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 Entertainment | June 2006 
Still Catching a Wave
 William Booth - Washington Post
| | Hanging 10 on the 40th anniversary of the surfer classic. |
Encinitas, Calif. - There were some seriously leathery old dudes at La Paloma Theatre the other night. Guys in their sixties - heck, in their seventies - sporting baggy shorts, flip-flops and aloha shirts, glowing with the kind of solar-irradiated skin only a dermatologist could love. Several of them used the word "stoked," as in they were stoked to be there, stoked to keep surfing, stoked to be, you know, alive.
In the mythology of surf culture, three early events loom large in the presentation of the sport to the mainstream:
There was Duke Kahanamoku, aka "the Big Kahuna," the Hawaiian Olympic gold medalist swimmer who brought his 10-foot-long redwood plank to America in the 1920s and introduced wave-riding to the world.
Then there was "Gidget," the 1959 Hollywood film starring Sandra Dee as the original beach blanket bunny.
And, finally, there was 1966's "The Endless Summer," the anti-Hollywood "home movie" made by Bruce Brown, who hired a couple of teenage surfers (Robert August and Mike Hynson) to travel around the planet looking for clean sets to ride, from Ghana to Tahiti to Malibu. It was a $50,000 gamble, originally shot on a handheld 16mm camera, without sound, that went on to gross $30 million. Validated by the critics, who were charmed by its corny innocence and tasty waveage, "Endless Summer" is still considered the ur-text, and the most important and influential statement on surfing.
So this was the setting for a rare reunion of the filmmaking team, which had come together for a $50-a-ticket cancer benefit at La Paloma in Encinitas, a beach town north of San Diego. Rare because Hynson left the scene for a long time, caught in a wicked undertow of drugs and alcohol. Rare, too, because of some bad blood. Hynson sued Brown in the 1990s, claiming a share of film profits (he lost). But on Thursday, they all took the stage and smiled gamely.
The ambiance for the evening? Mellow to the bone. Cold beers. Peapods stuffed with cream cheese. And nostalgia in the summer breeze: The crowd was mostly over 50. Among the celebrity sightings: Tom Morey, inventor of the boogie board, rubbing tan elbows with Gidget.
Kathy "Gidget" Kohner Zuckerman handed us her card, showing a raven-haired bikini-clad water nymph holding up a longboard on the beach of Malibu.
Zuckerman warned she is a hugger. "I've spent my life telling people that Gidget is a real person!" she said. "I'm not Sandra Dee. I'm me." Another hug. "I first entered the water on June 24, 1956. That's 50 years ago." She is five feet of pure perkiness. These days she engages in ceremonial surfing only. She plans on riding a wave to mark her upcoming 65th birthday.
Zuckerman kept a diary of her days on sand and sea back in the Malibu of the 1950s. She told us that "Moondoggie" was a real person, too.
We also learned that Zuckerman's parents fled Nazi Germany in 1938, and her father, Frederick Kohner, was a screenwriter who came out to Hollywood to write B-movies. They lived in landlocked Brentwood, not Malibu.
Fascinated by his daughter's stories of the surf subculture, Kohner cribbed from her diaries, eavesdropped on her phone conversations and hung around the beach shacks to create the slim pop-culture bestseller "Gidget," which was the nickname given to her for "girl midget."
"People, I don't why, but they get a kick out of learning that Gidget was Jewish. People say, 'Wow, I didn't know that Jewish people surfed.' That's funny, isn't it?" Zuckerman said. (To be fair, in the book, Gidget is WASP-ified into a character called Frances Elizabeth Lawrence.)
The original movie starring Dee was followed by "Gidget Goes Hawaiian" (Deborah Walley), "Gidget Goes to Rome" (Cindy Carol), the television series starring Sally Field and camp classic TV movies like "Gidget Grows Up," starring Karen Valentine wooed by an Arab sheik, and "Gidget Gets Married," in which surf-hubby Moondoggie hangs up his board shorts for a corporate gig.
