| SLIPPERY WHEN WET | SURF CRAZY |
| BAREFOOT ADVENTURE | SURFING HOLLOW DAYS |
| WATERLOGGED | SURFIN’ SHORTS |
| ENDLESS SUMMER | ENDLESS SUMMER II |
| ENDLESS SUMMER REVISITED |
THE FAMOUS BRUCE BROWN COLLECTION
Cinematographer Bruce Brown is one of the top surf-film makers. He made about eight commercially available films between 1958 and the late 90's. Without a doubt, the best known of his films was the classic "Endless Summer" (which, during a surf festival back in the late 60's, I went and saw for seven straight nights). Around 1990, Bruce and his son Dana put his films onto video. The rest is history. In the mid-90's Bruce Brown took another two hot surfers and headed off around the world again to make the aptly named Endless Summer II. On his early films he does a personal introduction 1990's style. He also gives a bit of an insight into where the various stars of the old films are today. Interesting to see how the weather has ravaged him over the past 35-40 years. There’s a lesson in there kiddies!! So grab ya copy and slip, slop, slap.
Filmed By: Bruce Brown
Year Of Production: 1958
Duration: 73 minutes
Rating (out of 10): 8
Available Through: Dick Hoole at Byron Bay or via your favourite surfing mag.
The narration is corny. The backing music is supplied by some jazz band from out of the mid-1950’s. But the film itself is a classic. As Bruce Brown himself says, “It was the summer of 1958. I was a 20 year-old lifeguard at San Clemente. At night I worked as a glorified janitor at Dale Velzy’s surf shop. Sometimes Velzy would show some 8mm films I had taken while in Hawaii. He would charge 25 cents admission, and some nights we’d rake in as much as six dollars. He eventually put up the $5000 that was needed for a proper (16mm) surf film to be made. This paid for the camera equipment, 50 rolls of film and six plane tickets to Hawaii. So armed with five of the hottest surfers of the day and my book on “How To Make A Movie”, we boarded the plane for the twelve hour flight to Hawaii”. The rest is history. This movie is now 41 years-old, but is still great.
Filmed By: Bruce Brown
Year Of Production: 1959
Duration: 71 minutes
Rating (out of 10): 8
Available Through: Dick Hoole at Byron Bay or via your favourite surfing mag.
Same corny narrative, but still a classic. This was Brown’s second movie. A good deal of it was filmed in Mexico. This was probably one of the first major surf trips ever filmed south of the border. The surf was pretty ordinary and they covered over 7000 miles in their search. They did find waves - in Hawaii. The winter of 59-60 was one of the biggest on record - even by today’s standard.
Filmed By: Bruce Brown
Year Of Production: 1960
Duration: 75 minutes
Rating (out of 10): 8
Available Through: Dick Hoole at Byron Bay or via your favourite surfing mag.
Still more early 50’s jazz music on this one, but you get a more modern narration - due to the fact that the original narration couldn’t be found. See classic Ala Moana, The Wedge, Trestles, Steamer Lane, Waimea, Sunset and Makaha. Del Cannon offers some comedy relief as well as some excellent surfing - for the time.
Filmed By: Bruce Brown
Year Of Production: 1961
Duration: 84 minutes
Rating (out of 10): 8
Available Through: Dick Hoole at Byron Bay or via your favourite surfing mag.
See the first ever ride at Pipeline by Phil Edwards. The first filmed trip to Florida in 1961 seems a bit lame by today’s standards, but 38 years ago it was a big deal. See classic and uncrowded California, Rincon and The Wedge again. View the surfing lifestyle as it should be - loads of fun, free of drugs, and NO CROWDS.
Filmed By: Bruce Brown
Year Of Production: 1962
Duration: 83 minutes
Rating (out of 10): 6½
Available Through: Dick Hoole at Byron Bay or via your favourite surfing mag.
