Fifty year ago, Bruce Brown’s “The Endless Summer” was released in theaters across the country. Among the surfers it inspired were Kevin Naughton and Craig Peterson. In 1972, six years after the film’s release, Naughton and Peterson set off on a decade long search of their own for the perfect wave. Naughton’s stories and Peterson’s photographs fueled the imagination of a generation of Surfer Magazine readers while also making a significant contribution to surf literature, which began with Captain Cook and Mark Twain and this year earned New Yorker writer William Finnegan a Pulitzer Prize for his book “Barbarian days: A surfing life.”
Brown, Naughton and Peterson will be in Hermosa Beach the first week in June for the inaugural and highly ambitious South Bay Film and Music Festival at the Hermosa Beach Community Theater.
Brown will be honored at a reception on Saturday, June 4 prior to a screening of “The Endless Summer.” Palos Verdes artist John Van Hamersveld, who designed the equally enduring  “Endless Summer” poster, will also be present.
The following day, Sunday, June 5, a documentary about Naughton and Peterson’s travels will screen. The writer and photographer will be present to talk and sign copies of their recently published  “Search for the Perfect Wave: The Surf-Travel-Misadventures of Kevin Naughton and Craig Peterson.”
The festival is presented by the Hermosa Cinema Society, founded last year by Jon Fitzgerald, a former director of the AFI Film Festival. In support of the festival, the Hermosa Arts Foundation has invested approximately $100,000 in improvements to the theater’s sound, projection and seating over the past year.
Though surf-centric (Fitzgerald’s grandfather was Dick Fitzgerald, the first Department of Beaches director), the festival also includes a documentary competition and a narrative film competition. Among the documentaries will be Hermosa Beach filmmakers Brett Drogmund and Howard Hanna’s “Swim to Africa,” which follows six swimmers as they cross the Strait of Gibraltar, from Spain to Africa.
“Sea to See,” an exhibit, organized by surf art curator Charles Adler, will include work by Van Hamersveld, Manhattan Beach painter Alex Weinstein, photographer Art Brewer, local photographers Ken Pagliaro, Brent Broza and John Smart and Hermosa’s legendary LeRoy Grannis.
Van’s shoe artist Yusuke Hanai, who will also be exhibiting, designed the festival poster as an homage to Grannis.
The films will screen throughout the days and evenings, beginning Thursday, June 2 and ending Sunday, June 5. Ticket packages range in price from $60 for six films to $500 for a full festival pass. For more information, visit SouthBayFest.com. B
