Where Dad left off

Gaviota, Calif. —  When he was just 19 or 20, Dana Brown recalls, he set out to conquer Hawaii’s famed “Pipeline” and its monster waves that beckon thrill-seeking surfers from around the world. He was lucky to make it out alive.

“I made the first wave, so I became a little cocky,” said Brown, now 43. “The next wave, I take off, free-fall, land, and my trunks blow right off my body because I hit with such force. I tumble around and I’m thinking, ‘I’m naked and I’m going to drown.’ ”

Now, all these years later, Dana Brown is taking up where his father, famed surfing filmmaker Bruce Brown, left off with his seminal 1966 surfing documentary “The Endless Summer” and its 1994 sequel, “The Endless Summer II.”

When Bruce Brown began in the 1960s, surfing was growing in popularity, but it was almost a Zen-like quest for wave-riding enthusiasts. Today, the popularity of surfing has exploded into the mainstream. Only last weekend, for example, an estimated 85,000 people crowded Huntington Beach to watch the some of the world’s great surfers perform at the Honda Element U.S. Open of Surfing.

Television today is also awash in surfing shows like “Surf Girls,” which follows a group of young female surfers trying to make it onto the pro circuit and WB’s “Boarding House: North Shore,” which the network hyped as “an intimate look at the largely unknown culture of surfing and the aggressive world of competition.” In addition, Fox Sports Network has two shows that include surfing, “54321” and “Off the Wall,” while Fox Sports West 2 has another extreme sports show, “Bluetorch,” that, again, touches on surfing. And on Aug. 16, KNBC Channel 4 in Los Angeles will air “Hawaii’s Ocean Games” that spotlights surfing in Oahu.

Tapping into this global phenomena, Dana Brown has filmed a new surfing documentary called “Step Into Liquid,” where the cameras chase some of the biggest and meanest waves. The film opens Friday in Los Angeles, New York and Hawaii.

Ask famed big wave surfer Laird Hamilton what Bruce and Dana Brown mean to surfing and he’ll say without hesitation: “They are the documentarians of our sport and [their films] come second only to the performances of the surfers themselves. They are artists ... who share the wonderful world of surfing with the world and they seem to be able to do it decade after decade.”

For “Step Into Liquid,” Hamilton rode the giant waves at Jaws off the island of Maui and even surfed the remote north coast of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), where the bottom, he said, looks like “a minefield of urchins.”

Dana Brown, who has assisted his father on various film projects over the years, said he was always open to doing his own feature-length surfing film, but not if it was perceived as just another sequel to “The Endless Summer.” He believes he has accomplished this, with different stories and locales and enough cutting-edge surfing footage to deliver today’s audiences the same “Oohs” and “Ahhs” his father elicited in “The Endless Summer.”

At times harrowing, funny, and poignant, “Step Into Liquid” provides an abundance of thrills -- like watching daredevils Gerry Lopez and Kelly Slater ride Hawaii’s always dangerous, powerful “Pipeline.”

But the film also roams the world looking for other, more offbeat tales that give a broader context to why surfing is so popular. Places like:

* Sheboygan, Wis., where surfers with Fargo accents get “stoked” riding storm-tossed waves on Lake Michigan. “They’re just into it,” Brown says. “Every night they’d be throwing parties. You’d go to the beach and 80 guys would show up with surfboards. It’s hard to believe.”

* Galveston, Texas, where surfers ride the wakes created by supertankers navigating their way along the Galveston ship channel.

* Cortes Bank, an area in the middle of the ocean 100 miles off San Diego, where some of the world’s top surfers -- Peter “Condor” Mel, Kenneth “Skindog” Collins, Mike Parsons and Brad Berlach -- brave sharks as they descend frightening waves cresting over 60 feet. How dangerous is it to surf these waters? “If somebody is swept in,” says Dana Brown, “nobody is going to be able to see them.”

