Into the Forge With Ryan Thomas

Warner Avenue slithers like a giant black snake through flatlands covered in drag-and-drop strip malls, business parks, and housing developments. It’s just one of many mega-streets that crisscross the sprawl at the bottom of a vast, urbanized coastal plain, stretching fifty miles from the San Joaquin Hills to the Santa Monica Mountains. Known in urban planning circles as the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim corridor, this grid of pavement spreads for hundreds of square miles, each of which has an average population density of more than 7,000 people, and a total population of 13-million-plus inhabitants. More humans live here than the five boroughs of New York City combined. This is the Los Angeles Basin. The Valley of Smokes. The Southland. It’s the place where freeways are born. 

Rising in the east near a Costco in Tustin, Warner crosses the concrete-encased channel of the Santa Ana River. After miles of stoplights and gas stations, it makes an abrupt bend. Suddenly the salty tang of marine air reveals the presence of the ocean. The development to the south vanishes at the rim of a low mesa. The horizon opens, and a broad field spreads down to a tidal estuary. In another quarter mile, mighty Warner finally ends its long journey through the Orange County suburbs, halted by the Pacific Coast Highway at Bolsa Chica State Beach. 

In a sea of human habitation, the estuary and field are places reclaimed by nature—an infinitely older world. Ryan Thomas grew up on the north side of Warner, just across from the field. Born in 1971, he lived with his mom and dad, two younger brothers, and eventually his stepmom, until he left the nest in 1994. “Growing up,” he says, “my brother Chet and I fed off each other when it came to surfing and skating. And my youngest brother Matt and I fed off each other for art and music. My mom, dad, and stepmom were all extremely supportive of all our interests.” 

In his formative years, the Bolsa Chica Mesa was still an unregulated expanse of fallow land, hemmed in by chain-link and barbed wire fences. The remains of various human endeavors still lurked in the brush and groves of eucalyptus. Old WWII bunkers and artillery mounts sat decaying alongside rusted farming equipment, derelict oil drilling paraphernalia, a secret BMX track, and a rope swing in the trees. The neighborhood kids would crawl through a hole in the fence to enter a land they called simply, “The Bunkers.”

From childhood through his early twenties, Thomas shaped his core sentiments on that plot of land. What was once a playground became a place of solitude. The largest bunker, covered in soil with plants growing on its inclined sides, could have been mistaken for a natural knoll. R.T. spent many hours atop it, staring at the ocean by day and the lights of Long Beach by night, surrounded by the ambient buzz of the great suburban hive around him. In the middle of an abandoned oil field, perched on a war relic now cloaked in living things, he formed a worldview based on his surroundings. He came to terms with the fact that he lived in a built-up and crazed world. He also found that he could take refuge from that world in nature.

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Thomas has been making surf films for nearly two decades. His work, to date, is bracketed by two highly personal independent films, created 18 years apart: Scratch Miscellaneous (his first, released in 2000), and Temporal Collections (his latest, to be released in late 2018). In between is a long list of documentaries, web edits, and feature surf films he created, which includes The Bruce Movie (2005), Creepy Fingers (2006), BS! (2009), and Psychic Migrations (2015).

To varying degrees, all of R.T.’s films reflect the perspectives he gained on the bunker, and in the ocean beyond it. “My inner pendulum,” he says, “often swings towards sarcasm, driven by a need to laugh at certain things about myself and my existence within the modern world in Southern California. The other side is a romantic desire to portray only the beauty of things and a feeling of escaping the mundane for a magical experience. Surfing is the activity, more than any other, that delivers to me beauty and a sense of magic on a day to day basis.” 

His passion for making surf films was ignited by a bootleg copy of Pacific Vibrations. At the time, he was in his fourth term as a film major at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, preparing to work in the mainstream film industry. Seeing John Severson’s counterculture opus changed all that. It was a fitting coincidence, given the fact that on the night of October 22, 1971, as Severson screened his psychotropic surf journey at the infamous Surf Theater in Huntington Beach, R.T. lay dreaming in his crib just a few miles up the road. He was four weeks old. 

