Bud Browne (July 12, 1912 - July 25, 2008) |
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In the beginning, there were no surf magazines. There were no VCRs, and there sure as hell was no Internet. Between the growing pools of surfers worldwide, there was no communication, period. If someone were to pull a cutback, it would be years before rumors would trickle around the globe, and by then it would be embellished into a rodeo flip. In 1953, a teacher from Los Angeles delivered surf movies to the world and changed everything. From the Duke to Lopez, Bud Browne recorded it all, chronicling our little sport and inspiring legions of followers.
Browne was born in Newtonville, Massachusetts, on the outskirts of Boston. He began swimming competitively at age seven, also partaking in basketball, tennis and track and field. After moving around the country with his family for much of his young life, he settled in California in 1931 to attend University of Southern California, where he was the captain of the swim team (ranked second in the nation) and swam competitively on behalf of the L.A. Athletic Club until 1948. Work as an L.A. County lifeguard led to an interest in diving and surfing, which he witnessed for the first time in 1932 at Corona del Mar. On a rescue board, he began surfing in 1938 at Sunset Pier. The same year, he went to Hawaii where he rode Waikiki and later filmed Duke Kahanamoku. During World War II, Browne served as a navy chief specialist in athletics (and earned the nickname "Barracuda" for his elongated figure and extreme amount of time spent in the water). Afterward, he became a member of the Waikiki Surf Club, started teaching in the Los Angeles Unified School District and bought a 16mm Bell and Howell movie camera. He soon learned about editing at the USC cinema school, and in 1953, a fellow teacher invited him to show his footage at Adams Junior High in Santa Monica. Bud called his work Hawaiian Surfing Movie, hung handmade signs on telephone poles and charged a 65-cent admission. The surf movie was born. Browne left teaching and made one movie annually for the next 12 years, filming around the world, then showing the spoils to stoked masses in school gymnasiums. At first, the films were accompanied by live narration, and in 1961, he began attaching soundtracks, helping to popularize the "surf" sound made famous by Dick Dale. Humor, in the form of skits performed by the surfers themselves, gave them a lighthearted feel. In addition to nearly 20 of his own films, he also contributed footage to the team of MacGillivray/Freeman in Waves of Change (now The Sunshine Sea) and Five Summer Stories. Browne's movies, followed by those of others, became the primary form of communication among early surf culture. They inspired kids to become surfers and turned surfers into stars. Hawaii was an unknown entity in Australia until Browne filmed first Makaha, then the North Shore in 1957. Later that year, his footage was packaged into two films, Surfing in Hawaii and The Big Surf, which he toured Down Under. In that regard, he was directly responsible for introducing the country to big-wave surfing as well as Malibu hotdogging. Likewise, he returned to the states with the first footage anyone had seen from Australia, creating the first international surf film. Browne's aquatic background enabled him to be the first to film from the water under heavy conditions. Aside from his swimming and bodysurfing prowess, he was an accomplished mat surfer, earning the Makaha title in 1955 and 1956. Soon after the Pipeline curse was lifted, he began shooting it from the water, offering vistas never before seen on film. To facilitate the inordinate amount of time in the water, he developed camera housings and built his own drysuits. Quiet in nature, Browne preferred to let his films speak for themselves. He failed to turn a profit during his early years touring the movies, barely breaking even, but managing to earn enough to do it again. His rewards came in the form of developing his craft and depicting the sport of surfing. "I don't think they've progressed technically," he says of the rash of surf videos flooding the market today. "Once in awhile, Herbie Fletcher gives me one, but as a rule, I don't watch them. They're more or less all surfing now. The modern surfers just like to see surfing, but the old-timers like to see related sports and breaks in the surfing." Despite suffering from diabetes, Browne remains healthy and athletic, regularly swimming, biking and walking. When his career in surfing began winding down in the late '70s, he spent a few years filming skiing and has since enjoyed bungee jumping and hang gliding. With the success of his 1994 movie, Surfin' the '50s, due largely to the nostalgic resurgence, he has been working on several other video releases of his early efforts. He no longer shoots surfing. "I have a camcorder," he says, "but my eyes aren't as good as they used to be. I tried it, and it didn't come out too well." -- Jason Borte, October 2000
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