Bruce Brown, longtime surf filmmaker and director of the seminal “Endless Summer” just passed at 80 years old. Drew Kampion wrote the following for our Surfing A-Z entry on Brown: Prior to 1964, the media saw surfers as rebellious thugs, and Hollywood made them out to be a bunch of idiots. Filmmaker Bruce Brown single-handedly changed that with The Endless Summer. It portrayed the wave as a kind of Holy Grail and surfers as knights on a quest. In one stroke, he replaced Hollywood's buffoonery with the popular mythology that endures today.