed to get his project off the ground (and into the surf), including his friends Jack Murgatroyd and Edwin Eversole of Hunt House Pictures in Santa Monica. Production funds came via a Kickstarter campaign, and getting selected to make its world premiere at Newport Beach’s festival of films from around the world was a natural. “Premiering the film anywhere else wouldn’t have been right,” Burnham told us.
Here is the film’s new SVOD Amazon Channel promo:
The channel is under the umbrella of Outside TV Features, a subscription video on-demand service showcasing full-length adventure sports films that was launched on Dec. 22. The cost is $4.99 a month. Featured athletes and adventurers include surf legend Kelly Slater, skateboard icon Paul Rodriguez, motocross legend Travis Pastrana, standup paddle boarding (SUP) sensation Kai Lenny, 2016 World Surf League (WSL) champion John John Florence and renowned wingsuit pilot Jeb Corliss. Additional platforms for the service are coming this year, Amazon vows.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.