With its smart naivety, Brown's undisputed masterpiece conquered the hearts and souls of every surfer. He was a veteran at only 26.įor many of us, Brown was the first filmmaker to capture the essence of surfing. With $5,000 from Dale Velzy, he bought a 16 mm camera and made " Slippery When Wet." That was 1958.īruce Brown filmed five surf movies before "The Endless Summer" was released in 1964 and distributed worldwide in 1966. He surfed his first waves when he was 11 at Long Beach's Alamitos Bay.Īfter working as a lifeguard in San Clemente, Brown got a golden opportunity to shoot his first movie. In the 1960s, the decade of " The Endless Summer," surfing was harder, but it was simpler, too.īruce Brown was born on December 1, 1937, in San Francisco, California.
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The motto, the movie title, the promotional posters, the soundtrack, the narration, and the waves.Ĭan you imagine the world without DVDs, smartphones, the internet, and websites? How would you plan your surf sessions without surf reports, forecasts, and telecommunications? It was similar to the reaction of the people crowding the beaches in Senegal and Ghana when Hynson and August paddled out and rode waves right in front of their villages - they were stoked! Brown, too, was stoked his $50,000 investment brought him millions."On any day of the year, it's summer somewhere in the world." Here's everything you need to know about Bruce Brown's ultimate surfing movie.Įverything about "The Endless Summer" is perfect. The reaction of Kansans and New Yorkers was echoed by audiences around the country when the film finally went into distribution in 1966. Meanwhile, it was picked up by Cinema 5 for national (and then worldwide) distribution. The Endless Summer played the Kuyps Bay for a year. But nobody knew who I was, and maybe they felt it wasn’t worth criticizing, so they pretty much gave us good reviews and helped us out.” If they did a review and wrote, ‘Brown did a shitty movie,’ we’d have been dead. We weren’t one of them, so a lot of the media in New York were into helping us out, not hurting us. “For some reason,” says Brown, “the real entrenched film critics seemed to like it, maybe because it was different from what they were used to seeing. When that didn’t work, they took the film to Manhattan and booked it into the Kuyps Bay Theatre, where Brown charmed the bored Big Apple critics at a preview screening, telling them he’d paid a hundred bucks for the room, so he expected good reviews. So they booked a theater in Wichita, Kansas, and the film broke house records there for two solid weeks. heartland would be convincing, if it worked. With Brown’s easy, homespun narration woven into a nice soundtrack by the Sandals, they worked on trying to sell it, came up dry and finally decided a test run in the U.S. The Endless Summer was a big success on the circuit - so big that Brown and his promotions man, Paul Allen (who ran ahead arranging shows and coordinating publicity) thought they might be able to attract a national distributor. When the film was finished, Brown knew he had something good in the can. There are bigger, better, scarier and more exciting waves in lots of other surf flicks, but none pay off quite as satisfyingly as “Bruce’s Beauties.” There, in that sequence, was magic indeed.
Francis in South Africa in one of the most revelatory and compelling moments in surf filmdom. So, a day late or not, everything turns out just as perfect as the wave they discover at Cape St. They’d meet someone (like future world champ Nat Young) and something happened. Somehow, even when they had no luck with the surf, something would happen. Things didn’t always go according to plan, but Brown wasn’t the kind of guy who did all that much planning anyway. Bruce Brown’s sixth film, The Endless Summer, is the archetypal tale of two California surfers, blond Mike Hynson and dark Robert August, hitting the road to follow summer and surf around the world.īrown filmed in Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawaii and California.
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