The following story is published in issue #126 of Pacific Longboarder Magazine. It is reproduced with permission from the publisher, author and John Van Hamersveld.
Written by Marcus Rebeschini
Surf culture has always had an unusual relationship to time. It likes to imagine itself as a creature of the present tense, of tides and weather and whatever swell is due to arrive tomorrow. But much of its real life is archival. It survives in old photographs, in boards stored in rafters, in ticket stubs that were never torn, in posters that outlast the theatres they were made for.
Its history does not disappear so much as recede, then return.
My own part in one of those returns began with an email, sent sometime around the era when email still felt faintly improbable, like a note folded into a bottle and set loose.
I wrote to John Van Hamersveld, known to most people as JVH, the artist behind one of the most recognizable images in surf history, the poster for The Endless Summer.
Even people who have never seen the film usually know the image. The blazing sun. The improbable colours. The three surfers in silhouette, walking toward the edge of the world.
Bruce Brown in the foreground. Robert August to the right, board balanced overhead. Mike Hynson in the background, his board tucked under one arm. It is not merely a poster. It is the visual shorthand for a certain idea of freedom, of youth, of California, of the dream that there might still be an uncrowded wave somewhere over the horizon.
I did not expect a reply.
Life moved on.
Then, two years later, one arrived.
Not from JVH, but from his wife, Alida.
She wrote to tell me that something remarkable had surfaced. R. Paul Allen, the man who had overseen the original promotion and presentations of The Endless Summer, had been cleaning out his closet. Allen had been there almost from the beginning, working with Bruce Brown and Patricia Brown in the early Dana Point years, helping shape not just how the film was shown but how it would be seen. In the closet, tucked among the sediment of a long life, were 15 original posters from the first run.
15.
Not later reproductions. Not the smaller versions printed for standard theatre displays. These were the early large format originals, about 60 by 40 inches, fluorescent Day Glo silk-screened posters produced in 1964 in a garage in Costa Mesa by a printer named Eric Askew, who ran a small operation making posters and T-shirts. Allen had personally supervised the printing and paid Askew himself.
In other words, these were not just posters. They were the first physical expression of the film’s ambition.
To understand why that matters, it helps to go back to Dana Point in the early 1960s, when almost no one involved could have known what The Endless Summer would become. In 1960, Allen, then twenty-three, began working with Bruce Brown and Patricia Brown out of their tiny rented home. They were all the same age, Allen later recalled, and all struggling toward some undefined version of success. Surf films at the time were not a proper industry so much as an improvisation. Brown made the films. Allen promoted and presented them. Together they built audiences the old fashioned way, town by town, screening by screening.
By late 1963, Allen had started his own promotional business. His agreement with Brown gave him exclusive responsibility for the promotion and presentation of The Endless Summer. Before the film became a national phenomenon, before it reached New York, before its title took on the glow of legend, Allen understood that it would need an image powerful enough to travel ahead of it.
His first priority, he said, was the poster.
The artist he turned to was a friend, John Van Hamersveld, then the art director of Surfer Magazine, who was living in Dana Point. JVH had already designed Allen’s stationery and business cards. Now Allen asked him to do something larger, though no one involved yet knew just how large that something would become.
The inspiration was modest, almost throwaway. Allen saw a black and white silhouette illustration on a sports page in his local newspaper, a figure running with the sun behind him. He tore out the page and drew a surfboard beneath the runner’s arm so that he appeared to be moving toward the waves. He brought the clipping to JVH, Bruce Brown, and Patricia Brown as a visual prompt. It was not a finished idea. It was a spark.
From there, the image became an act of collaboration. JVH produced thumbnail sketches. Allen wrote the film summary that he believed should be an essential part of the design. That summary mattered to him. The original poster was never meant to be image alone. It was meant to persuade, to explain, to promise an experience. It needed the words as much as the colours.
To create the silhouette, JVH used a black and white photograph of Bruce Brown, Robert August, and Mike Hynson on the beach with their surfboards. The photograph had been taken at Salt Creek Beach in Dana Point during an advertising shoot for Sandcomber Surfing Trunks. Brown’s assistant, Robert Bagley, took the pictures under JVH’s direction. One of the images was then reversed into a negative and transformed into the final composition.
