Best Sections of All-Time: Donavon Frankenreiter in Hit & Run

Donovan Frankenreiter’s surf career was an interesting one. We met him in Taylor Steele’s movie Focus — riding a mechanical bull incredibly well, his long hair flowing beneath a cowboy hat before proceeding to throw that hair and his fins around in Puerto Escondido while dropping textbook backhand straight airs. Seeing him in that movie with all the other 90s dudes was like, “Wait, what?”

Then came this part. Hit and Run, one of Taylor’s cult classics really — it had an attempted mainstream theatrical release in theaters and interviews instead of skits and tried to make surfing presentable — but tends to hide out from best ever lists for whatever reasons. I think the shooting window for it was short. But hidden in those generic interviews was this part that found Donovan fusing a free surfing spirit to his 6’2” thruster in a way that would become an evolutionary link to a lot of the surfing we see today on less-modern crafts.

I was blown away by this part at the time and wasn’t really on the Donovan soul train when it came out, but it sure did something for me. He brought some pool skater to the part too in the way he linked sections with floaters and airs on the crumbly Mexican points. Stylish but not lazy. He was still punting.

After this, Donovan went on to his recoding career and the rest is bellbottoms and fedoras and sold out arenas thanks to radio hits, but before that, we got this. And it still hits.—Travis