Pacific Vibrations portrays surfers at the dawn of the 70s seeking to maintain a place they’d found within the 60s counterculture. The backdrop is a mainstream civilization spinning out of control. Orange County is a prominent venue in the film, with playful surf sessions juxtaposed against oil extraction, militarization, Vietnam War protests, overpopulation, traffic, pollution, and competition. For those receptive to its message, the film stamps a point of view on the psyche that lingers in the subconscious long after any memories of its details have faded. It is a timeless work of art, made by an artist working with fellow artists of the highest caliber. Ultimately, it makes a statement not just about surfing, but also one of a broader sociological and environmental context.

As a young film major at Art Center, Thomas got Severson’s message. It resonated deeply with him as a depiction of the time, place, and culture he was born into. It mirrored how he related to that world in his own time. Ronald Reagan once proclaimed that Orange County was where good conservatives go before they die. While he may have been right, it was also where their children danced on the grave of the California dream as they torched cop cars and rioted at the OP Pro. For a teenaged R.T. and his crew in the late 80s and 90s, Orange County was the nexus between surfing, skating, art, and music. It was also the main conduit to an industry that branded their lifestyle and sold it as a commodity for worldwide consumption. The business of “board sports” was, in many cases, created and operated by the youths themselves.

As it happened, R.T. would eventually be drawn into the orbit of a particularly youthful segment of that industry. The first tug of gravitational pull came in the 8th grade when he met Troy Eckert, who had just moved to Huntington Beach from Lake Forest. A full-tilt grom friendship ensued, and the two have been creatively tied together by surfing, playing in garage bands, and making art and films ever since. 

In 1991, Eckert started showing up for jam sessions wearing t-shirts made by a fledgling start-up clothing company named Volcom. Richard Woolcott, the co-founder of the label, had recruited Eckert as Volcom’s first surf team rider. On Eckert’s recommendation, Woolcott soon signed Chet Thomas as Volcom’s first skater. Meanwhile, R.T., who had long been drawing and painting, started doing freelance designs for Volcom’s t-shirts. Woolcott’s willingness to support talented local youth brought R.T. into the nurturing embryonic fluid of the Volcom brand just as it was beginning to grow.

The surf industry was, at the time, ripe for disruption. The economy was in recession, and established brands were feeling the pain. Tustin-based Ocean Pacific, which had reaped annual sales of close to a billion dollars during the boom years in the late 80s, filed for bankruptcy in the spring of 1992. Other brands, having grown fat off highly commercialized chain stores, were losing touch with the kids. Volcom marched into this post 80s milieu through a backdoor that the big companies left wide open. Woolcott immediately positioned his label as being completely divorced from the world of established surf apparel. Skating, snowboarding, surfing, art, and music had equal footing from the get-go. Volcom’s early ad campaigns expressed their philosophy with a simple slogan: Youth Against Establishment.

As the 90s progressed and the brand grew, Eckert gravitated toward the marketing side of the business as Volcom began releasing snow, surf, and skate films. It was during this time that R.T. stumbled upon his dad’s old Super-8mm camera and began filming pastoral scenes on the Bolsa Chica Mesa. “I owe a lot to my dad, Vince,” he recalls. “He taught me manual 35mm still photography in my mid-teens and, later, finding his Super-8 camera was the clincher. Most of what I shot was an attempt to crop the suburban landscape out of the frame and escape into the little pockets of nature that existed there.” 

It wasn’t long before Eckert’s expanding role in Veeco Productions (Volcom’s filmmaking unit) intersected with R.T.’s budding interests. While editing the Volcom skate flick Freedom Wig (1997), Eckert discovered that he needed some last-minute clips to round out Chet Thomas’ segment in the film. He asked R.T. to go shoot Chet skating. It was Ryan shooting footage of his brother—a simple, organic, inside job. 

