"He was completely at home in the water," Matt Warshaw, author of "The Encyclopedia of Surfing" and a former editor of Surfer magazine, told The Times on Monday. "With a camera cased in housing, he was willing to go out and take lumps and get angles no one else wanted to get."
In a 2005 column in the Orange County Register, surfing champion Corky Carroll recalled "running over" Browne one day at Pipeline in Hawaii.
"He told me to surf like he wasn't there, so I did," Carroll wrote. "I am tucked deep into this monster barrel, and there is Bud, right in the way, filming me. I figured that he was gonna dive under before I ran him down. Wrong. He just stayed right here filming, and I took him out like a Greyhound bus nailing a highway dog."
As a surf-film pioneer, Browne predated other early surf filmmakers such as Bruce Brown, Greg Noll and John Severson.
Brown, whose film "The Endless Summer" became a phenomenon after opening nationally in 1966, remembered watching Browne's films as a teenager. In fact, Browne captured him on film surfing in Hawaii.
"That was a big deal to go to Bud's movies and to see if you were in it," Brown told The Times on Monday.
He held Browne in such esteem as "the originator" of commercial surf films that "when I got a chance to make one of my own, I went to Bud and said, 'I don't want to do it without your blessing.' He said, 'No problem; go for it.' "
Warshaw said the work of Browne and other early surf filmmakers was, to surfers, the equivalent of passing around a scrapbook.
"When Bud first came out, there weren't even surf magazines," he said. "Everyone was so starved to see imagery of surfing."
Nicknamed "Barracuda" for his tall, slender build and the amount of time he spent in the water, Browne was known as a top body surfer. In the early '60s, he was famous for body surfing at the Wedge in Newport Beach, the most dangerous body-surfing spot in California.
As a filmmaker, Pezman said, Browne "made a film record of the surf culture that he was intimate with.
"He was allowed inside as one of them, even though he was quite different than they were," Pezman said.
"He was a traditional, old-school gentleman, and they were rambunctious rebels, but somehow they coexisted, and he recorded their lives and their culture as it expanded from a few hundred [surfers] in the '50s to several million in the '60s, and he and his films helped fan the flames of that growth," he said.
