Bruce Brown
Film-maker whose laid-back 1960s’ surf movie ,The Endless Summer, changed the image of the sport
BRUCE Brown, who has died aged 80, was a film-maker whose 1966 classic The Endless Summer changed the image of surfers from the buffoonish beach bums of 1950s ‘Hollywood party movies to bronzed sporting heroes — helping, with the music of the Beach Boys, to make surfing cool and part of American culture.
The film, a documentarytravelogue, was made on a shoestring budget with Brown performing nearly every function from camera operator to narrator. It followed the adventures of two clean-cut Californian teenagers as they travelled the world, seeking “the perfect wave”.
The film’s stars, Mike Hynson — who did not tell his mother where he was going — and Robert August, were chosen mainly because they could go off for three months and pay their own air fares.
Brown, who had no formal training as a film-maker, adopted a loose, laid-back style which chimed with the times and, despite the limitations of his 16mm camera, achieved stunning Technicolor footage of big waves everywhere from Hawaii to Australia and from South Africa to Senegal.
The distributors did not think it would sell, however, so Brown took out a $50,000 loan to rent a Manhattan theatre, pay for advertising and have his 16mm film blown up to 35mm. The Endless Summer ran for 48 weeks in New York and broke attendance records nationwide, outselling My Fair Lady. Brown was dubbed “the Fellini of the foam”.
The film’s success was propelled by a John Van Hamersveld poster, featuring the silhouettes of three surfers, which became one of the most popular images of the era.
The Endless Summer led to an explosion in the popularity of surf tourism, with enthusiasts pushing through the jungles of Indonesia, is- land-hopping on the Indian Ocean ferries and scouring the fringes of Africa and Central America for virgin waves.
Much later, with his filmmaker son Dana, Brown directed The Endless Summer II (1994), in which a couple of surfers repeat the travels of Hynson and August, a film chiefly interesting for showing the evolution of the surfing scene that the original had inspired.
Bruce Brown was born in San Francisco on December 1, 1937, and brought up at Long Beach. He learnt to surf at 12 and made home movies of his friends surfing in Hawaii while in the US Navy.
After his discharge in 1957, he became a lifeguard in San Clemente, then moved to nearby Dana Point. Fed up with the way that early Hollywood attempts at surf movies “made us out to be a bunch of idiots having food fights”, he started making documentaries about the sport, including Slippery When Wet (1958) and Barefoot Adventure (1960), showing them in high-school auditoriums in and around Orange County.
After The Endless Summer, he made other sporting documentaries, most notably On Any Sunday (1971), bankrolled by Steve McQueen, which gave the same treatment to motorcycle riding as The Endless Summer and was nominated for an Oscar. A sequel, On Any Sunday II, was released in 1981.
By the time Brown began work on The Endless Summer II, the original film in which the surfers rode old-fashioned long boards and were shown wearing sports jackets and ties while travelling, had come to seem quaintly dated, with a home-movie shagginess emphasised by corny lines such as “Malibu Beach, California, famous for its Malibu Outriggers, surfing and girls. This is a girl, and for those of you who are maladjusted, this is a Malibu Outrigger.”
But it was sweet, guileless and authentic, and film buffs loved it. In 2010 Brown was inducted into the Surfers’ Hall of Fame.
In 1960, he married Patricia Hunter, who died in 2006. Bruce Brown, who died on December 10, is survived by their three children.