R.T. was also making his first two Super-8 short films for a night class at Art Center. Titled Liberation and The Mesa, neither involved surfing. Though today he cringes at what he refers to as the “easy clichés” used in these films, they remain examples of the core sentiment found in his later work. In both, viewers are drawn out of the frenetic, overbuilt environment of the Orange County suburbs and into nature. There is no dialogue in either film, only music. In Liberation, a young man who is trapped and oppressed by his man-made surroundings reclaims his humanity by fleeing to a remote and beautiful canyon in the desert. In The Mesa, a young couple shares a spiritual connection to nature, symbolized by the fields of Bolsa Chica. The film ends when the fields are bulldozed to make way for a housing development.

Still a part-time student, R.T. submitted both films to Art Center and was accepted into the film major program as a fully enrolled pupil. He did four straight terms, then, halfway through his matriculation, made a dramatic shift in the wake of viewing Pacific Vibrations and decided to invest his student-loan money into making his first surf film, Scratch Miscellaneous. “It was an instantaneous thing,” he says. “I saw Severson’s movie and was floored. The second it ended I picked up the phone and started making plans.”

Surfer/artist Ben Brough was the first person he called to collaborate on the project. “He had the vision and easily communicated what he wanted out of a surf-travel flick,” says Brough. “We just did what we did, always drawing, always filming, the creativity levels always turned up to 11. Those trips will never leave my memory.”

At 18 minutes long, the film is a frantic montage of surf vignettes infused with visual cultural commentary. Driven by a feverish soundtrack, it’s a document of a manic episode—a frenzy spent traveling the world making a surf flick while burning through a big chunk of borrowed money. One of the most notable things about it, visually, is the ample screen time given to images other than surfing. It’s as much about being on the road as it is about being in the water.

 Alongside Brough, Shawn “Barney” Barron, Mike Morrissey, and Ozzie Wright, Eckert was one of the featured surfers in Scratch. He’d just finished directing the shooting of an unfinished Volcom surf project and was sitting on a bunch of unedited 16mm footage that would eventually be turned into Football Shmootball (2002). “When I saw Scratch Miscellaneous,” he recalls, “I just knew there was something special going on. It was all shot on Super-8, and it was raw yet polished. So I made the decision to do the Football Shmootball edit with R.T. The Bruce Movie was also on deck, and I wanted to give him a shot at that, too.” 

In December 2004, R.T. and Eckert flew to the North Shore to film and interview Bruce Irons for what became Irons’ era-defining signature film. As they landed, Irons’ fate on the World Championship Tour hung in the balance. His one and only chance to re-qualify was to place 5th or better in the Pipe Masters. Bruce was known primarily as a progressive and fearless free surfer, with a flair for huge airs, and technical and stylish tube riding. Many in the surf industry, however, felt he’d never be able to find success on the World Tour, within the confines of competition. 

The plot was thick, and it got even thicker when Bruce bombed in the first round at Pipe, riding one closeout for an abysmal heat score of 1.07 points. He’d have one last chance in round two. Hope for a positive storyline, with regard to Irons’ 2004 year-end competitive performance, was fading. 

Then, over the course of the next five days, Irons delivered all the plot drama R.T. and Eckert could possibly handle. A massive swell roared down from the Aleutians and furiously pounded the North Shore. Pipe washed out and the call was made to run the Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational. In iconic conditions at Waimea, he went on to win the 2004 Eddie. A few days later, he made it out of his second round elimination heat at the Pipe Masters, ultimately placing 4th in the contest and re-qualifying in the process. Instant story. Instant glory. Pressure off. Pundits silenced. A clear path ahead. 

Now, the ultra-high expectations that the surf world had piled onto the back of Irons shifted squarely onto the shoulders of Ryan Thomas. The mild-mannered, then-unknown director of the forthcoming Bruce Irons documentary knew that he had to make a film worthy of the subject matter. 