Before "Endless Summer" was screened Thursday, Brown, 69, signed autographs for weekend surfers more familiar now with BenGay than Coppertone. He explained how surprised he was to produce a cult classic. He was just avoiding land-based employment.
"There was no business culture around surfing back then," he said. The board sports today - surf and skate - form a $5 billion industry, and Brown is a millionaire. "We did stuff to make a living so we could surf. Somebody made surfboards. Somebody started a magazine. I made these home movies."
His surf movies didn't play in regular movie theaters but in school and civic auditoriums around California on "the surf circuit." They had no sound, so Brown would often narrate them and play recorded surf music (in "Endless Summer," the Sandals play their guitar riffs).
Though "Endless Summer" gives the impression that August and Hynson decided to tour the world looking for waves, the idea was actually Brown's. They initially were going only to South Africa. "But we found out the airline tickets were cheaper if we went around the world," Brown said.
Why did he pick August and Hynson? "They were available," Brown said.
No, really, why? "Really," Brown said.
August and Hynson were out of earshot, surrounded by their own fan pods, middle-aged guys wanting to remember the glory days and recall where and when they originally saw the movie. A few confessed they saw the film over and over when they were young. They talked about weak knees, their surfing grandkids and, curiously, golf, which we learned a number of aging surfers have drifted toward.
One of the great conceits of the film is the introduction of August and Hynson, shown arriving at various West African airports, wearing dark suits, wraparound shades and carrying boards under their arms. August later said that "Endless Summer" did so well because of the acting abilities of the two surfers, and the joke is that neither speaks a single line in the movie - the whole thing is narrated by Brown. The two young men, though, are easy to look at: impossibly lean and healthy and tan in a pre-leather way. What they do in the film is either lounge around in their white trunks or surf.
"Nobody was interested in a theatrical release of the movie," Brown said. But a test screening in Wichita, Kan., during the middle of a winter snow storm sold out. They opened the film in New York at the Kips Bay Theatre. "It played there for a year," Brown said, and it went on to become a hit.
"It was the first time that surfers were shown as legitimate athletes," he said, "and not the way Hollywood portrayed them, or the media back then, which was as drooling food-throwers."
On his Web site, Legendarysurfers.com, Malcolm Gault-Williams gives a taste of the media take on surfers at the time. In 1964, Time magazine reported: "Riding a board through the surf is a little like going on hashish. The addicts - and there are 18,000 of them in the U.S. - have their own fashions in everything from haircuts (long, but not too long) to swimsuits (cotton, a size too small). They speak a lingo of words like 'hook' (the lip of a breaking wave) and 'tube' (the cavern under the hook) and 'wipe out' (a spill in the boiling froth). They listen to their apostles, who preach: 'When the surf is good, you've got to go and get it.' "
Brown said, "I still get a phone call every 10 years from Time asking me to explain surfing's new popularity, and I always tell them the same thing: It's the sport itself."
August, 61, who went on to operate a successful surf shop in Huntington Beach, Calif., says he never begrudged Brown's "Endless Summer" success. "I was a kid. I was just happy to fly around the world and surf," he said. "I didn't get paid a penny. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Are you kidding?"
"I was cool with it then and I'm cool with it now."
After an intermission, Hynson, 62, came into the lobby to talk with some fans. He said the past was the past and he didn't want to talk about the lawsuit. Inside the theater, one of the most famous scenes from "Endless Summer" was on the screen - the wave they found at Cape St. Francis in South Africa. "That wave just appeared. And it just kept going and going and going," Hynson said. There was no hint of longing in his gruff voice. On-screen, the ride is phenomenal (Brown said he had to reload his camera to catch it all). The surf stayed up for only 45 minutes that day, Hynson remembered, "and then it was gone."
So, what is it like to watch yourselves, so young, a world away, in that endless summer? Hynson squared his shoulders and said, "I haven't changed one bit," and then walked away. |
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