Discoverers and Creators : The filmmaker: O.C. director Greg MacGillivray is ‘super-proud’ of capturing the spirit of the explorers’ quest.

The last surf movie Orange County filmmaker Greg MacGillivray worked on was “Big Wednesday” in 1978. That was six years after he and his late partner, Jim Freeman, finished the last of a string of surfing films they produced together: “Five Summer Stories,” a documentary that became a classic of the genre.

Last month, MacGillivray found himself on a beach in Hawaii, shooting a new generation of surfers in a film format somewhat larger than the 16 millimeters in which he shot “Five Summer Stories”: IMAX, with a frame size 10 times bigger than standard 35-millimeter.

“It was really enjoyable. . . . I was able to meet all these new professional surfers whose names I didn’t know,” said MacGillivray, head of Laguna Beach-based MacGillivray Freeman Films.

The new breed of surfers is finely tuned and serious, he found, different from the laid-back lot he knew as a surfer and surf filmmaker in the ‘60s and early ‘70s.

“The modern professional surfer is more or less like the professional athlete in any sport,” he said. Although the new surfers are “very much in love with what they do,” MacGillivray said, there are “fewer characters than there used to be. In the old days, it seemed like every 10th surfer was a real character. . . . The best surfers were the guys who hung out at the beach the most.”

Surfing is only one part of his current IMAX project, “The Living Sea,” but it represents something of a return to MacGillivray’s first love.

Another sign that his professional life has come full circle, in one respect: the first video release of “Five Summer Stories,” scheduled for later this year.

“The ocean has always been probably the most important thing to me. I really love the ocean,” MacGillivray said. “I’ve always wanted to communicate that feeling I had for the ocean with an audience.”

“The Living Sea” will be the next in an impressive body of IMAX films directed by MacGillivray, probably the foremost director in the format.

His credits include “To Fly,” “Speed,” “To the Limit” and the most recent entry, “The Discoverers,” now playing on the IMAX screen at the California Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles, and in San Diego at the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater and Science Center.

“The Discoverers” was inspired by the book of that title by historian Daniel J. Boorstin (related story, F1). It represents a departure from MacGillivray’s previous IMAX efforts and from other works in the format (the films are projected on a five-story screen designed to fill the viewer’s field of vision).

IMAX films tend to be long on visual flash but short on narrative structure. MacGillivray took a different tack with “The Discoverers,” which briefly tells the stories of six real-life explorers and scientists, three segments with the actual people and three with actors playing historical characters.

IMAX is “such an in-your-face kind of medium,” MacGillivray said, that it was difficult to balance the personal stories in the film with the high-tech visuals people have come to expect.

“I’m really super-proud of ‘The Discoverers.’ It’s not the easiest kind of film to make in that medium,” he said. “It’s kind of the exception in the IMAX world.”

“The Discoverers” came about when MacGillivray Freeman Films won a competition to produce a 19-minute film for Expo ’92 in Barcelona, Spain, marking the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ journey to North America. The idea to use Boorstin’s book as a model was raised, and to simultaneously make a 40-minute version of the film for standard IMAX release.

Screenwriter and documentary filmmaker Jon Boorstin, the historian’s son, was asked to write the script and help direct some of the interior sequences. He had worked with MacGillivray on 1989’s “To the Limit,” which took a prize at a Paris festival of IMAX films.

His first task was to boil down the essence of “The Discoverers” in a script for the World Expo film--for an international audience, with no narration. “I was essentially trying to make a 19-minute silent film out of a 700-page book,” Boorstin said by phone from his home in Studio City.

The work isn’t an adaptation in any traditional sense: Four of the six characters in the longer film do not even appear in the book. Rather, the film tries to capture what the book conveys about the spirit of discovery and make audiences “feel it through the characters,” Boorstin said.

“Part of the trick was to find moments of discovery” where viewers could “understand the story without even understanding the words.”

The three historical incidents depicted are Newton’s discovery of the refractive qualities of light, Magellan pioneering the path across the tip of South America and the discovery of prehistoric cave paintings in Altamira, Spain, by an amateur archeologist. Three modern scientists were added for the general IMAX release, their stories told in semi-documentary fashion.

Jon Boorstin agrees that depicting personal stories as narrative is a challenge in the IMAX format: “It is unusual for IMAX, and for good reason,” he said. “The IMAX camera is big, intrusive, temperamental. . . . It’s not really an actors’ medium.”

Although Daniel Boorstin’s involvement was minimal, his son did send drafts of his script for suggestions.

“He loved the idea of seeing his work played with on film,” Jon Boorstin said. “I have to say it was a great pleasure for me, because I had never worked with him.”

Daniel Boorstin said in a telephone interview that he is “very much impressed” with the film and appreciates that it brings the message of the book to a wider audience. “I was glad to see the ideas of the book translated in that way,” he said. “I was very pleased with the way it caught the spirit of discovery.”

Boorstin even helped promote the film by giving a “brilliant speech” in September in Charlotte, N.C., at a convention of the International Space Theater Consortium, MacGillivray said. “He’s an American treasure; he’s so learned and well-read. He’s especially interesting to talk to, although you don’t want to say a word when you’re talking to the guy.”

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As usual, MacGillivray was already putting together his next projects before “The Discoverers” was released.

In “The Living Sea,” he is working with prominent marine biologist Robert Ballard and experts from other institutions. He has traveled to Palau, an island east of the Philippines, to a village that has lived in harmony with its environment for centuries; other locations will include Nova Scotia and Chile.

The film aims to point up threats to the ocean while still giving a positive message.

“It’s not a doom-and-gloom kind of thing,” MacGillivray said. He said his hope is that “the audience will get a real respect for the value and the fragility of the ocean and will use it better. . . . There’s an awful lot we can draw from the ocean without being harmful to the ocean.”

MacGillivray has started work on the next IMAX project, a film called “Storm Chasers” about scientists who study storms. He already has some spectacular film of hurricanes and tornadoes, he said.

His goal is to continually seek new and different projects.

He’s been exhorted to make sequels to some of his popular films, such as “To Fly,” about the history of flight, but “you have to kind of resist that temptation,” he said. It’s something he says he learned when he worked as a production assistant to director Stanley Kubrick.

“He said, ‘Why do the same thing twice?’ Your life’s too short to do that.’ . . . The whole point is doing a good job. Satisfying myself is the point in filmmaking, in my mind.”

* “The Discoverers” plays daily at 10 a.m., noon, 3, 6 and 9 p.m. at the California Museum of Science and Industry, off the Harbor (110) Freeway at Exposition Boulevard, Los Angeles. $10. (213) 744-2014. The film will play at the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater and Science Center in San Diego’s Balboa Park today and Thursday at noon, 2 and 5 p.m. Beginning Friday, it will screen weekdays at 1 p.m., Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. $3.50-$6. (619) 238-1233.