Birth of the Endless Summer: Discovery of Cape St.  Francis

An Interview with Richard Yelland by Glenn Sakamoto

Filmmaker Richard Yelland’s latest documentary, Birth of The Endless Summer: Discovery of Cape St. Francis, examines the hidden story of The Endless Summer and follows California surfer Dick Metz’s journey around the world and his role in inspiring Bruce Brown’s epic film. We spoke with Richard to find out more.

What is your film Discovery of Cape St. Francis (CSF) about?  

It's really about the birth of the sport as we know it and centers not only Bruce Brown's creation of The Endless Summer, but also Hobie’s pioneering of foam boards and the role of his eventual partner, Dick Metz, at the center of the modern surf movement.   

My focus in particular is on Metz and his 3-year, steamship-hopping, vagabond adventure in the late 1950's through Tahiti, Fiji, Australia, Europe and Africa. The clinching moment of the journey was his landing at the tip of South Africa, on a Cape Town beach where he’d inadvertently run into a surfer in the water there named John Whitmore. Whitmore was one of the first surfers in the country and would later become a legend, “The Oom” or uncle of the sport of surfing. 

The chance encounter between Metz and Whitmore has been called "the most fortuitous meeting in the history of South African surfing" by Paul Botha, a surf historian and contest organizer in South Africa. It became a friendship that’d lead Metz to a place where he found “the perfect wave” at Cape St. Francis. A discovery often mistakenly credited to Bruce Brown and the source of an inside joke between them. 

The Birth of The Endless Summer?

How this all started for me was when Bruce Brown passed away and all the tributes started coming through from every living surfer on the planet, young and old. It’s the first time I’d seen surfers from every era – and every corner of the globe – agree on something. I thought that telling the story behind Bruce's epic film, The Endless Summer would be a great tribute to Bruce. Revealing Dick Metz's discovery of Cape St. Francis and the inspiration he gave Bruce to go there – only to film the most iconic surf scene in our lifetimes – was a piece of history that needed to be told. It felt like duty, in a way, to get this story documented before it was lost.   

In Birth of the Endless Summer: Discovery of Cape St.  Francis, we are documenting Metz’s late 1950’s journey around the world and his discovery of South Africa’s nascent surf culture and world class surf breaks. But the goal in the documentary is to have a living story arc.  Metz retracing his original steps in Cape Town and Cape St. Francis would offer a current day experience for viewers rather than just a history lesson. 

 “If Dick didn’t have that chance meeting in 1959 with John Whitmore on a beach in Cape Town, neither The Endless Summer would exist nor South African surfing as we know it.”

Why is The Endless Summer important to surfing and the culture at-large? 

The discovery of Cape St Francis by surfers Mike Hyson and Robert August, and Bruce Brown behind the camera, was every surfers’ dream realized. Kelly Slater in his interview for this film said of The Endless Summer, “It’s the most important surf movie of all time."  

But it wasn’t just a surf movie. On its national theatrical release, The New Yorker called it, “A perfect film.” That was the magic of it for me. It was the ultimate adventure.  It had the power to change someone. The film even, according to a great Robert August story, inspired one fan to quit their office job and become a DJ, living the dream at a radio station. It was about going out and exploring life to its fullest and meeting different people and enjoying the journey of being human on this planet.  

It was the allure and relevance of surfing, the attitude and lifestyle, that’d have an impact on every single person who watched it.  It would create an explosion of surf culture that would be felt not only in surfing but across the world at large. The movement would spawn skateboarding and “action sports”, inspire a surf music boom led by the Beach Boys, bring a never-ending parade of surf fashion and mainstream surf entertainment, the list goes on and on. A cultural movement involving generations of surfers, as well as those living beyond the coastlines, for six decades and counting since The Endless Summer was first screened in a high school auditorium in 1964.   

Tell us about your experience once you got there...

