new surf dialogue

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By 1964, surfing’s popularity in the U.S. was growing at an incredible rate, riding a tidal wave of Hollywood surf-ploitation films, Beach Boys pop music, and a whole hodge-podge of American consumer technologies and infrastructure that enabled and inspired the masses to paddle out at any number of beaches along the nation’s coast lines. Southern Californian beaches especially, were packed to the gills with post-Gidget[1] chaos; white middle class teenagers thrust into the affluency of California’s golden era, seeking out through surfing what Kampion described as the “promise of freedom, near nudity, and excitement,[2]” that celluloid surf images were selling en mass. Surfboards had become lighter and easier to maneuver with the advent of foam board blanks, making them much easier to learn on. Foam replaced the balsa wood board, a material increasingly hard to obtain, expensive and difficult to work with, making production extremely efficient too. Neoprene wetsuits were in production, allowing surfing comfort beyond the summer months and in the colder climes up north. Roads were paved, highways abundant, cars affordable and gas was cheap for the post WWII generation of teenagers, who were targeted by the marketing madmen of the era to consume the beach and the American Dream, which was purportedly nestled along the beaches of southern California[3]. Kids who didn’t live on the beach, didn’t have trouble finding ways to get their toes in the sand or on the nose of a board. Air travel was cheap, so with relative ease, middle class baby boomers in Nebraska who were exposed to Gidget, Gidget Goes Hawaiian, Ride the Wild Surf, Beach Blanket Bingo or any of the other seventy b-grade Hollywood surf flics produced in the early to mid 60’s had little trouble seeking out the commodified ‘Surf City’ paradise, if for only a long weekend or extended summer vacation[4]. To the millennium and beyond, they would keep coming.

In response to the storm of bogus representation of ‘real’ surf culture by Hollywood, Bruce Brown (himself a diehard surfer, born and raised in SoCal) released his fifth feature length surf film, “The Endless Summer”, first independently in 1964 and then again in 1966 when Columbia picked it up for a national release, and transferred it to 35mm where it would earn $30 million at the box office[5]. Matt Warshaw[6] comments that Brown’s seminal work was an effort to “cross over to a general audience and present surfing…in true shape and form,[7]” which it did, simultaneously catalyzing a new dream vision for the ‘real’ surfer, the search for the perfect wave.

After an introductory montage of iconic Californian and Hawaiian waves and wave riders, with slight commentary on the crowds of California, Brown proclaims, “The ultimate thing for most of us would be to have an endless summer, the warm water and waves without the summer crowds of California. The only way to do this is to follow the summer season around the world, as it travels around the world.” The film then follows Robert August and Mike Hynson as they leave a cold and grey California November and travel to Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti and Hawaii chasing the sun with path paving, frontier forging sensibilities. In “primitive” Africa, as Brown constantly refers to locations in Ghana and Senegal, Hynson and August become as Ormond describes, “ambassadors of American youth and frontiersman venturing into the wilderness and colonizing waves in undiscovered territories.” The empty waves, exotic “other” cultures (are those ‘primitive’ natives going to have us for dinner, or join us for a surf? What a rush!), and colonial aesthetic of being the first to surf a wave (and therefore being able to name it and claim it) in unknown territories would prove to be a romantic, irresistible adventure for surfers to gobble up, especially at a time when surf exploration was in its infancy and the possibilities endless. After The Endless Summer, and with help of surf mags like Surfer, Surf Guide, and Tracks in Australia publishing monthly or bi-monthly images and stories of the latest tales of discovery and style, surf exploration would take off, exposing every corner of the globe to the stoke virus. Ironically, this would create new crowds and other problematic situations as the years passed and the surf numbers grew and grew and grew.

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[1] The novel Gidget was written by Frederick Kohner in 1957 and quickly turned into a Hollywood film in 1959. Kohner wrote the novel based off of his own daughters tales of life on the beach at Malibu, where she had become a part of the surf scene there in the mid 50’s, and is credited with bringing surfings popularity to the fore front of youth pop culture.

[2] Kampion, p.70

[3] See Ormond

[4] See Ormond, Kampion.

[5] See Warshaw.

[6] Warshaw is a former editor of Surfer magazine and author of numerous literatures, most notably The Encyclopedia of Surfing.

[7] Quoted from Warshaw.