I came across this on an episode of the Colbert Report (feat. Stephen Colbert ("t" is silent on Colbert and Report... and all other words ending in "rt" like "Sport")
Imagine you're a doctor in the 50s in America with a wife and kid. You have a good job, a home in middle-class america. One way, you sell everything, you pack your family into a camper, and you drive. and keep on driving to create your utopia.
And you raise your family (which eventually grows to 9 kids) on beaches and surfing. And you use your medical skills to provide free medical help to those in need. And your kids never go to school; they learn everything on the road.
This is what the movie Surfwise apparently is about: the story of Dr. Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz and his family.
http://magpictures.com/profile.aspx?id=d2fc80a7-5c8f-4eb2-8a72-810208462713
Here's a not-so-flattering review from movies.com:
The Basics: Documentary about Damien Paskowitz M.D. and his
decision to ditch normal family life in the 1960s to live as a nomadic,
raw-foods-consuming, extreme-voluntary-poverty-loving hippie surfer.
That he and his wife raised nine surfer children in a 24-foot-long RV
(no school, no money, no boundaries, no outside-world socialization)
only made it weirder. They were seen as examples of bohemian freedom at
the time, but as the now-grown children explain, it wasn't exactly as groovy as it might seem to the outside world.
What's the Deal? While not nearly as freaked out and horrifying as Capturing the Friedmans,
this movie isn't afraid to show you the dark side of "freedom,"
especially when it comes to raising children. Paskowitz is seen as a
man in his mid eighties with few apparent regrets about the cult-like,
sometimes physically abusive surf-dictatorship he ran in the
never-not-rolling (or rocking — more on that in a second) RV. According
to one of the adult children, they weren't so much raised by wolves as
"raised as wolves."
About That Rocking: Doc, it turns out, was — and maybe still is
— a really horny guy. Early in the movie, he discusses how he went on a
sex-education quest as a strapping young surfer, doing it with as many
women as possible and devising a score for each one. When he found one
who scored a "93" on his chart, he married her. And they had loud sex
every night in that RV, no matter that the kids were trying to sleep
nearby, often in the same bed.
Results: Nine adults with no education or social skills,
estranged from their parents and often from each other but for the most
part now living functional and reasonably happy lives, give or take
some moments of seemingly seething rage.
Verdict: It's not so much that the movie lets Doc off the hook
as it is just too fascinated by him to judge him harshly for his weird,
destructive family experiment. Somehow even the huggy ending doesn't
feel wrong.
http://movies.com/surfwise/r936611/documentary