Still Riding a 30-Year Crest, Surf Filmmaker Hangs ‘II’ : Lifestyle: Sequel to 1963 classic ‘Endless Summer’ mirrors sea change in sport the original helped popularize.
Three decades after his classic film “Endless Summer” introduced surfing to the landlocked masses and earned him critical accolades as “the Bergman of the boards” and “the Fellini of the foam,” legendary surf filmmaker Bruce Brown is back at the beach.
“Endless Summer II”--the world’s first surf documentary to be shot in 35 millimeter--opens June 3 and surfers up and down the coast are, in a word, stoked.
But this time out, there’s a difference.
The world of surfing has changed dramatically since the Dana Point filmmaker and surfers Robert August of Seal Beach and Mike Hynson of San Diego packed up their boards in 1963 and left on the original around-the-world surfing safari.
Indeed, the two “Endless Summer” films--Brown spent $50,000 on the first one, which he shot on a 16-mm Bolex camera, while the $3.3-million sequel boasts a crew of eight--underscore the evolution of surfing over the past 30 years.
Orange County--home to Surf City and the Wedge, Surfer and Surfing magazines, the Surfrider Foundation and the Assn. of Surfing Professionals--has played a pivotal role in the sport’s image and growth.
“People are definitely more aware of surfing than they were,” said Brown, 56, who first rode the waves at Hermosa and Huntington as a kid in the ‘50s and began making surf films to bankroll his beach lifestyle.
Surfing has grown into a billion-dollar-a-year business that spawns everything from boards and wet suits to magazines and videos to the biggest offshoot of them all: the trend-setting surf-wear industry, whose ranks include such major Orange County-based labels as Off Shore, Billabong, Ocean Pacific Sunwear and Maui and Sons.
Surfing has also become a global phenomenon, with burgeoning surf cultures in Brazil, Japan, France, Spain and England. And there are now resorts in Fiji and Indonesia catering to surfers, who are traveling more than ever.
Today, surfers can even make a living riding waves. About 50 surfers on a worldwide pro tour make $30,000 to $50,000 a year from contest winnings and endorsements, while 1992 world champ Kelly Slater and a small number of other upper-echelon surfers earn about half a million dollars. Says Peter Townend of Westminster, the first Assn. of Surfing Professionals world champ in 1976: “It wasn’t that way in my time.”
Surfers have gained political muscle too. The decade-old Surfrider Foundation in San Clemente and other ecology-minded surfer organizations wage environmental legal battles and lobby on coastal issues.
Surfing is now not only offered in high schools up and down the Orange County coast, but teen-agers are just as likely to be paddling out with doctors, lawyers and CEOs who don wet suits to get in a few rides before dress-suiting up for work.
The sport even has enough of a history now that a handful of surf museums, from Huntington Beach to Santa Cruz to Florida, display the flotsam and jetsam of the sport.
In the process, the sport many once considered a realm of barefooted misfits has gained respect.
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Before “Endless Summer” opened nationally in 1966--after debuting in school and civic auditoriums on the surf circuit two years earlier--surfers had a generally unsavory reputation: They were the bad girls and boys of the beach, at least to the generation prone to wearing sandals and socks on the sand.
New Journalism guru Tom Wolfe captured the generational contrast in “The Pump House Gang,” his 1965 magazine story about the “too cool” surfer crowd that hung out at Windansea Beach in La Jolla: a tanned band of teen-agers who lived in garages, threw beer-keg parties and lived to surf.
The laid-back, party atmosphere still exists. But the good-humored “Endless Summer” shattered the stereotype. Brown went out of his way to show surfing as a bona fide sport requiring great skill, that surfers weren’t aquatic versions of the Hells Angels and--most memorably captured on film--that riding waves was as much poetry as sport.
The antithesis of all those bland and cartoonish Frankie and Annette “Beach Party” movies, “Endless Summer” was the real thing, as much an engrossing travelogue as a compelling surf film.
“One area that Bruce had a big impact was he showed surfers that the world is not flat. There are waves everywhere,” said Surfer magazine editor Steve Hawk.
Hawk credits the beginning of the surfing boom in the ‘60s to several factors, including mass production of foam surfboards and advances in wet-suit technology that now allow surfing year-round--even Alaska, which offers this advantage: “You can surf until midnight.”
But playing no small role in the initial popularity of the sport were the “Gidget” movies, the Beach Boys’ music and Brown’s “Endless Summer.”
“It was a real turning point in the general cultural image of the sport,” Hawk said.
Hawk, who attended a preview of the sequel, said it not only has the “best cinematography” of any surf film he’s ever seen, but “overall, in capturing contemporary surfing, I think it’s the best surf movie ever made.
“It was so heartening when I saw (the sequel) to realize that the same kind of joyful spirit that permeated the first movie is alive and well in the second one. He really does a terrific job showing how fun it is.”
