Legendary surf movie pioneer Bud “Barracuda” Browne has died at age 96 in San Luis Obispo, California.
Bob Browne first pointed a movie camera at waves in the around 1940 while he was working as a lifeguard at Venice Beach in Los Angeles county, California. After WWII, Browne began making annual treks to Hawaii with a 16mm movie camera and in 1953 he showed his first feature, Hawaiian Surfing Movies, at Adams Junior High in Santa Monica.
While he wasn’t the first to make surf movies (Doc Ball and others were doing it in the pre-war years), Browne was first one to do it commercially – and thereby to establish surf flicks as a genre.
Following the modest commercial success of Hawaiian Surfing Movies, Browne decided to make surf movies for a living and quit his day job as PE teacher for the LA Unified School District.
It was a low-tech era. In an interview published on www.legendarysurfers.com, Browne describes the scene on his opening night:
Bud was asked if he remembered how it went.
“Oh yeah! That evening, after introducing the film on stage, I hurried up to the projection room to join the operator of an arc projector I had hired. I could see the screen from a small window, I had a microphone in hand and a tape player with music. It was a nervous time, trying to coordinate telling the projectionist when to switch from sound to silent speed and vice versa, playing music in some places and not in others, and narrating when needed. Sometime during the show I remember the take-up reel quit turning and much of a 45-minute reel of film piled up on the floor. Although this was a sort of nerve-wracking experience, I’ve always thought of the overall event as going pretty well.”
Arguably the first “international” surf movie, Browne’s Surf Down Under was released in 1958. Browne shot the footage on a trip in 1957. Sadly, the waves weren’t too good (he visited during the summer), but he did manage to shoot one sequence looking back at the crew from the bow of a surfboat. More importantly perhaps were the surf movies he showed at various surf clubs in Sydney. A young surf entrepreneur named Bob Evans helped with the organisation.
Surfing as we know it today was just getting started in Australia. A year before Browne’s visit, a group of American lifeguards visiting for the Melbourne Olympics, had left a few boards behind. Browne turning up with a couple surf movies featuring hot surfers in Hawaii really added fuel to the fire.
Footage from the Australian trip turned up in 1959’s Cat on a Hot Foam Board, and not long after American surfers started catching ships out to Oz in search of waves and adventure.
Bud Browne’s Wikipedia entry has numerous interesting links.
