Dick Metz, 1959, at Cape St. Francis, home of “the perfect wave.” Photo: Surfing Heritage & Culture Center//Dick Metz Archives
Editor’s Note: Filmmaker Richard Yelland’s latest documentary, Birth of The Endless Summer reveals the hidden story of The Endless Summer by following surf pioneer Dick Metz’s journey around the world, examining his role in inspiring Bruce Brown’s iconic film and how the relationships he formed played a pivotal role in shaping the modern sport of surfing.
This story is really about the birth of the sport as we know it. It centers not only Bruce Brown’s creation of The Endless Summer, but also on Hobie Alter’s pioneering of foam boards and the role of his eventual partner, Dick Metz, at the center of the modern surf movement.
My focus in Birth of The Endless Summer (87 minutes, USA and South Africa) is on Metz and his three-year, steamship-hopping, vagabond adventure in the late 1950s through Tahiti, Fiji, Australia, Europe, and Africa. The clinching moment of the journey was his landing at the tip of South Africa, on a Cape Town beach. It was there that he had inadvertently run into a surfer in the water named John Whitmore, a man who was the pioneer of surfing in the country and would later become known as the “The Oom,” or uncle, of South African surfing.
Metz (left, in hat) landed in Cape Town and was taken in by Whitmore (right, sitting) and family on the back end of a ‘round the world hitchhiking tour (1958-1961) Photo: Surfing Heritage & Culture Center//Dick Metz Archives
The chance encounter between Metz and Whitmore has been called “the most fortuitous meeting in the history of South African surfing” by Paul Botha, a surf historian and former contest director in South Africa. It’s a friendship that would become a brotherhood over the months Metz lived with Whitmore in his family house. A relationship that led Metz to the Eastern Cape of South Africa, where he found a pristine bay and deserted stretch of sand. Metz stood on a bluff and watched the place as it drew in beautiful lines from a point that stretched miles out to sea. This surf break, originally known by local surfers as “First Bush,” according to early Cape St. Francis surfer, Graham Hynes, later would become known as “the perfect wave” or “Bruce’s Beauties” after the release of The Endless Summer from Bruce Brown Films in 1964. It was a discovery often mistakenly credited to Bruce Brown and the source of an inside joke between the two.
The Birth of the Birth of The Endless Summer
The idea to do this film came to me when Bruce Brown passed away late in 2017. All the tributes started coming through social media from what seemed like every living surfer, young and old. It was the first time I’d seen surfers from every generation agree on something. I immediately thought that telling the story behind Bruce’s The Endless Summer would be a great tribute to him. I also had an idea that Dick Metz might have been to Cape St. Francis first because I got to know Dick when he helped me with early 1950s Malibu research for my film 12 Miles North: The Nick Gabaldon Story. I immediately called Dick up and told him what I was thinking and he said, “Let’s meet and talk about it over a meal.”
We met at Dana Point’s Harbor House Cafe. It didn’t take many minutes into our lunch of omelettes to realize that Dick’s story wasn’t the backstory of The Endless Summer — it was the story. Something that Bruce Brown’s promoter, Paul Allen, said in my film was that it was possibly “more interesting than the story itself.”
The realization that I was going to have to do this project all crystallized very quickly. Bob Hurley gave me words of encouragement when he asked me whether I could envision anyone else making it. Dick Metz’s discovery of Cape St. Francis and the inspiration he gave Bruce to go there – only to have him film the most iconic surf scene in our lifetimes – was a piece of history that needed to be told. It felt like duty, in a way, to get this story documented before it was lost.
In Birth of the Endless Summer I was going to be documenting Metz’s late three-year journey around the world, from 1958-1961, and his discovery of South Africa’s nascent surf culture and world-class surf breaks. But the key to its success was to have what I call a “living story arc.” Metz retracing his original steps in Cape Town and Cape St. Francis would offer a current-day experience for viewers rather than just a history lesson.
“If Dick didn’t have that chance meeting in 1959 with John Whitmore on a beach in Cape Town, The Endless Summer would not exist, or South African surfing as we know it.”
The discovery of Cape St Francis by surfers Mike Hynson and Robert August, with Bruce Brown behind the camera, was every surfers’ dream realized. In his interview for this film, Kelly Slater said he believed that The Endless Summer was “the most important surf movie of all time.”
We launched the project filming up and down the coast of Southern California and the North Shore of Oahu. The next big question was how were we going to get to South Africa? Quite simply, this wouldn’t have been possible without Paul Naude. Naude was the South African founder of Vissla and serendipitously a neighbor of mine in Laguna Beach. Paul had a tremendous amount of respect for Dick Metz. He was inspired by Metz running the first Hobie surf shops that grew out of Hobie Alter’s opening one of the world’s first surf retail operations in Dana Point, California. In fact, Metz was responsible for opening Hawaii’s first surf shop, a Hobie shop in downtown Honolulu. But Naude was also very familiar with Metz’s relationship with Whitmore and Dick’s discovery of Cape St Francis. Paul told me how important this film was to South Africans and that he really wanted to see me get down there to film that part of the story. What’s more, he really wanted Dick to go with me, and applied the necessary pressure. Dick is a super energetic 92-year-old guy, but it was a big leap for him to finally commit and take the trip.
