BY DESIGN : Surf and Turf : It seemed the Bear belonged to no one--and everyone. Then director John Milius decided his logo was worth fighting for.

By DAVID WHARTON

Sept. 28, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

This tale begins simply, with a T-shirt.

A logo adorned its breast, a red diamond with a grizzly bear at the center. Director John Milius had the shirt made as a prop for the fictional surf shop in his 1978 film “Big Wednesday.”

The movie flopped. So this tale might have ended quietly.

But a handful of entrepreneurs saw that little red diamond and began reproducing it--without permission--on shirts and surfboards that were advertised in the back of surfing magazines.

Thus ensued an unlikely fashion epic.

Long after the film disappeared from theaters, the clothes, boards and decals that featured its logo continued to reap millions. Time blurred the distinction between artifice and reality. The Bear earned a place among traditional--and real--surfboard companies.

Then, as surf wear grew into a billion-dollar industry and Hollywood discovered the gold mine of licensing, the logo became entangled in a bitter struggle that ultimately landed in federal court.

Perhaps it is fitting that Milius plays the protagonist in this drama. As Hollywood’s resident tough guy, he wrote “You gotta ask yourself, do you feel lucky?” for “Dirty Harry” and “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” for “Apocalypse Now.” He is a brash storyteller who sees life in mythic terms. Yet the tale of the Bear has surprised even him.

“We wanted to have a good logo, something accurate,” he says. “I didn’t think it was all that important.”

Perched on a couch in his Culver City office, surrounded by busts of Caesar and Napoleon and a life-sized photograph of John Wayne, Milius gestures widely with a cigar in hand to illustrate his point. He presides over a newly licensed--and the first legal--line of Bear clothing. In addition to the original white T, the collection includes board shorts and jeans, fleece crews and canvas jackets, all of which could gross as much as $20 million this year. But Milius is talking about something bigger than money.

Eternal values, he insists, “a nostalgia for everybody’s time that has passed, the flare of our youth.” Back in 1978, the filmmaker had parlayed a number of successful screenplays into the chance to direct “The Wind and the Lion.” Having grown up on Southern California beaches among such luminaries as Mickey Dora and Lance Carson, he chose a surf film for his next project.

“Big Wednesday” took its inspiration from Denny Aaberg’s “No Pants Mance,” a short story about a 1960s Malibu party. The script expanded upon that notion, following the lives of three party-goers--played by Jan-Michael Vincent, Gary Busey and William Katt. A wise surfboard shaper, nicknamed the Bear, served as their mentor. “The Bear is the old man of the sea,” the film’s narrator explained. “The one who knew where the great swells came from and why. He made our boards. He taught us how to live.”

“If anything, I romanticized surfers,” Milius says now. “I applied Arthurian legend to a bunch of itinerants.”

With its coming-of-age theme, “Big Wednesday” promised to be the first surf film to reach beyond the beach-blanket genre. As such, it started a buzz.

Not all of the attention was positive. Vincent played a hard-drinking character named Matt Johnson who was obviously patterned after Carson. “Lance was angry,” says Steve Pezman, then editor of Surfer magazine. “He had no control over how he was personified.” Asked recently about the film, Carson simply threw his hands up and shook his head.

Then there was the logo. Milius chose the likeness of a bear because he likes to think of himself as having descended from the family Ursidae . “I have paws,” he says. “I like to sleep.” He also borrowed the distinctive diamond shape from famed surfboard-maker Hap Jacobs. Jacobs took no offense. But cries of thievery rang from other circles.

Such controversy merely heightened interest in the film. While it was still in production, Pezman obtained promotional material that included the logo. He began printing T-shirts as a novelty item. They sold briskly through his magazine.

“We knew it would be a hot item,” he says. “At the time, licensing wasn’t a big deal. It was more of a surfer prank than anything else.”

Ultimately, the movie failed to become the crossover hit that Milius had hoped for. But bad box office did not harm the logo’s marketability.

Bear clones multiplied. By the time Pezman bowed out, half a dozen other manufacturers had taken his place.

Rumor had it that Milius gave his permission for others to use the logo. In fact, Warner Bros. retained the licensing rights and refused to sell them, despite the director’s repeated attempts to cut a deal.

“They weren’t doing anything with it,” Milius says. “But the movie wasn’t a hit, so they weren’t going to do me any favors.”

Still, Milius persisted. One might have suspected greed on his part, or anger at the thought of others profiting from his creation. No, he says, it was a matter of pride. By the mid-1980s, “Big Wednesday” had resurfaced as a cult hit on video. Even though Milius had since scored a number of hits, including the film “Red Dawn,” he was feeling possessive of the project that he still refers to as a sentimental favorite.

So in 1989 he sent his assistant, Leonard Brady, a former surf journalist, to Warner Bros. with instructions to pester studio lawyers one last time.

“I played the dumb surfer,” Brady recalls. “I said we really wanted to buy the rights and when they asked how much, I said $100. From there, we inched up.”

The studio, which declined to comment on the negotiations, finally relented. After a dozen years, it sold the rights for a whopping $5,000.

Milius then contacted a Laguna Beach manufacturer, JIP Inc., whose Bear Surfwear was perhaps the biggest and best known of the pirate lines. The filmmaker claims he wanted to sell them the rights to continue using the logo for only $5,000 and a few T-shirts.

“They told me, ‘Screw you,’ ” Milius says. He puffs up his broad chest and recalls that he responded with a quote from the famed capitalist Cornelius Vanderbilt: “I will ruin you.”

A copyright infringement suit was filed. The owners of JIP, whose three Orange County factories were later cited for employing undocumented workers, could not be reached for comment.

According to Milius, the parties settled out of court. The filmmaker then cut a deal with an Irvine manufacturer, R&S; Trading Co., to create an array of traditional surf clothing with the Bear logo.

This reincarnation comes at an opportune time. The surf wear industry has embraced the retro look, with major labels such as Quiksilver and Billabong churning out flannel shirts and board shorts.

Perhaps Bear has taken advantage of nostalgia among older surfers. But projected sales indicate success with young shoppers who may not realize the logo originated as a movie prop.

“It was the first logo that came out without a surfboard,” says Ann Beasley, director of the International Surfing Museum in Huntington Beach. “It’s just that everyone thinks there was a surfboard because of the movie.”

Milius, for his part, has no clue why people buy the clothes. Nor does he particularly care.

Dressed in matching--and decidedly unhip--beige shirt and slacks, he claims to avoid any decision-making when it comes to the clothing business. But the filmmaker takes an obvious delight in having Bear shirts made for the crew that will work on his upcoming adaptation of Tom Clancy’s “Without Remorse.” He sends boxes of clothes to such friends as Steven Spielberg.

Again, he says, it is a matter of values.

“That hare-brained surf movie . . . it still gets to me,” he says. “If you put your heart into something, it always comes back. These are the things that are lasting.”