The Endless Summer made surfing what it is today. This wave at Cape St. Francis became emblematic of the film, but without Bruce Brown’s tireless efforts, no one would have seen it. Photo: Bruce Brown//The Endless Summer
For surf filmmaker Bruce Brown, the adventure of creating The Endless Summer began with the idea of chasing summer around the world in search of “The Perfect Wave.” Following a hot tip from his friend and renowned surf vagabond Dick Metz, he found an abundance of good surf in remote and unknown locations like Cape St. Francis, South Africa. The film played an integral role in making surfing what we know today. But once the film was shot and edited, Brown faced an even bigger hurdle: getting the film distributed.
Planning and shooting a trip to South Africa and other exotic locales in 1963 with surfers Robert August and Mike Hynson was more fun than not, but it was no easy task. “Bruce had only filmed in Hawaii and California, and a bit in Mexico,” Metz said in the new documentary, Birth of The Endless Summer, director Richard Yelland’s Emmy nominated feature documentary about Metz and his adventures.
At the time, surf travel wasn’t exactly a popular pastime, and the premise of The Endless Summer seemed like something that was nearly impossible.
“Getting to places on the other side of the world was almost unthinkable,” Dana Brown, Bruce’s son, said in Birth of The Endless Summer. “South Africa was like a moonshot.”
But once Brown completed editing The Endless Summer in early 1964 — a massive feat in and of itself — he faced a seemingly insurmountable challenge to get his epic feature-length surf documentary into theaters so that he could reach a general audience beyond surfers and beach enthusiasts.
How Brown and his marketing partner, R. Paul Allen, rose to the challenge is part of the movie’s fascinating backstory, as seen and heard in Birth of The Endless Summer. It’s an origin story that is, perhaps, more intriguing than the story itself.
After winning stellar reviews and multiple awards on a two-year festival circuit, and cinema tours through the U.S. and Australia, the film premiered worldwide on the first day of summer, June 20, 2025.
“It’s wild to think that The Endless Summer, the greatest surf film of all time – one that some call ‘the most watched and beloved documentary of all time’ – took two years to finally get to mainstream distribution,” Yelland said.
Brown and Allen quickly discovered that major and even independent film distributors in Hollywood and New York were skeptical that a documentary about surfing could interest non-surfers and fill theater seats anywhere between the West and East Coasts.
“In fact, there was a good chance it never would receive full distribution,” Yelland said.
To those distributors, surf culture at the time meant the vacuous Gidget and Beach Party movies, which real surfers would either ignore or suffer through only to see the actual surfing scenes intercut with the hilariously fake ones.
But Brown’s sixth film broke the mold, even for real surf movies. It wasn’t just a collection of waves and sometimes anonymous surfers. The Endless Summer was a surf travelogue that featured two surfers as stars, not just stunt doubles, and targeted a general audience. The movie had an underlying, if loose, plot, showing how chasing summer and perfect waves around the world could be a fun, carefree, and healthy lifestyle that anyone could try and attain.
Language differences were no barriers. Brown, August, and Hynson swapped beach culture with their guides John Whitmore and Terrance Bullen and other locals in Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawaii, and California, in a way that would soon bring these places and people to life for millions of young moviegoers.
These were revolutionary concepts in surfing and documentary filmmaking. And they were perfectly timed.
“Modern surf culture was so nascent when Bruce made The Endless Summer,” Yelland observed of the surf scene in the early 1960s. “Dick Metz was helping Hobie open the first Hobie Surf Shops; they were just inventing foam and resin and experimenting with modern surfboard design.”
Dick Metz stands in front of a Hobie Surfboards shop in Honolulu. Photo: SHACC//Birth of the Endless Summer
This was when John Severson created SURFER magazine, the Hoffmans designed Aloha shirts for mass consumption, bands like The Sandals, The Beach Boys, and The Challengers were creating the sonic backdrop, and Bruce’s surf films evolved from eight millimeter home movies to a 35 millimeter theatrical releases that spread the stoke worldwide.
“This cast of legendary characters was at the epicenter of the modern surfing movement,” Yelland said. “They all have so many amazing stories building this culture. Nothing came easy. It was always a journey of discovery and invention.”
Brown premiered The Endless Summer in 1964 as a 16mm silent lecture film. He narrated it live at each venue while his wife, Pat, operated a Wollensak tape recorder playing the soundtrack music by The Sandals, a local group from San Clemente. At screenings up and down the California coast and in Hawaii, surfers packed the houses.