When we arrived in Cape Town, I couldn’t believe the reception the South Africans gave Dick. It gave me a completely new perspective on the story’s importance not only to the making of the The Endless Summer, but also the pipeline that Metz formed for surf culture to be exported from California to South Africa in the early 1960s. Bruce Brown’s films, foam blanks, Surfer magazines, all of these things that were vital to create a global surf culture, were shipped down to Whitmore after Metz’s trip. Dick came back home to Laguna Beach and told Bruce Brown, Hobie Alter, John Severson, The Hoffman’s, and everyone else what was down there at the southern tip of Africa – and the rest was, as they say, history. It created an industry in South Africa and a national team sport out of it, as well. It added Africa to Hawaii and California as the epicenters of surfing.
The first Brooks Street Surfing Classic in 1955. Among the surfers are Hobie Alter, Tom Morey, Renny Water, and Bing Boca. Photo: Surfing Heritage & Cultural Center//Dick Metz
When I went back to South Africa with Dick Metz to retrace his steps, it was his brotherhood with Whitmore that came through. The time spent with the Whitmore family revealed the importance of what we were doing. You could clearly see why Metz was a hero there because surfers recognized that if Dick didn’t have that chance meeting in 1959 with John Whitmore on a beach in Cape Town, The Endless Summer wouldn’t exist or South African surfing as we know it.
At times, the scale of this project felt like it would overwhelm me. There seemed to be no end in sight. The dozens upon dozens of interviews required was head spinning, and I still didn’t get to interview everyone I had wanted to, like World Champ Shaun Tomson, who I hope to catch for my next film. Then we were also stopped in our tracks by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The lockdown landed right in the middle of our early editing and animation process, and it also slowed the launch of my film, Seeding Change: The Power of Conscious Commerce, which I had to release before this one. The edit started as a 120-minute+ rough cut. Once we got it down to 105-minutes, we were able to chip away until we had an 87-minute final cut. The whole process took over a year. It was all about mining the gold and condensing the best elements into a concise film. One that moves with good pacing so that a feature length documentary feels more like a brisk 45-minute show.
The extra time given to us by the pandemic really helped us polish our animations that we were working on with illustrator Brian Rea, acclaimed for his work for the New York Times as well as his book, Death Wins a Goldfish. Brian and his animator Pablo Declan did a first pass on illustrations and animations of scenes from Dick’s journey and felt they were over-detailed, so they did an entirely new set of drawings and animations that were raw, intuitive, and more engaging for viewers’ imaginations. It’s always nice to hear fans of the film say how much they like Brian’s and Pablo’s final work. We also took the time to dig deeper into the film and archives, looking harder for that perfect photo or archival clip. Additionally, we took extra time in post to clean up the imagery and footage on a DaVinci system, so the historical materials looked sparkling.
Our first screenings were sold out at our world premiere at the Newport Beach Film Festival in fall of 2021, and an Audience Award for Best Action Sports Film followed. We moved on to a sold out screening at the Laguna Beach’s Hobie store for the opening of the 2021 Coast Film Festival. A global film festival tour followed that just wrapped up with showings at Screenwave in Australia, Surf At Lisbon, and the Dana Point Film Festival. All told, we won five festival awards over an 18-plus-month film festival run. We finally released the film to theaters on July 14, 2023, starting at LA Paloma Theater in Encinitas.
The response at our San Diego premiere, with many Windansea Surf Club members in attendance and also an appearance by Mike Hynson himself, was rewarding. I’m also happy to announce the companion book release from SCRIBD Birth of The Endless Summer: A Surf Odyssey on June 28. I had been working on the audio book project for over a year with writer Jamie Brisick. We were also extremely fortunate to bring on Surfing Hall of Fame Inductee Rob Machado as its voice. Rob also shares untold stories from his life as a surf traveler along with other luminaries of the sport like Strider Wasilewski, Dave “Rasta” Rastovich, William Finnegan, Kassia Meador, and Dick Metz himself.
The love of The Endless Summer and Bruce Brown, the passion for the history of the sport, and the respect given to me and the project by the individuals who’ve made this history, are unbelievable. Those things made the process of finding and uncovering this story so meaningful. Doors were opened for us that normally wouldn’t have been opened. While we come to an end of sorts as the film releases to the world, the journey is far from over.
With the documentary market in flux and upheaval in the entertainment industry due to the writers’ and actors’ strikes, we have no idea whether we’ll be heading straight to digital after cinemas or looking at other channels.
In the meantime, keep posted on our Instagram @birthoftheendlesssummer to find a theater screening near you and to stay current on our fall releases, whether that be broadcast or streaming.
We were incredibly fortunate that Metz did an unbelievable job documenting his original 1958-1961 trip with high quality photography delivered by a worn and beaten Leica camera that’s still around today. We’re grateful that Alex Mecl, Director of Bruce Brown Films, supported this project from the get-go and gave us access to all of Bruce Brown’s film and photo archives. Also, we had the good fortune that Dick Metz was the founder of the Surfing Heritage and Cultural Center (SHACC). Thanks to his team and great people there like Jake Howard, Barry Haun, and Linda Michael, we were able to spend countless hours combing and pilfering their archives of imagery and relics that could be considered the world’s best.
Editor’s Note: Keep up to date on Birth of the Endless Summer‘s Instagram @birthoftheendlesssummer. The Hawaii screening premiere is Saturday, July 29th at the beautiful Doris Duke Theater in the Honolulu Museum of Art. Tickets are still available here. August dates for Hermosa Beach, Orange County and San Rafael, CA as well as Lake Worth, FL and Ketchum, ID will be updated soon on @birthoftheendlesssummer
