‘Any Sunday’ sequel is the Brown family’s latest in a long, cool ride

To make his Oscar-nominated 1971 motorcycle documentary, “On Any Sunday,” Bruce Brown went to the most famous Hollywood motorcyclist of the era, Steve McQueen.

Brown wanted the King of Cool to be in his film. More important, he needed the actor to pony up the $300,000 needed to make “On Any Sunday.”

“I didn’t know him,” said Brown, 75. “I was a fan. I met up with him and told him what I wanted to do. He said, ‘Great, what can I do?’ I said, ‘Pay for it.’”

McQueen replied that he made movies, he didn’t finance them.

“I said, ‘If you want to be in my movie, you better put the money up or I’m not going to let you be in it,’” Brown recalled. “He went for it.”

Four decades later, Brown is an executive producer of the sequel opening Friday, “On Any Sunday: The Next Chapter,” directed by his son, Dana Brown.

Shot in 4K Ultra HD, “On Any Sunday: The Next Chapter” captures the action at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb competition in Colorado; speedway racing in Costa Mesa and Alberta, Canada; freestyle motocross in Park City, Utah; and MotoGP racing in Valencia, Spain; Austin, Texas; and Laguna Seca, Calif.

Personalities such as Australian stunt rider and freestyle motocross competitor Robbie Maddison, Grand Prix motorcycle road racer and current MotoGP world champion Marc Marquez and former professional racer Kenny Roberts are just as important to Dana Brown as the racing action.

“You know the athletes are there, and if you are smart enough you can get the images, but what’s the story and who are the characters that people are going to identify with?” the younger Brown, 54, said during a joint interview with his father.

Bruce Brown hawked his belongings to make his 1964 surfing film “The Endless Summer,” and he worked with his son on the 1994 sequel “The Endless Summer 2.” Subsequently Dana Brown has directed several documentaries, including “Step Into Liquid,” the 2003 surf film, and “Dust to Glory,” a 2005 documentary on the Baja 1000 offroad race.

Part of the reason Dana Brown decided to do the motorcycle sequel was because of how the sport has evolved during the last 40 years. “And the fact that some of the same themes — the sense of friendship and camaraderie and fun that exists in the original — still exists,” he said. “So it’s that kind of yin and yang between the two.”

Dana Brown began making Super 8 bicycle racing movies when he was a kid. He received his degree in film from San Diego State but didn’t rush into the business.

“I didn’t want to be a PA and work my way up,” he said. “I was writing for a local paper in San Diego and doing construction and stuff.” His first job in movies was working for his father putting old surf movies back together so they could be released on VHS. “That was 26 years ago.”

Bruce Brown began shooting 8-millimeter films of surfers while he was in the Navy stationed in Hawaii. After his discharge in 1957, he became a lifeguard in San Clemente and edited the footage he had shot into a little movie.

“We used to show it at a surfboard shop in San Clemente,” he said. “There was a guy already making surfing movies, and he asked how about making a real one in 16 millimeter. He put up $5,000. That covered the total film budget and year’s living expenses and five guys’ trip to Hawaii.”

The result was the 1958 film “Slippery When Wet,” which he also narrated. Brown made other small surfing films, then set out to make “The Endless Summer,” which followed surfers Mike Hynson and Robert August as they rode the waves around the world.

“Everybody thought surfers were total losers,” he said. “Hollywood set surfing back 20 years.”

He toured the lecture circuit with “The Endless Summer” in 1964, then in 1966 he blew the film up to 35 millimeter and rented a theater in New York to prove to distributors that the film had mass appeal. “The first week it broke the theater records,” he said, “and the third week it broke the record of the first week.”

Distributors began to court the filmmaker.

“We finally got a distributor that we wanted who was going to leave the poster the way it was,” Brown said of the now-iconic artwork. “Most of the Hollywood guys and the New York guys said you have got to put more chicks in it and do this and do that. They would have just ruined it. “

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