What emerged was both graphic and strangely lyrical.
The fluorescent Day Glo colors gave the image its electric pulse. The hand-designed lettering gave it warmth. It looked handmade because it was handmade. It looked optimistic because the people who made it were.
In late June 1964, The Endless Summer premiered at the Hollywood Encore Theater in Los Angeles over four nights, by invitation only. It was shown in 16mm, and Bruce Brown narrated the screenings live. Allen then flew to the east coast, presenting Bruce and the film in conjunction with the Hobie Surf Team who traveled via motorhome from New York to Florida giving surfing demonstrations and showing the movie. Besides promoting the team, Allen used those dazzling posters wherever he could, in theatres, in surf shops, in any place that might hold the eye long enough to stir curiosity.
The size of the poster, however, was part of both its beauty and its impracticality. At 60 by 40 inches, it was too large for the standardised architecture of theater promotion. Allen never printed more after that original limited run in 1964. Then, in June 1966, after the 35mm theatrical premiere at the Kips Bay Theatre in New York and the expansion of distribution through Cinema V, he authorized a smaller silk-screened version sized to fit the conventional one sheet display, 27 by 41 inches. From that point on, the large original effectively disappeared from circulation.
What survived instead were variations. Cropped versions. Simplified versions. Adaptations that retained the image, the title, the color, but often stripped away the full text Allen had written and regarded as central to the design. To him, those later versions diluted the force of the original design. The first poster had been complete. It had image, narrative, and invitation all in one frame.
And yet the image endured anyway. Or perhaps because of that very tension, between what was first intended and what the culture later extracted from it, it became iconic.
Over time, the original design entered museum collections, among them the Smithsonian, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum Of Art. A piece of surf advertising, made by young people in a small California town, had crossed into the canon.
And due to the incredible worldwide popularity of the movie the original poster has become the everlasting memory of The Endless Summer.
Allen sounded almost amused by that outcome. They were just doing what they loved, he said. Who would have known.
Not long after Alida’s email, I happened to be in Los Angeles for work. She suggested we meet. Until then, our connection had existed only in messages. Soon enough, I found myself doing something else I had never done before, driving a left-hand drive American car through Los Angeles traffic toward San Diego. For anyone raised on the other side of the road, it feels less like ordinary transit than a small wager against confusion.
At the end of that drive was R. Paul Allen himself.
We sat and talked about those years in Dana Point, about the making of the film, about promotion in the era before a surf movie could presume an audience simply by existing. Then he brought the posters out of his closet.
The colours were still astonishing. Not faded into nostalgia, but alive. They held that same saturated feeling of sun and distance, the same promise that somewhere beyond the frame there was still time enough to leave.
They also felt expensive. Painfully so.
But I had made a mistake like that before. Years earlier, I had passed on the chance to buy the original Ride the Wild Surf board used in the film’s imagery. Collectors know that kind of hesitation well. It feels prudent in the moment and absurd forever afterward.
So this time I did not hesitate.
I bought two of the 15 posters.
Then Allen stepped into another room and returned with something smaller, and in a way even more improbable. Two unused ticket stubs from the first screening of The Endless Summer at the Hollywood Encore Theater in June of 1964. Tiny paper artifacts, the sort of thing almost designed to vanish into a pocket, a trash bin, oblivion.
I bought those too.
Today, one poster and one ticket stub hang in my home in Japan, a fragment of California surf mythology quietly relocated across the Pacific. The second poster and second ticket remain stored, waiting for whatever wall or life might claim them next.
That, in the end, may be the real story. Not only the making of an image, but the movement of objects through time. A poster dreamed up in Dana Point from a newspaper clipping. Printed in a Costa Mesa garage. Tacked up in theatres and surf shops. Reduced, revised, mythologized, museum-ised. Forgotten in a closet. Found again. Carried halfway around the world.
Surf culture, for all its worship of the fleeting moment, leaves behind an astonishing trail of relics. Sometimes they survive because someone has the foresight to save them. Sometimes they survive by accident. And sometimes, after decades of silence, they return because of something as small and hopeful as a message sent without expectation.
A letter, really.
Dropped into the ocean.
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