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Walter maintained a friendship with the filmmaker that endured until Brown's passing in 2017. "Just before he died, Bruce agreed to give me the rights to the graphics and name 'Endless Summer,'" Georis says. "He signed off on it and said, 'I'd love to see you do Endless Summer as a wine proj- ect,' even though he was not a wine drinker. I've been wanting to do this for quite a few years and I decided that if I'm going to do this, I'm going to produce the best wines possible." In the half-century since "The Endless Sum- mer" was released, the surfing industry has mush- roomed into a world-wide behemoth. Market research firm Global Industry Analysts, Inc. pre- dicted that the global surfing market would reach $13.2 billion by 2017. The sport and its image have come a long way since the 1950s, when Brown first started surfing in Long Beach. "The Endless Summer" was not his first film about surfing, but it was his most ambitious. By the early '60s, the Southern California surfing commu- nity had grown exponentially—fertilized in part by teen beach movies such as 1959s' "Gidget"—and that meant more competition for waves. The young filmmaker hatched a plan to search for the perfect wave in South Africa. When his travel agent informed him that it would actually cost $50 less to fly around the world rather than return by the same route, he came up with the idea of 256 C A R M E L M A G A Z I N E • S U M M E R / F A L L 2 0 1 8 Bruce Brown, director/writer of "The Endless Summer." Before his 2017 passing, he granted the rights to the name and imagery associated with his most popular and successful film to Carmel restaurateur, businessman and winemaker Walter Georis. Photo: Courtesy of Bruce Brown Films This new wave of surfers are also consumers of the finer things in life, and those include good wine.