Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн
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Bruce Brown had already made a series of popular films for surfing audiences in the late 1950s and early 1960s, among them the cleverly titled Slippery When Wet and Barefoot Adventure. All August and Hynson would have to do for Brown’s newest project, The Endless Summer, was to travel, smile, and surf. They would not even have to talk; Brown would provide the picture’s narration. August and Hynson readily agreed, and the result was Brown’s artful chronicle of the two surfers chasing the summer, with its warm water and consistent waves, from California to Africa and points between. Shot in 1963, The Endless Summer traveled the traditional surf-film circuit of civic center and high school auditoriums in California, Hawai‘i, Australia, and South Africa over the two years that followed. But Brown was convinced his documentary could appeal to a broader audience. With Gidget and the Annette Funicello/Frankie Avalon beach-party movies having achieved wide commercial success, surfing’s popular appeal at that time was unmistakable. No major distributor would touch the untested documentary, however. Brown thus decided to rent a venue “about as far as one can get from the ocean and surfing,” a press release for the film noted, so as to screen it to an audience of surf-culture neophytes.27 By any mea sure, Wichita, Kansas, fit the bill. “[O]pening a surfing film in Wichita is like distributing Playboy Magazine in a monastery,” Brown opined. “In Wichita, most of the natives think surf is a new brand of detergent . . . or something.”28 In spite of what would seem, by all reasonable predictions, to have been a uniformly disinterested audience of landlocked Midwesterners, The Endless Summer proved a runaway success. Opening opposite My Fair Lady and The Great Race, the documentary “slaughtered them both during its two-week [Kansas] run,” reported the Hollywood Citizen News.29 Brown then took the film to New York City, where it showed to enthusiastic audiences for a remarkable forty-seven weeks.30 Shot on a bud get of $50,000, The Endless Summer would ultimately gross an estimated $30 million worldwide, rendering it one of the most successful documentary films of all time.31