This is the “least best” of the five feature movies that Bruce Brown had made up until 1962. This was actually a compilation of his other four films. It was made with the express purpose of giving him enough time and money to make something special. That something special was going to turn into The Endless Summer. See Phil Edwards teaching us poor aussies how to hot dog at out of the way places like Byron Bay. Of course, you’ll also get another dose of The Wedge.
Filmed By: Bruce Brown
Year Of Production: Unknown
Duration: 57 minutes
Rating (out of 10): 7
Available Through: Dick Hoole at Byron Bay or via your favourite surfing mag.
This was the last of the Bruce Brown collection and is pretty corny all over. This wasn’t really a surf film as such, but is rather a collection of a number of short promotional films, TV programmes and commercials. The Wet Set was basically a commercial for the newest in surf-wear fashions modeled by the Hobie-MacGregor Surf Team. America’s Newest Sport shows us the art of skateboarding 1960’s style, and you get to see the first surfing trip to Japan. The Japan sequence was to be included in The Endless Summer, but when The Endless Summer was completed, the Japanese section didn’t seem to fit so was left out. It sounds a bit boring, but the surfing is still pretty good - you just have to look past the commercialism.
Filmed By: Bruce Brown
Year Of Production: 1964
Duration: 88 minutes
Rating (out of 10): 9
Available Through: Dick Hoole at Byron Bay or via your favourite surfing mag.
This is the surf video that all others are judged by. Made over a period of a couple of years, it was the ultimate in surfing travel "documentaries".
The notion was pretty simple. Take a couple of good surfers and chase the summer around the world.
Some of the situations are a bit contrived, such as the hike over the endless sand dunes to "discover" Cape St Francis, or the "no surf in Tahiti" bit. But the spots they surfed and the people they met made this far more than just another surf flick. This was THE surf flick.
I watched it for something like a week straight at a surf film festival back in the 60's, and have probably viewed it in excess of 200 times since. It's a classic.
Filmed By: Bruce Brown
Year Of Production: Around 1990
Duration: 101 minutes
Rating (out of 10): 9
Available Through: Dick Hoole at Byron Bay or via your favourite surfing mag.
It was a long time coming, but Endless Summer II was well worth the wait. As with ES 1, this film has a few contrived bits which are fairly corny, and the segment shot with Nat Young is down-right embarrassing. It was good to see some of the old characters like Robert August and John Whitmore, as well as some of the old places like Cape St Francis. This flick was certainly not going to follow the route of the original Endless Summer, which in some respects was unfortunate, but it did introduce the traveling surfer to what in 1990 were isolated or scarcely surfed regions of our planet. Not so these days though, with places like G-Land and Tavarua now hosting rounds of the World Surfing Championships. I sometimes wonder whether people like Gerry Lopez regret the loss of their private little pieces of paradise to the world of the traveling surfer. But that aside, this 8th (and probably final) contribution from the Bruce Brown Collection is great and worth getting hold of.
Filmed By: Dana Brown
Year Of Production: 2000
Duration: 70 minutes
Rating (out of 10): 8
Available Through: LongboardLife
It sounded so simple, yet in 1966 a young filmmaker named Bruce Brown captured the essence of a sport as never before. To stand atop a crescendo of water, to ride on nature's all powerful wave feeling the speed and spray accelerate with each moment, and to embrace a lifestyle uniquely connected to a single word, SURFING. The film was "THE ENDLESS SUMMER".
Now, Bruce Brown and filmmaker son, Dana, have created an all new classic, featuring never-before-seen footage from "The Endless Summer". Embark on a journey of adventure, discovery and the incredible challenge of facing a fifteen foot wall of water as the sport's greatest surfers look back on the thrills, the spills, and the movie that uniquely embraced the lifelong search for that shining beach, that glowing sunset, that perfect wave.
This is a great little film. Dana Brown laughingly says that it is just another way of extracting people's hard-earned money from them. But whether that's a fact or not, it IS a fact that it's a great piece of light entertainment.