Getting to South Africa also got us over the hump in terms of having enough footage to finish the film. When we arrived in Cape Town, I couldn't believe the reception the South Africans gave Dick. It gave me a completely new lens on the story’s importance not only to The Endless Summer but also the pipeline that Metz formed for surf culture to be exported from California to South Africa. Bruce Brown's films, foam blanks, Surfer magazines, all of these things that were vital to create a global surf culture, were shipped down to Whitmore after Metz’s trip. Dick came back home to Laguna Beach and told Bruce Brown, Hobie Alter, John Severson, The Hoffman’s and everyone else what was down there at the southern tip of Africa – and the rest was, as they say, history.  It created an industry in South Africa and created a national team sport out of it as well. It added Africa to Hawaii and California as the epicenters of surfing.  

When I went back to South Africa with Dick Metz to retrace his steps, it was his brotherhood with Whitmore that came through. The time spent with the Whitmore family revealed the importance of what we were doing. You could clearly see why Metz was a hero there because surfers clearly recognized that If Dick didn’t have that chance meeting in 1959 with John Whitmore on a beach in Cape Town, neither The Endless Summer would exist nor South African surfing as we know it.

Tell us more... 

 What we needed early on were people believing in what I was doing. Paul Naude had a lot of respect for Dick Metz and was inspired by him opening the Hobie shops that grew from the original Dana Point store – starting with Hawaii’s first surf shop, a Hobie shop in downtown Oahu. But he was also very familiar with Metz's relationship with Whitmore and the story of Dick discovering Cape St Francis. Paul told me how important this film was to South Africans and really wanted to see me get down there to film that part of the story. What's more, he really wanted Dick to go with me, and applied the necessary pressure. Dick is a super energetic 90-year-old guy but it was a big leap for him to finally commit and take the trip.  

What have been some of the difficulties in producing this film?

Difficulties come with the territory when you have such an ambitious idea. The number of interviews this film has required is head spinning—there have been dozens and dozens. The assignment has spanned not just California but Hawaii and South Africa. On the other hand, the love of The Endless Summer and Bruce Brown, the passion for the history of the sport, and the respect given to me and the project by the individuals who’ve made this history, are unbelievable.  

Fundraising has been unsurprisingly challenging. It turns out that everyone wants to see the film get made but very few want to dig into their pockets to make it. The same reason why Bruce Brown had to mortgage his house to bring The Endless Summer to life. Fortunately, we picked up private funding piecemeal along the way as well as one key sponsorship. 

Thanks to Steve Clarke, who I surfed with as a grom– and some help from fellow Laguna Beach lifeguard, Chad Nelsen, now CEO of Surfrider–I was able to get a meeting with the founder of Vissla, Paul Naude. Paul, as a South African and leader in the industry, took a personal interest in what I was doing. He looped in Vincent De La Pena at Vissla and Vin’s early enthusiasm for the project was wind in the sails as well.  

 Where is the film currently? 

The edit started as a 120-minute+ rough cut. Once we got it down to 105-minutes, we were able to chip away until we had an 87-minute final cut. The whole process took over a year. It was all about mining the gold and condensing the best elements into a concise film. One that moves with good pacing so that 90-minutes feels more like 45-minutes.

 We don’t want to get hung up on nostalgia--that’s easy to do with so much good archival imagery. We’re fortunate that Metz did an unbelievable job documenting his trip with high quality photography.  The goal is to get to the core of Dick’s original journey. If we concentrate on the story first, all the amazing historical film footage and photographs we have to pull from will become that much more powerful. Thanks to Alex Mecl, Director of Bruce Brown Films, we have access to Bruce Brown’s film and photo archives. Also, we’re lucky that Dick Metz is the founder of Surfing Heritage and Cultural Center (SHACC) and their archives of imagery and relics could be considered the world’s best.   

Birth of The Endless Summer: Discovery of St, Francis has its world premier at the Newport Beach Film Festival on October 26 and October 28th, 2021– tickets are available here. The film also screens at Coast Film Festival in Laguna Beach on November 10th and November 12, 2021.

To learn more about Birth of the Endless Summer: Discovery of Cape St.  Francis, follow Birth of The Endless Summer and Curtis Birch / Richard Yelland on Instagram, or visit the official website.