The Endless Summer: The movie we all pretend we’ve watched

If you’ve never heard about The Endless Summer are you even a surfer? At least after today’s episode, you can pretend you’ve watched it.

I have a framed The Endless Summer poster hanging in my garage. I look at it every day. It’s iconic: purple and orange with black silhouettes of surfers. It’s by the same dude who designed an album cover for The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour—John Van Hamersveld. He’s actually designed a ridiculous number of famous album covers. But I’m digressing.

We brought up Bruce Brown, the director of The Endless Summer, in quite a few of our previous episodes. Usually, he’s the first filmmaker to film a “have discovered” surf spot in the ’60s. But we haven’t really talked about the legend of The Endless Summer—the movie. Let’s fix it now.

Not time to read? There’s a micro-pod for that.

the plot that’s barely a plot

I watched The Endless Summer once, but due to my interest in surfing, unbridled enthusiasm for documentary filmmaking, and a box office–success obsession, I’ve read about the making of The Endless Summer and Bruce Brown A LOT.

The plot isn’t a lot. The movie follows two surfers—Robert August and Mike Hynson—on a quest to circumnavigate the globe chasing “the perfect wave” while following the summer from hemisphere to hemisphere. They wouldn’t have gone around the globe at all if it wasn’t for the fact that the roundtrip tickets were actually cheaper. $50 cheaper at that time, if you want to be precise.

Matt Warshaw describes the stars of The Endless Summer as: the calm, dark-haired goofyfooter who had just graduated high school and was going to become a dentist (that’s Robert August), and the grass-smoking, grinning regular-footer with permanently slicked-back blond hair on the run from the U.S. Army draft board. What a pair! It’s genuinely entertaining watching them wear suits and ties at LAX.

bruce brown: director, cameraman, narrator, everything

As for Bruce Brown, he was 26 when he started filming The Endless Summer, his sixth surf movie, but just 19 when he made his first movie. And he had a lot riding on it—he invested $50,000 of his own savings. He was the director, cameraman, narrator, editor—you name it. No crew, and his equipment weighed less than a hundred pounds.

The movie takes you from California → Senegal → Ghana → Nigeria → South Africa (incl. Cape St. Francis) → Australia → New Zealand → Tahiti → Hawai‘i, and their trip lasted four months. They did find what they were looking for—the perfect wave at a place called Cape St. Francis in South Africa.

️ documentary? fiction? something in-between

There’s a debate among surfers about whether The Endless Summer is a documentary or a fictional movie. According to The History of Surfing, Bruce Brown wasn’t really interested in documenting surfing; he just wanted to present the look and feel of surfing in its best moments—and that’s what he did. Opening it up to the masses.

But if you watch the movie, you’ll notice that Bruce embellishes for dramatic effect, the discovery of the perfect wave after walking for miles over sandy dunes being a prime example. No matter. It’s entertaining and the waves are real.

The audience agreed to the tune of $20 million at the box office, despite The Endless Summer’s most chaotic distribution over the course of several years. It’s so bizarre that The Endless Summer, being a total icon, actually bookends the surfing boom—filmed just after surfing exploded in the ’50s and watched in theaters as surfers started getting obsessed with shortboards and abandoning surfing in droves because…learning curve.

Author: The Wipeout Weekly team