Bruce Brown’s final interview. Photo: The Inertia/Smolowe
#10. Bruce Brown
Bruce Brown did more to bring surfing to the non-surfing public than anyone else. Producer of surfing’s most influential and famous movie, The Endless Summer, Brown was born in 1937 in San Francisco. He made his first surfing movie at the age of 18 in Honolulu while he was in the navy, and made one every few years until 1964, when The Endless Summer was released.
Brown, along with Mike Hynson and Robert August, set out to film the perfect wave, and ended up with 95 minutes of what would become a big part of surfing’s backbone in the years to come. In 1965, Bruce Brown showed the movie in Kansas, a landlocked state, and it outsold My Fair Lady, a film that won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. After being transferred to 35-mm and re-edited, Newsweek called it one of the 10 Best Films of 1966. Almost thirty years later, Brown filmed The Endless Summer II with his son, Dana. The sequel was an attempt to recreate that initial film, featuring Robert “Wingnut” Weaver and Pat O’Connell as they try and follow in the footsteps of Hynson and August. It missed the mark,ironically, largely in part to the evolutionary fire under surfing for which the first film was kindling.
The Endless Summer portrayed surfers differently than any other film before–not as lazy, beach-bum types, but as something a bit more passionate: people in search of perfection, and willing to go, literally, to the ends of the earth to find it. Bruce Brown also was the first to film the Banzai Pipeline. The groundbreaking footage he took of Phil Edwards that day in 1961 was featured in his fourth film, Surfing Hollow Days.
