RIP: Bruce Brown,
1937-2017
Prior to 1964, the media saw surfers as
1937-2017
Prior to 1964, the media saw surfers as
rebellious thugs, and Hollywood made
them out to be a bunch of idiots.
Filmmaker Bruce Brown single-handedly
changed that with The Endless Summer .
It portrayed the wave as a kind of Holy
Grail and surfers as knights on a quest.
In one stroke, he replaced Hollywood's
buffoonery with the popular mythology
that endures today.The Endless Summer was Brown's sixth
surfing film in a career that started
almost accidentally and proceeded
according to the guerrilla template of
the times -- shoot all winter, edit in the
spring, run your ass off all summer
showing the damn thing (including doing
your own live narration) in school
auditoriums and small halls, then pack up
for another winter on the road and do it
all over again. With The Endless Summer,
Brown broke that mold.
Born in San Francisco, Brown grew up in
Southern California. He started surfing
at 11 on the green rollers that formed in
the entrance channel to Alamitos Bay
before the Long Beach breakwall was
completed. He attended Wilson High
School (class of 1955), where he was a
gymnast, but really, he says, "I majored
in not going to school."
Instead, he went to the beach. He first
used a still camera to show his mother
what surfing looked like. A regular in the
Huntington Pier-Seal Beach area in high
school, he enlisted in the Navy after
graduation, went to submarine school
and finished at the top of the class to
ensure his pick of assignment, which was
Hawaii. Besides surfing Ala Moana in
those mid-'50s glory days with
California transplant Jose Angel and
others, he started taking some 8mm
movies.
After his discharge in 1957, Brown
returned to California and was working
in San Clemente as a lifeguard when a
flush Dale Velzy ("World's Largest
Manufacturer") put up $5,000 for a film
that would promote the Velzy surf team.
"That covered the cost of the camera,
travel and a year's living expenses,"
Brown says.
It was a journey that would become
familiar -- surfing California, traveling
to Hawaii, driving in goofy beaters and
sleeping on beaches. The resulting film,
narrated live by Brown along with an
offbeat Bud Shank soundtrack, was
Slippery When Wet. Bruce took the thing
on the four-wall tour in 1958, following
in the footprints of pioneer Bud Browne
and paralleling another rising
cinematographer, John Severson.
Surf Crazy, Barefoot Adventure,
Surfing Hollow Days and Waterlogged
followed, and Brown's success was
following the same curve as surfing's in
those first boom years. His lens
documented the meteoric rise of a cult
sport. In the winter of 1961, while in
Hawaii with Phil Edwards making Surfing
Hollow Days , he filmed Edwards'
groundbreaking first rides at the Banzai
Pipeline.
The formula was effective, but the
market was getting crowded with more
and more surf films. In 1963, Brown
decided his next film needed a different
twist -- two surfers, Robert August and
Mike Hynson, would take advantage of
the fact that when it was winter in the
Northern Hemisphere, it was summer in
the Southern. The concept was simple
and profound -- you could live in a
surfer's paradise, an endless summer.
Released in 1964, The Endless Summer
was Brown's most successful surf film,
playing to sold-out theaters in the
United States and Hawaii. Audiences
were so encouraging that Brown became
convinced that this was a movie that
even non-surfers could enjoy.
The tale of Brown's campaign to take
The Endless Summer to the American
heartland is testament to the
filmmaker's creativity and persistence.
In 1966, the film opened in theaters
across the country, and Bruce Brown
became surfing's greatest success story.
After The Endless Summer, Brown built
new offices in Dana Point, California,
and went to work on a film about his
other passion -- dirt bikes. The resulting
documentary, co-produced by his friend,
the actor Steve McQueen, earned On Any
Sunday (1970) an Academy Award
nomination
Never much drawn to cities or even
crowded theaters, Brown moved his
family (wife Pat and kids Dana, Wade
and Nancy) to a remote ranch north of
Santa Barbara around 1980. There
Brown surfed, rode his motorcycles, built
a house, got into car restoration, raced
sprint cars around his track and got into
rally cars -- an all-wheel-drive turbo-
charged Mazda that he and Pat co-
race. "We try to stay upright as much as
possible," he says.
Brown came out of retirement in 1992 to
go on surfari making the Hollywood-
sequel Endless Summer II (released in
1994 by New Line Cinema), a reprise of
the original with Robert "Wingnut"
Weaver and Pat O'Connell leading the
search.
0 التعليقات لموضوع "وفاة بروس براون Bruce Brown"
الابتسامات الابتسامات