was a “dictator,” though he considered him a “popular” one, and “the country has made remarkable progress” under his rule, he told his parents in August 1964. The evidence cited by Troy illustrates the extent to which tourists hailing from the industrialized West often conflate material trappings that remind them of home with “progress” in the nations they are visiting. There were, Troy wrote of Paraguay under Stroessner, “machined fence posts, town indicators, mile signs[,] and direction indicators.”25
As the jaunt in landlocked Paraguay suggests, Troy spent more and more time away from the ocean. What was originally conceived as a surfing-centered voyage became a hitchhiking odyssey across vast swaths of the Latin American, European, and African interiors. There were occasional opportunities to surf, but Troy’s interests broadened with each passing mile. Still, there was no doubting the significance of his globe-trotting to the international surfing community. Peter Troy was, one of the Australians who discovered Lagundri Bay with him opined, “the grand-daddy of surf exploration,” spending years on the road with a backpack, some instruments with which to write, and a dwindling reserve of funds.26 However, he was nowhere near as successful in popularizing surf exploration as were a couple of Southern California teenagers in the mid-1960s. Robert August and Mike Hynson are, to surfing enthusiasts today, house hold names. This is not because the two photogenic teens—one a blond-haired regularfoot, the other a dark-haired goofyfooter—racked up any championship trophies; neither of them, in fact, was a professional competitive surfer. Rather, August and Hynson just happened to be asked by a budding twenty-something film-maker whether they wanted to appear in his new movie.
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
Its cultural impact was profound. The Washington Post would dub it a “classic” account of “the sport’s golden age.”32 Members of the National Screen Council, which in January 1967 awarded The Endless Summer its Boxoffice Blue Ribbon Award—“unusual for a documentary,” the group noted—were ecstatic. “You could be 85 and never have put a toe in the water and still think this is great,” chimed one. “Who would have thought I would sit enthralled for 91 minutes by a documentary about surfing!” said another.33 Brown came in for extraordinary praise. To Time magazine he was the “Bergman of the Boards”; the New York Times christened him the “Fellini of the Foam.”34 So historically significant is The Endless Summer that in 2002 the Library of Congress selected the picture for inclusion on its exclusive National Film Registry. The movie’s signature poster, featuring the silhouettes of Brown, August, and Hynson “backlit by the sun,” has been “immortalized,” noted the Washington Post, in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.35 The Endless Summer theme music, composed and performed by the Sandals, helped define the surf music genre. As a global project, the film awakened thousands of surfers to the possibilities of exploration in Africa, the South Pacific, and other exotic locales, and it introduced countless people worldwide to California’s more genuine surfing “subculture” (as opposed to the caricature that appeared in Hollywood’s teenage surf movies).36 Yet in ways that have not been explored by scholars, The Endless Summer also illustrates how, during the height of the Cold War, the United States came to view surfing as an ideological weapon in its anti-Communist crusade, for in May 1967 it was announced that the documentary would appear, under State Department sponsorship, at the biennial Moscow Film Festival.37
It is not difficult to envision the film’s appeal to those tasked with American cultural diplomacy. In its story of two young Californians who meet the locals while looking for surf in Senegal, Ghana, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, and Hawai‘i, Brown’s picture is entertaining, funny, and visually striking. But it is much more than that. Through its protagonists’ carefree travel, The Endless Summer highlighted the freedom afforded Americans—unlike most of those living in the Soviet bloc—to explore and discover the nations of the world. In the stars’ quest for nothing more than good waves and fun, the film illustrated the pleasurable lifestyle promised by the capitalist system that made such leisure possible. And in the visiting surfers’ interactions with the locals—as embarrassingly racist as some of these interactions may appear to audiences today—The Endless Summer painted a portrait of the United States as a benevolent and sympathetic power at a time when, given the escalation of the war in Vietnam, the U.S. image was suffering in much of the Third World. Such people-to-people encounters, for which global tourism played a leading role, were an important Cold War weapon at the heart of America’s soft overseas propaganda.38
For reasons more nepotistic than meritorious, The Endless Summer was withdrawn from the Moscow festival just weeks before it was to get under way. The Soviets told Washington that it needed to whittle down the number of films it intended to present, including just one commercial documentary. The United States had planned to show two: The Endless Summer and The Young Americans (1967), a patriotic account of high school-and college-age American choral singers performing in venues across the United States. Marc Spiegel, the Russian-speaking executive of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) who traveled to Moscow to consult with the Soviets, recommended The Endless Summer.39 But Columbia Pictures, whose founders’ scion made The Young Americans and which served as the film’s distributor, “prefer[red]” its own documentary, MPAA chief and U.S. delegation organizer Jack Valenti notified Spiegel.40 The MPAA, of course, represented the big American studios, while The Endless Summer was made by Bruce Brown Films and distributed by the small art-film company Cinema V. It was no contest. The Young Americans received the official nod.
Much to the frustration of the American contingent, in the end it, too, failed to show in Moscow. Its scheduled presentation was abruptly canceled by the Soviets without official explanation. Informally the authorities stated that the film was considered “American propaganda” by “high-level” Soviet viewers.41 This incensed Valenti, who had been assigned by the State Department to oversee American activities at the festival. “If the portrayal of young, wholesome Americans as they tour the United States giving concerts, climaxed by appearances in patriotic settings in Washington, is propaganda, then this was ‘propaganda,’ and about as good as could be found,” Valenti wrote to Washington. “But it was, first of all, an excellent motion picture.”42 While Valenti believed The Young Americans’ cancellation
