Still Catching a Wave

"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.