Take out your surfboard and ride some celebratory waves. “Blue Crush” may be coming to TV. NBC has given a script commitment with penalty to a series based on the 2002 surfing movie starring Kate Bosworth, Deadline reports. “Switched at Birth” creator Lizzy Weiss, who co-wrote the script for the film with its director, John Stockwell, will pen the adaptation as well as exec produce.
The original story focused on three female friends (Bosworth, Michelle Rodriguez, and Sanoe Lake) living in Hawaii. They pay the bills by working at a resort, but their passion is for surfing. Bosworth’s character, Anne Marie, once held great promise in the sport, but a bad accident put her career on hold and left her fearful and lacking in confidence. “Blue Crush” follows her comeback story.
Imagine Entertainment’s Brian Grazer, the movie’s producer, joins Weiss as an exec producer, as does Imagine’s Francie Calfo. Universal TV is co-producing with Imagine Television.
“Blue Crush” was inspired by “Life’s Swell,” an article in “Women’s Outside” magazine written by Susan Orlean. You can read the feature, originally published in 1998, online.
“There is nothing much to do in Hana [Hawaii] except wander through the screw pines and the candlenut trees or go surfing,” Orlean writes. “There is no mall in Hana, no Starbucks, no shoe store, no Hello Kitty store, no movie theater — just trees, bushes, flowers, and gnarly surf that breaks rough at the bottom of the rocky beach.” She continues, “Before women were encouraged to surf, the girls in Hana must have been unbelievably bored. Lucky for these Hana girls, surfing has changed. In the ’60s, Joyce Hoffman became one of the first female surf aces, and she was followed by Rell Sunn and Jericho Poppler in the seventies and Frieda Zamba in the ’80s and Lisa Andersen in this decade, and thousands of girls and women followed by example. In fact, the surfer girls of this generation have never known a time in their lives when some woman champion wasn’t ripping surf.”
Weiss’ “Switched at Birth” has been honored with two Peabody Awards. The family drama’s fifth and final season will premiere in January on Freeform.
