It was in Dana Point, though, on the coast but an hour south, that John created the Endless Summer poster. By day he was a surfer, sharing waves with the great Miki Dora, not as an equal but as one of Miki’s “tools,” a tool, according to John, being “the usual jerk kind of young, worshipping male,” a sort of Ur-gremmie. Sharing waves, too, with the real-life Gidget, Kathy Kohner, bearing scant resemblance to the cute-as-a-button beach bunny with the high-bouncing ponytail and snub nose and boy-crazy ways made famous by Sandra Dee. She was, John writes in his memoir, My Life, My Art, “not necessarily a sexual kitten” but rather “a female tool” and “very outspoken.” By night, though, he was a student at Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, studying Abstract Expressionism and hanging out with the fast-company likes of the artist Ed Ruscha, who’d published Twentysix Gasoline Stations only the year before, and Rick Griffin, still doing time in high-school homeroom yet already with his own comic strip, “Murphy,” and a significant underground following. John was also the art editor of Surfer magazine. (He’d tried to start his own surf-related magazine, Surfing Illustrated, but things got a little weird between him and his principal backer, who’d had a metal plate inserted in his skull after an accident in the water.)

The Local Hotshot

So John was on the scene and known to do good work. Plus, said Bruce Brown, “he was the only artist I knew.” It was no big surprise, then, that he was asked if he’d be interested in designing the poster for Bruce’s latest. No big deal either. Bruce was a hotshot, certainly, but strictly a local one, which was exactly how he liked it, thank you very much. “I would rather be a milkman at the beach than live in Hollywood,” he once wrote, though this seems less the kind of remark you commit to paper for posterity than spit in some jerk’s face to make him shut it. Bruce started making surf documentaries in 1958. All were done on the super-cheap, first with an 8-mm. camera, later with a 16, starring his buds and shown in high-school auditoriums in and around Orange County, him on the stage with a tape player, lowering the volume of the music to do narration, turning it back up when it was just footage playing, as his wife, Pat, ran the projector. (Kem Nunn, future writer of surfer-noir classic Tapping the Source and co-creator of HBO’s John from Cincinnati, then just a kid, a gremmie, would be in the audience, soaking it all in.) Recalled Brown of those early, catch-as-catch-can days, “I hadn’t ever got up in front of an audience and done anything like that. Anyway, I came up with something and did it and people . . . were laughing and I thought, Wow, this isn’t too bad.”

John accepted the assignment, thinking it little more than a chance for some quick cash, if that. (Bruce had hocked his house to finance the movie, so payment wasn’t a given.) A basic concept was devised by Bruce, Pat, and Bruce’s marketing-and-publicity man, R. Paul Allen: silhouettes of surfers in a beachy-type setting. John drew several thumbnail sketches. Once they were O.K.’d, he and Bruce, along with the film’s two unbelievably cute stars—Mike Hynson, fair-haired and right-footed and renting the room above Bruce’s garage, and Robert August, dark-haired and left-footed and a veteran of Bruce’s movies, appearing in his first, Barefoot Adventure, at 14—headed over to Salt Creek Beach. Photos were taken there by Bob Bagley, one of the film’s producers, under John’s direction, of Hynson and August with Bruce in the foreground. John chose a negative, made a high-contrast positive, then using the silkscreen techniques taught in his advertising class—a case of earn as you learn if ever there was one—he created the image of the Kansas figures in the Oz landscape, black on neon, selecting colors of such retina-burning vividness they were best viewed through a pair of Ray-Bans in hopes of attracting attention on high-school campuses. (Fluorescent paints and inks were relatively new on the art scene, up until then having been used mostly by the military during World War II.) John then hand-lettered the title because he was picky about fonts and none were quite right. His job done, he passed off the poster to R. Paul Allen. And once Allen coughed up the $150 fee, John promptly dismissed the matter from his mind.