If there was one thing Bruce Brown was proud of, it wasn’t the accolades of his film that followed surfers chasing the sun, or the mainstream success after “The Endless Summer” became a cultural phenomenon even in the snowiest of towns.
It was that the perception of surfers was changed — that the world got to see that wave riders weren’t just “surf bums,” as he said in an interview with Orange County Register three years ago.
“At the time, surfers were considered losers. You didn’t want to tell anyone you were a surfer,” said Brown at the time. “It showed the general public we were good guys.”
Brown, who grew up in Long Beach, started his film career in the sleepy surf town of Dana Point but lived out his later years in Santa Barbara, died at age 80 of natural causes on Sunday, Dec. 10.
“Today our friend, partner, mentor, filmmaker, and father peacefully passed away in Santa Barbara, California,” reads the website brucebrownfilms.com. “With Bruce Brown and his inspiring movies an era comes to an end! His legacy lives on with all of us that continue to carry his torch!”
Brown was born in San Francisco but spent his early years in Long Beach. At age 11, he surfed the “green rollers that formed in the entrance channel to Alamitos Bay before the Long Beach breakwall was completed,” reads his bio. He attended Wilson High School and became a regular at surf breaks such as Seal Beach and Huntington Beach.
He enlisted in the Navy after graduation, went to submarine school and finished at the top of his class and was assigned to Hawaii, where he started making 8mm movies. After his stint in the Navy, he returned to California and worked in San Clemente, when surfboard shaper Dale Velzy put up $5,000 for a film that would promote the Velzy surf team.
Though his most widely recognized work, “The Endless Summer” wasn’t Brown’s first stint behind a camera. His first film, “Slippery When Wet,” was released in 1958, and was followed by “Surf Crazy,” “Barefoot Adventures” and other movies that were showcased in high school auditoriums up and down the coast, Brown narrating live in front of the salty, sandy crowd.
“The Endless Summer” came later, in the ’60s, when he had the idea to follow two surfers following the sun. He tapped Huntington Beach’s Robert August, who had plans to go to college to become a dentist, as one of the cast, the other Mike Hynson.
When Brown approached August about traveling the world in October 1963 to find unknown waves, August’s first reaction was “no way.”
But the next day, after surfing Trestles, August stopped by Brown’s office in Dana Point – where a map of the world showed all the potential stops during this dream adventure. It wasn’t just to nearby Hawaii or Mexico, which August had already explored through the years. Brown had his sights set on places like New Zealand, Tahiti, Africa.
“We’re going to see the world,” Brown told August.
“I said, ‘Wow.’ We weren’t just going to go and catch a few waves and come home,” August recalled. “It’s a big deal.”
The team first wanted to travel straight to South Africa for the film, but it was $50 cheaper to go the long way around, stopping in countries such as Australia and New Zealand along the way, he said.
A favorite scene for the filmmaker was the part shot in Cape St. Francis, where they discovered a perfect, untouched wave in a remote part of South Africa.
“It’s kind of like a pipe dream. If you traveled around the world just right, you’d be in the middle of summer everywhere you went,” said Brown a few years ago while at a Huntington Beach celebration that marked the 50-year anniversary of the film.
Distributors, thought, didn’t want to buy a film they thought would only appeal to the coastal towns.
To prove to New York theater operators that the film could fly in places far from the beach, Brown had to rent out a theater in Wichita, Kan. Week after week, despite heavy January snowfall, it sold out.
It wasn’t long before “The Endless Summer” was shown around the world, as far away as Russia.
“Then it worked. Then it becomes what it is. That would have never happened if he didn’t believe in the film and doing it himself,” Dana Brown said of his father earlier this year. “It reflects the laid-back, casual stereotype of surfers, but there’s a lot of heart and grit and fortitude that made that film happen. That’s always impressive.”
It wasn’t just the-wave riding skills that captivated the audience. For a generation in the ’60s, “The Endless Summer” represented a sense of freedom, with viewers magically whisked away to a foreign land.
“I think he helped shape our culture. He gave us all that idealized lifestyle,” said Barry Haun, creative director for the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center based in San Clemente. “It’s always summer. You go, ‘That’s what I want. I want it to always be warm and sunny and fun.’ I think that was the main thing, he made it look really fun.”
Haun said, like many others, he saw the movie before he learned to surf and it planted the seed that he wanted to become a surfer.
Bruce Chambers, of Rancho Palos Verdes, spent the past five years with Brown working on a 50th anniversary book and box set for “The Endless Summer.” It was released earlier this year and now the movie and book are in the Smithsonian Institution collection in Washington, D.C.
Chambers said Brown’s passing was unexpected. The duo had recently done a book signing and had another planned for February.
“I was absolutely stunned and shocked,” he said.
Chambers said “The Endless Summer” is credited with “changing American culture.”
“That’s a pretty amazing feat,” he said. “That movie launched the craze of surfing.”
He described Brown as calm, quiet, laid-back, “a surfer dude.”
Chambers said he was honored and pleased to have helped document and share Brown’s legacy.
“I’ve gotten many emails, people thanking me for helping preserve surf history,” he said.
Brown also had a big impact on the motorcycle culture after his film “On Any Sunday,” a 1971 documentary that was nominated for an Academy Award in 1972.
Brown in 2009 was inducted into the Surfers’ Hall of Fame, and in 2014 he was given the first Surfing Heritage and Cultural Center Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015, the Smithsonian Institute had an exhibit called “Wave of Innovation: Surfing and the Endless Summer.” Earlier this year, a 500-page book detailing the behind-the-scenes making of the film was released.
Memorial service details are pending.
