A Short History Of The Endless Summer

Time passes, but it also parses: it sorts the quality from the trash by sheer attrition. Fidget spinners will be dead by July, the Trump presidency by Christmas, but some things just go on and on.

Released in 1966, The Endless Summer has been called the most influential surf movie ever made. Film-maker Bruce Brown followed two surfers; natural-footer Mike Hynson and shit-footer Robert August (with cameos by Miki Dora, Phil Edwards and Butch van Artsdalen), on a round-the-world trip, clocking Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawaii, Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa. It’s an obvious premise by modern standards: by dipping from the northern hemisphere into the southern and back again, it’s possible to avoid winter altogether, thus creating an “endless summer”. Kids, take note: you might have the footage, but narrative is everything. Reason number one why you couldn’t re-make the film now is, the surfers would feed the whole thing to Instagram for free.

Our two heroes appeared to be made from an all-American mould, and to an extent, August was. He was a class president, academically strong. But Hynson was older, more tuned-out. He’d reputedly been caught stealing boards from Hobie Alter, who not only forgave him but lent him money to join Brown’s mad crusade. Robert August still makes boards in California and is a hardworking advocate for causes including cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy and ocean conservation. Hyson became a drug dealer and dabbled with the dark spirituality of the acid generation. He married a famous model, got jailed, sorted himself out. Want to know yourself? Just ask whether you’d go surfing with Hynson or August.

Hollywood rejected Brown’s film, and ironically it was in Wichita Kansas, a thousand kilometres inland, where it scored a hit: people queuing in the snow for hours to get tickets.

Then there’s that poster. Art student John van Hamersveld created it, for the princely sum of $150. Lili Anolik wrote a wonderful essay about it in Vanity Fair – you can find it online. New York executives wanted to change the timeless combination of day-glo and silhouettes: Brown refused to budge. It’s now one of the most iconic images in surfing, a licensing phenom, with Gap and Urban Outfitters helping themselves to it on their crappy clothes, and Wilson using it for a branded volleyball. German car-maker Opel even produced a limited-edition ‘Endless Summer’ convertible.

It‘s been suggested that Hynson was dodging the draft to Vietnam by being on the road with Brown. It’s also been suggested that by the time they got to Port Elizabeth and the fabled ‘perfect wave’ at Cape St Francis that is the film’s dramatic centre, the trio were driving each other nuts. The Cape St Francis scene is both genuine (they’d hitched a ride with a snake-loving collector of zoo animals in exchange for petrol money) and staged (the famous trek over the dunes was faked afterwards). But those things are the pesky static of reality; the film’s contrivance is something blissful and innocent.

The other gold in Endless Summer is the one-liners: “Bells Beach is the fly centre of Australia. You go to the beach and there are 30 flies assigned to your body. When you leave they go back to command headquarters and wait for another assignment.” Sometimes they walked a very fine line, as in the snide apartheid reference, “sharks and porpoises have yet to integrate in South Africa.”

Brown himself found wealth and fame. The New York Times dubbed him “the Fellini of the foam.” But there’s a parable built into the fate of Cape St Francis. The wave was perfect (although rarely) because of the dunes – the spilling sand smoothing the reef into a bank. In pursuit of that perfection, massive real estate development covered the dunes, and eliminated the sand-spill. No sand, no perfect wave. We kill that which we love