The film was produced by John-Paul Beeghly, who also served as director of photography, and features other top surfers like the Malloy brothers, Rochelle Ballard, Jesse Billauer, Keala Kennelly, Layne Beachley and Rob Machado.

Growing up near the beach in Orange County’s Dana Point, young Brown said he learned to surf from early childhood. “Back then, you could walk one way to Doheny or walk the other way through vacant lots to get to Salt Creek,” he said. Now a divorced father of three, he lives in the Naples area of Long Beach.

His dad, Bruce Brown, who is executive producer of “Step Into Liquid,” lives north of Santa Barbara on a 40-acre parcel of land within sight of the ocean. His house, which is located at the back of a deep, scenic canyon, sits above a man-made pond filled with a variety of fish and a few wary turtles. A large, furry dog named Daisy -- half-wolf and half-Labrador retriever -- lounges on the porch.

When he was young and “The Endless Summer” was an unexpected hit, Bruce Brown says, he could have answered Hollywood’s siren call. He did make other films, like 1971’s “On Any Sunday,” a documentary on motorcycle racing featuring his close friend Steve McQueen, and 1975’s “The Edge,” a film about extreme sports.

But he turned down the offers from Hollywood.

“I didn’t want to go to Hollywood,” Brown said. “They told me, ‘You’ve got to move up to Hollywood or you’ll never make it.’ I went, ‘Hey, I’d rather deliver milk in Dana Point and not live in Hollywood.’

“I’d rather live in a [trailer] on a perfect surf break than live in Beverly Hills in a mansion with 50 servants and Rolls-Royces,” he added. “I don’t care about that stuff.”

Now in his 60s, Brown has a ruddy complexion, blond, thinning hair and a laid-back appearance befitting a man who has always loved the sea. He is standing barefoot in his living room wearing white jeans with holes in one knee, holding a pack of Marlboros, and looking more laid-back than Daisy.

Dana Brown, the oldest of three children, is a tall, lanky man with a beach tan, boyish grin and dark-sandy hair. He is also barefoot.

The Browns acknowledge that “Step Into Liquid” presents an overwhelmingly positive view of surfing and does not attempt to explore the dark side of the surfing culture, like drug use or territorial fights among surfers.

“In my view, surfing is positive,” Dana Brown said. “ ... If you go to Palos Verdes, you can get your lights punched out any day of the week. But in an hour-and-a-half to tell a story, if you make that a big percentage of it, is that accurate to what [surfing] is in the world? I don’t know why those suckers surf? ... To even give those guys the light of day makes me mad.”

Bruce Brown still sees red when he talks about how Hollywood made stereotypes of surfers with all those silly bongos and kids dancing to surf music on the sand. “In that era,” he points out, “the surfers liked jazz.”

Non-surfers also gave the real surfers a bad image in his day, Bruce Brown recalls.

“Guys from the Valley who weren’t surfers would have surf boards bolted on the roof of their car and they’d go down to the beach and start trouble and we’d get blamed -- ‘Oh, those damned surfers! They burned down the lifeguard shack!’ Which we didn’t do. I mean, we weren’t angels by any means but we got blamed for it.”

Brown says “The Endless Summer” was partly his answer to all those “Beach Blanket Bingo” movies. Shot with a 16mm Bolex, the documentary told the story of two young surfers who travel the world in an almost mystical quest to find the perfect wave. The movie became a life-changing experience for many who saw it.

Ray Willenberg Jr., the president of NV Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary of San Diego-based technology firm New Visual Corp., which financed the $2-million production budget of “Step Into Liquid,” said he first saw “The Endless Summer” as a youth and then went on his own endless summer at 18, catching waves all along the Gulf Coast, East Coast and along California.

“Back then, I was just in awe of Bruce Brown,” he said. Today, Willenberg and his grown son each sport tattoos of “The Endless Summer” movie poster on the calf of their legs.

Bruce Brown isn’t surprised. “I have people come up to me all the time and go, ‘I saw your movie ... and it changed my life.’ ”