“Everywhere (Bruce) showed The Endless Summer, it was sold out,” co-star Robert August recalled in Birth of the Endless Summer. “People just loved it. And so, he approached the Hollywood studios, and their response to him was, ‘Well, if people don’t surf, they’re not going to understand anything,’ and they basically said, ‘No, it really costs a lot of money to blow this whole thing into 35mm.’”
It took Brown and Allen two years of rejection, creative marketing, and technical improvements to meet the challenge of convincing distributors that The Endless Summer had an audience much wider than just surfers. And they did it out of their own pockets.
“Bruce couldn’t get any investors to help him because it didn’t make any sense,” fellow surf filmmaker Greg MacGillivray said. “There was a certain audience for a certain kind of film. He took a huge gamble, spending two years of his life and three times more money than anyone had ever spent on a surfing movie. Bruce mortgaged his house and his car, and Pat, his wife, said, ‘Go for it, honey!’ And they did.”
Among the stunts Brown and Allen staged to prove The Endless Summer could also stoke non-surfers in the hinterlands was the West to East Tour, coast-to-coast in summer 1965.
Hobie Alter, Bruce and Pat Brown, Hobie’s wife Sharon, Heidi and Phil Edwards, Joey Cabell, Corky Carroll, and Mike Hynson drove a Ford Condor motorhome from California across the Midwest to New York City and then south to Florida.
Hobie Alter, Bruce and Pat Brown, Hobie’s wife Sharon, Heidi and Phil Edwards, Joey Cabell, Corky Carroll, and Mike Hynson stand in front of the Ford Condor motorhome they called home on The Endless Summer tour. Photo: courtesy of Birth of the Endless Summer
By plugging the movie and Hobie’s new Super Surfer skateboards, and riding Hobie longboards on rarely or previously un-surfed East Coast beaches, they boosted surfing and surf culture beyond the cult.
Yet national distributors remained unconvinced. Frustrated but undaunted, in February of 1966, in the dead of winter, Brown and Allen took The Endless Summer to the middle of America. They figured that would prove their point one way or the other.
“This is what a confident risk-taker Bruce was,” August said in Birth of the Endless Summer. “They went to Wichita, Kansas. It was snowing, it was freezing, it was so new and strange, and it sold out the whole time.”
Even a bomb threat on opening night didn’t keep audiences from lining up around the block in sub-freezing weather and packing the Sunset Theater. The film was held over for a second week of sold-out screenings.
The Endless Summer found itself in decidedly un-summery places. Photo: Courtesy of Birth of the Endless Summer
“That proved it,” August said. “You didn’t have to be by the beach or surf or anything to like The Endless Summer.”
Encouraged, Brown and Allen borrowed $50,000 and got the 16mm version transferred to 35mm with narration and The Sandals’ soundtrack music added to make it more attractive to distributors. That’s the version they took to New York City, where they four-walled a 550-seat theater on Second Avenue as a Hail Mary.
“Bruce took the gamble again to play it at the Kips Bay Theater with a bunch of exhibitors, distributors, and critics,” MacGillivray said. “‘I’m Bruce Brown,” he said as he introduced himself. “A scrawny kid from the beach in Southern California. I made this film. I hope you like it, but I don’t have much risk because if you don’t like it, you’re not going to write a thing. You’re not going to write a story about something you hate. You probably think you’re going to hate it right now. But if you do like it, write something nice because I mortgaged my house to pay for this thing.’”
“The non-surfers that were there walked out of there just thrilled about the romance and the color and the action of these two young men traveling around the world riding waves for pleasure,” said Endless Summer surfer Fred Hemmings in Birth of The Endless Summer. Critics flipped for the film as much as audiences. After rave reviews from the press and nearly a year of sold-out Kips Bay screenings, Brown and Allen finally scored a domestic and international distribution deal with Cinema V, headed by Dan Rugoff.
“To this day, it’s still out-shown every movie that has ever played in New York City,” August said. “And then… everybody in the world got to see it.”
Over the years, The Endless Summer has earned millions worldwide and gained even more millions of loyal and passionate fans.
After 60 years, surfers and non-surfers alike still consider The Endless Summer one of the greatest movies ever made, and the most iconic representation of the easy-going surfer lifestyle of the 1950s and 1960s. It’s those adventures, both in the journey on-screen and in its making, which make Birth of The Endless Summer so compelling — revealing even more ways to enjoy the notion that on any day, it’s still summer somewhere in the world.
Birth of the Endless Summer retraces Dick Metz’s journey around the world from 1958-1961. His wild, steamship-hopping tour inspired one of surfing’s most iconic films and is now available here.
