Here’s an interview with the incredible Bruce Brown from Surfer’s Journal.
Brown made headlines with his Endless Summer movie that followed surfers around from wave to wave. Between him and the Beach Boys, California became the #1 destination for surfing and his movies romanticized catching a wave until it became a worldwide phenomenon.
What was the key to his movies was how much technique he packed into the narrative, becoming a literal surfing documentary
Read more: Surf’s Up: Bruce Brown and the Endless SummerCatch a wave and you’re sitting on top of the world……Beach Boys, Surf’s Up.
Brown was born December 1, 1937 in San Francisco, California, but grew up in southern California’s Long Beach about four hundred miles away. He joined the Navy, naturally enough, in the Fifties and there started his documentary film career, and released his first commercial film “Slippery When Wet” in 1958. He was Oscar nominated for the 1971 motorcycle racing film “On Any Sunday,” which Steve McQueen, a well-known racing enthusiast, was a producer.
He gets the Water-bearer for his rectified chart, exact to his Mars, that gets in the Hyperion Symbols the symbol of “Surfers searching for new waves,” and shows how much his personality and the surfing milieu was so much a part of his persona. His Part of Fortune is not that far away either, right there on the Eleventh House cusp, telling us how much surfing and surfing comaraderie were part of his whole life.
Directly opposite that PoF is Pluto in Cancer in the Fifth House highlighting how he transformed a lowly vocation like surfing into a real professional sport particularly as Pluto is sextile Neptune, king of the oceans, in the Seventh House. The mutual reception between Saturn and Jupiter is also sextile with the Saturn opposite Neptune; thus Jupiter opposite Pluto in Cancer becomes an endless series of friends, drugs and waves.
Uranus in the Third tells us how his vision was unique and yet hearkening to others who wanted to be part of something is so solitary and yet still part of a larger environment. Neptune shows up again this time against Saturn on the cusp of the Second House, assuring us that this is how he would make his name and fortune that is supported by the preponderance of planets hovering around the mid-heaven.
a-splishing and a-splashing, reeling with the feeling
Brown is not a splay temperament type because of his opposition from Saturn in Pisces to Neptune in Virgo. He is uncannily a Splash temperament type because of his lack of conjunctions — friends with all but no one close — and very humanistic approach toward life.
Bruce Brown died shortly after his 80th birthday on December 11, 2017 in his native Long Beach. Variety has the obit.
