It's easy to envy the elite of modern professional surfing. The best of them enjoy a lifestyle blessed with fame, sponsorships worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and easy access to the most prized waves in the world.

At some stops on what is often called "The Dream Tour," including O'ahu's North Shore, these top surfers stay at luxury beach houses managed by corporate sponsors. Some surfers have done well enough to acquire investment property that is salivated over in magazine profiles. They have coaches, managers and agents.

When Shaun Tomson arrived in Hawai'i in November 1974, however, the articulate young South African surfer found none of this. Instead, he found surfers who casually rode enormous waves for the thrill of it. Their reward, aside from the occasional contest prize money, was excitement, achievement and survival.

But Tomson's arrival came at a tipping point in the history of surfing. As he explains in his new documentary, "Bustin' Down the Door," the changes ushered in by himself — and a small, like-minded crew from South Africa and Australia — transformed surfing from a counterculture pastime to a professional sport.

Tomson, his South African cousin, Michael Tomson, and Australians Ian Cairns, Wayne "Rabbit" Bartholomew, Mark Richards and Peter Townend brought an aggressive and highly competitive style of surfing to the North Shore.

"Bustin' Down the Door" is their story, told with loving nostalgia and no shortage of the same bravado that raised eyebrows among the Hawai'i surfers of the period.

"We just kind of had this vision that if we could turn this into a sport, we could possibly make a living from it and be able to surf more," Tomson said by phone from New York, where he is working to get the film released. "It was a very simplistic objective. We didn't have a grand master plan. We wanted to get famous and win contests, and we knew that if we could change the perception of the sport, we could make money at it."

That first winter, none of them could secure invitations to the few Hawai'i contests that existed, even after writing letters of introduction that noted their success at hometown events. By the next winter, they were not only invited, but winning every contest.

And beginning in 1976, they won seven straight world titles on a professional tour they helped inspire.

"Their contributions were enormous," said state Sen. Fred Hemmings, a former world champion and one of the founders of the International Professional Surfers Organization, the original governing body that launched them on their string of world titles.

"They laid the foundation for all the success of the modern-day sport and at great sacrifice and cost to themselves," he said. "They traveled all around the world at their own expense."

NOT JUST ANOTHER SURF FLICK

The film is unlike most surf movies. Instead of the endless surf porn of wave after wave, "Bustin' Down the Door" includes an explanatory narrative delivered by Hollywood actor Ed Norton and a wide range of interviews with surfers who lived through the era.

Now 52 and primarily an author and motivational speaker who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., Tomson served as the film's executive producer.

He began making the film at the end of 2006 and has created a period piece.

Tomson used old footage from 19 surf films and from ABC's "Wide World of Sports." The grainy, 16mm movie segments will instantly transport an older generation of surfers back to their youth. He also found old Super 8 movies stored in the garage of the family home in Durban, and photographs from Dan Merkel, whose '70s-era shots defined the time.

"A lot of the stuff in the movie has never been seen before," Tomson said.

But it's the story that propels the film. Rich with personal anecdotes, the surfers come across as something more than skilled athletes. They are men with demons and desires.

Bartholomew, the current and longtime president of the Association of Surfing Professionals, was raised in poverty and stole to feed his mother and four sisters. Tomson wanted to succeed to honor his father, a champion swimmer sidelined by a vicious shark attack. Richards, softspoken and gangly, burned with a need to be the best and said he would have died trying if necessary.

They knew of only one place that would quench them.

"Hawai'i was the ultimate proving ground," Tomson says in the film. "I knew it was the place you had to go because without Hawai'i, you were nothing."

On the North Shore's seven-mile stretch of famous surf breaks, they found a paradise of simple living — half-inch foam mattresses and a blanket — and waves beyond their wildest dreams. Bartholomew tells the story of how the Aussies thought they had conquered Hawai'i after riding 8-foot waves, only to wake up in the middle of the night because they thought an earthquake was shaking the rafters.

It was a powerful west swell.

Still, they thrived. In fact, they got so good that photographers followed them everywhere.

'SALTY' REACTION

Barry Kanaiaupuni, one of the most respected surfers of the late 1960s and '70s, said all that attention began to grate on the local surfers.

Before the Australians and South Africans arrived, the North Shore regulars surfed for "pure joy," Kanaiaupuni said. They were just as good as the foreign surfers, but they didn't feel the need to boast about it.

But local anger boiled over after Bartholomew authored a story in the surf media declaring the new crew to be the kings of surfing. He called it "Bustin' Down the Door."

"It was kind of offensive, to put it mildly," said Kanaiaupuni, now 62 and a surf-shop owner. "That put so many people off. First time he paddled out at Sunset after that story, he got beat up. He called himself Muhammad Ali. That got a lot of people salty."

Bartholomew and Cairns holed up at the Kuilima, the door locked and the blinds drawn. Tomson bought a shotgun.

"We all did have death threats," Tomson said. "We all got punched out. We all got intimidated."

The tensions were resolved peacefully, though, after big-wave legend Eddie Aikau organized a meeting at the Kuilima that resulted in a truce.

Matt Warshaw, a former editor of Surfer magazine and the author of "The Encyclopedia of Surfing," said the new crew brought excitement that stirred younger fans, even as it ruffled the feathers of an established "heavy-duty hierarchy."

"When this group came along from Australia and South Africa, especially if you were like I was, a teenager, it was a hugely exciting, transformative thing," said Warshaw, who lives and writes in San Francisco. "It wasn't just that they were surfing in new ways, it was that they dressed differently and said more outrageous things."

Warshaw believes a professional tour would have evolved even without these brash surfers.

"But these guys came in and in a very short time changed the way we wanted to surf and changed the way we wanted to think of ourselves as surfers," said Warshaw, now 48. "These guys came out and even if they were nice, sweet guys like Mark Richards and polite like Shaun Tomson, everything got brighter and louder and more flamboyant."

In the film, Bartholomew, now a graying elder statesman for a sport he shaped, downplays their role.

"Really, we weren't trying to take over," he says. "We were trying to arrive. To be part of it."