Ingenuity and a can-do spirit underpin surfing’s greatest ever film

Last year marked the 50th anniversary of Bruce

Brown’s The Endless

Summer, arguably the greatest surf film of all time and certainly the most influential, in which Californian surfers Mike Hynson and Robert August famously set off to “follow the summer around the world,” visiting Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti and finally Hawaii, on a trailblazing surfing safari that set the template for generations of itinerant waveriders to come. It’s taken until now for the inevitable special edition DVD to make an appearance, but it’s been well worth the wait: the bonus disc is a real treasure trove of unseen footage and interviews with the cast and crew, and it builds up a richly-detailed picture, not just of how the film was made, but of the optimistic, openminded beach culture that spawned it. The Endless Summer is sometimes described as “timeless,” and its appeal certainly hasn’t faded with the passing years, but it is also very much a product of the time and place in which it was created.

Perhaps the thing that comes across most strongly from the various 50th anniversary mini-documentaries is the sense of 1960s California as a time ripe with possibility; a brave new world in which everyone was a backyard inventor and everyone wanted to be part of the next big thing. Hynson describes how he nearly became a golfer instead of a surfer, devoting a chunk of his youth to experimenting with new kinds of golf clubs. Eventually, however, he chose surfing over golf because the nascent watersport was still “wide open”. In a similar vein, camera expert Bob Bagley, who set up Brown with all his gear for the

Endless Summer trip, describes their approach to making waterproof camera housings: “There were no Gopros in 1960, 1965, so we made

our own.” If watching The Endless

Summer remains an uplifting experience for surfers and nonsurfers alike, perhaps it’s due, at least in part, to the fact the film is so deeply suffused with this confident, can-do spirit.

Brown certainly needed every ounce of can-do spirit he could muster to make his masterpiece. Bagley describes how he embarked on his epic surf odyssey with a stash of 50 rolls of film, each one equivalent to just two and a half minutes of recording time. Not only did he have to frequently change films while shooting, he was also working with 16mm Bolex cameras which required hand-cranking every 20 to 25 seconds. Bagley says that when Brown was filming the iconic Cape St Francis sequence in South Africa, in which Hynson and August discover an endlessly peeling right-hand wave in the middle of nowhere, Brown would often have to put the camera down half way through filming one of the surfers on a wave, crank it furiously, and then start filming again in order to capture as much action as possible.

The mini-docs paint an intriguing and occasionally surprising picture of Brown. The introductory interview with the man himself is quite short and doesn’t tell us much that we didn’t already know (he made the film, he says, because “at the time surfing had a bad rep, thanks to the Hollywood stupid movies and stuff, so, y’know, I wanted to show what it was really like”) but there’s no shortage of telling quotes from his contemporaries.

Greg Noll, who became known as Da Bull for his fearless approach to riding the giant waves at Waimea Bay on the North shore of Oahu, chuckles a little at the common perception of Brown as a shy, enigmatic genius and says: “I remember a different Bruce Brown.

“He was the worst camera hog I’ve ever seen in my life,” he continues, talking about the time before Brown got into making films and was just another aspiring surfer. “He’d do anything to be on film. It’s a damn good thing he got a camera.”

That takes us to another part of Brown’s achievements that it is easy to overlook – his surfing. The commentary on The Endless Summer is so laconic that you could be forgiven for thinking you’re listening to an old man speaking, but in fact Brown was still in his 20s when he made and narrated the film. A clip shot in 1964, the same year as the

Endless Summer trip (the film wasn’t released until 1966), shows Brown riding solid 15-20 foot waves at Waimea, something only a handful of people would have been capable of at the time.

Brown turns 80 on 1 December. He begins his introduction to this DVD with the words: “Hi, I’m Bruce Brown. Yes, I’m still around.” Thanks to his film, he’ll still be around as long as people are still surfing. The Endless Summer – Limited Edition Deluxe Box Set is available now, £24.99

Brown was working with 16mm bolex cameras which required hand cranking every 25 seconds