‘Endless Summer’ documentarian dies at 80

Filmmaker introduced surfing as a search for the perfect wave

Bruce Brown, a filmmaker whose scrappy 1966 documentary “The Endless Summer” became an international phenomenon, introducing surfing to the world not as a frivolous fad but as a sacred search for the perfect wave, died Dec. 10 at a hospital in Santa Barbara, California. He was 80.

He had heart ailments and complications from a broken hip, said his son Dana Brown, also a documentarian.

Hailed as “the Bergman of the boards” and “the Fellini of the foam,” Brown brought next to no professional training but an abundance of passion to his art form, which he used to popularize surfing far beyond the coastlines of California.

He had learned the sport growing up in Southern California before he hit his teens. At the time, surfing did not enjoy the reputation that it would acquire in later years — in large part thanks to “The Endless Summer” — as a refuge for pure seekers of the purest thrill.

Surfers had long been perceived as “silly and mindless,” Matt Warshaw, creator of the Encyclopedia of Surfing, said in an interview. Contributing to that impression was Hollywood fare such as the “Gidget” films of the late 1950s and 1960s, featuring a parade of actresses as the quintessential beach bunny. Neither did “Beach Blanket Bingo” (1965), with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, do much to help.

Brown began experiment with film during his Navy service in Hawaii — a felicitous posting for a surfer — working with rudimentary equipment and improvised techniques. His first production, “Slippery When Wet” (1958), was for surfboard manufacturer Dale Velzy.

On its heels came five more surfing documentaries, including “Surf Crazy” (1959), “Surfin’ Shorts” and “Barefoot Adventure” (both 1960), “Surfing Hollow Days” (1961) and “WaterLogged” (1962).

They were low-budget affairs, featuring no soundtracks, and presented in theaters with Brown delivering live narration. Sometimes an as-yet unknown musical group, the Beach Boys, would play at intermission.

Brown burst to the fore with “The Endless Summer.” The film featured two young surfers, Robert August and Mike Hynson, who embark in 1963 on a sojourn around the globe, hopscotching across the equator and back several times over, to follow the sun and chase the waves.

“It’s kind of like a pipe dream,” Brown said, according to the Orange County Register. “If you traveled around the world just right, you’d be in the middle of summer everywhere you went.”

The trip took the surfers to Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Tahiti, among other locales, with Brown filming on a handheld 16mm camera and providing narration. The final product, film reviewer Stephen Holden later wrote in the New York Times, had the “perky ingenuousness of an early Beach Boys anthem.”

“The Endless Summer,” whose budget had been $50,000, became a sensation.