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But can “Endless Summer II”--in which California surfers Robert (Wingnut) Weaver of Santa Cruz and Pat O’Connell of Laguna Niguel go on a two-year, seven-country search for perfect waves--pack as big a wallop as the original, which turned even pasty-faced New York film critics on to the joys of surfing?
“I don’t think it’ll have the same eye-opening impact because (the original) kind of changed the perception forever,” said Hawk, adding that “back in those days surfers had limited visual access to the sport. There was no such thing as videos, and you had to go to your local junior high school and see some small-time 16-mm film.”
Today, surfing competitions not only air regularly on cable channels, but the number of surf video titles has grown from a handful a few years ago to about 20 a year.
One of the hottest surf-video makers is Taylor Steele of Solana Beach, who, at 21, has become something of the Bruce Brown of the MTV generation. His punk-music-accompanied 40-minute videos feature the world’s top short boarders “ripping” in the best small surf spots in the world.
Print chroniclers of the sport are also flourishing. In addition to the venerable Surfer magazine, founded in 1960 by San Clemente surf filmmaker John Severson, and San Clemente-based Surfing, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year--regional tabloid newspaper-style “zines” such as H30 in Hawaii and Beach Happy in Huntington Beach zero in on the local scenes.
Significantly, several of the newer publications are aimed at older surfers who ride long boards, such as Contemporary Longboarding, Longboarder and Long Board Quarterly. Surfer’s Journal, a slick quarterly, also features pieces aimed at more “mature” readers.
In fact, said Hawk, “the graying of the surf population is one of the most significant changes of all.”
Unlike the ‘60s when veteran wave riders were a rarity, many surfers who began riding waves 30 years ago have yet to retire their boards.
“What that means,” said Hawk, “is that there are a lot of surfers out there who can go to a surf shop and buy a board and leash and put it on their American Express gold card, which wasn’t really true in the ‘60s.”
It also means there are now multi-generational surf families such as Tom and Nancy Gudauskas of Capistrano Beach, who have taught their three sons--8-year-old twins Dane and Patrick and 5-year-old Tanner--to surf.
Tom Gudauskas, who recalls being so excited after seeing the original “Endless Summer” as a kid in Santa Monica that he couldn’t sleep that night, said his sons have been watching the classic surf film twice a month since it came out on video a few years ago.
He also plans to take his entire family to see “Endless Summer II” the day it opens, which happens to be his 41st birthday.
“Really what (the original film) did was open my eyes to a big world out there,” said Gudauskas, who has since surfed in Tahiti, Fiji, Hawaii and Mexico. “Now I’m looking forward to this movie coming to light up my family and take them to all the surf spots featured in the movie.”
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In a dimly lighted mixing room in a Burbank sound studio earlier this month, Brown sat watching the wide-screen image of Robert (Wingnut) Weaver rocketing down a wind-swept wall of green water.
“There are not many surfers on the west coast of South Africa,” Brown was saying on the sound track, a rhythmic guitar underscoring the wave action at Elands Bay. “This was the weekend: There were only about six people out. Wingnut was in surfer heaven. “
Casually dressed in tan Levi’s and a blue long-sleeved T-shirt bearing a Clark Foam logo, Brown was in the middle of a weeklong dubbing session, his final task on “Endless Summer II.”
Brown hasn’t made a film since “On Any Sunday,” his 1971 Academy Award-nominated motorcycle documentary. He said he turned down numerous offers over the years to do a sequel to “Endless Summer” but finally relented, in part, because he respected the film crew he would be working with and his 33-year-old son, Dana, could help him write, shoot and edit the film.
As for the original “Endless Summer,” Brown said during a smoke break outside the studio, “I think it showed surfing in a dignified way, that it was an honorable thing to do and all that. That was very important to me, to help give the sport a good image--at the same time being entertaining.”
“Endless Summer II,” he said, will offer more of the same.
“The thing is it’s real positive,” said Brown. “I mean, hey, it’s a couple of young guys going off around the world, having a good time. There’s no dark side to it. Everything’s happy and things are bitchen because that’s the way I look at things too.”
He’s not concerned that “some New York intellectual” may complain that he didn’t show “the other side of it. You’ll notice there’s no surfers with tattoos and that kind of thing because that’s the side of it that, to me, doesn’t represent what I perceive to be the good part of the sport.”
Still a Hollywood outsider by choice, Brown moved out of a bluff-top home in Dana Point in the early ‘80s when it became too crowded for his taste. He now lives on the coast north of Santa Barbara where he still regularly hits the waves.
Despite all the changes, he doesn’t believe the surf scene is much different today than it was in the original “Endless Summer.”
“I don’t think surfers deep down have probably changed at all--the real surfers,” he said. “It’s a lot more crowded (in the water), so that’s the main difference. But if you have a place to surf where there’s not a bunch of people, to me, it’s mostly still the same and I think most surfers share that:
“You’re sitting out there in some neat spot on a good day and you’re just going, ‘Wow, man! Aren’t we lucky?’ ”
* LOW TIDE: Stars of “Endless Summer II” find the perfect wave--and the world around it imperfect. C6