R.T. and Troy went back to California with the goods to begin weaving it all together in the editing bay. Eckert had already gathered 16mm footage of Bruce shot by accomplished cinematographers including Brad Anderson, Bill Ballard, and Daren Crawford. R.T.’s task was to build a cohesive story around the stellar surf action. To do so, he and another cinematographer, Brian Bleak, shared camera duties shooting Super-8 interviews of key figures in Bruce’s life: Andy, Occy, Kai “Borg” Garcia, Titus Kinimaka, and a host of others. The prominent use of comments from these subjects gives the film a candid, unpretentious, and humorous view into Bruce’s world and personality.

The Bruce Movie premiered in July 2005 at Volcom’s headquarters in Costa Mesa to a massive and raucous crowd. In September, it won Video of the Year at the 2005 Surfer Poll Awards. The project had required R.T. to build a storyline around a raw, unpredictable personality. On screen, Bruce’s prodigious talent draws attention like a force of nature, while nature itself recedes into the background, counterintuitive to R.T.’s personal inclinations. Despite this, the film carries emotional weight in its portraiture of a generational talent reaching for his potential. In hindsight, 13 years later, Andy Irons’ presence in the film adds to this dimension. Watching the brothers surf together is like watching one surfer, not two. They become almost indistinguishable, except for the slightest variations in tempo, aggression, and style. In the final sequence of the film, Bruce and Andy share waves in Indo to the sound of Iggy Pop’s The Endless Sea. It’s an ethereal and melancholic piece of music, tinged with a biting cynicism that somehow only adds to its beauty:

Oh baby, what a place to be

In the service of the bourgeoisie

Where can my believers be?

I want to jump into the endless sea…

In the final shot, Bruce sits on his board, alone in the ocean as tropical rain pours down. The camera rests along the waterline and we see beneath the surface and above it, simultaneously. At the top of the frame, Bruce sits in the rain. In the bottom half we see his board and the lower half of his body. The shot holds as a series of wavelets submerge the lens. Bruce disappears and then reappears as the wavelets pass. As the last one passes, we see his board and legs underwater, but when the camera surfaces Bruce is gone. Only the part of him below the surface remains visible. Above the surface, the rain beats down on an empty ocean. The effect is haunting. Someone who was there, who should be there, is gone.

In the wake of The Bruce Movie, R.T. launched into a full-time production schedule, making films and web edits for Volcom, an arrangement that continues to this day. 

Next up, he worked on Creepy Fingers, a shred montage that makes use of Gavin Beschen’s soulful perspective—and R.T.’s Super-8 interstitials—to touch on thoughts far beyond the shredding: family, peace, cultural tolerance, violence, pollution, climate change, death, and the need to impart positive messages on future generations. Considering that R.T. was expecting his first-born child during the making of the film, it’s no wonder these topics made their way into the project.

By the time R.T. moved on to his next Volcom release, BS!, he began looking for ways to blend his long-running interest in alternative craft into his work. His personal design journey began in 1998, when Eckert turned him on to the “Pill,” a wide 5’5″ pintail twin-fin with a third trailing fin. Shaped by Timmy Patterson, the design was a revelation of speed, looseness, and glide for R.T., who had spent a good ten years exclusively riding thrusters. A few years later, a 5’6″ hybrid fish supplied by Brough intensified his fever. He rode the board to death and brought a replica of it to Australia while shooting interviews for The Bruce Movie in early 2005. It was on that trip that Ozzie Wright showed him Andrew Kidman’s film Litmus, most notably Derek Hynd’s lines on the infamous Steve Lis-inspired fish shaped by Skip Frye. Upon returning home, he ordered a 5’4″ version of the same design from shaper Eric Christenson. By 2006, he was dabbling in shaping his own boards and soon found himself getting heavily into Liddle displacement hulls.

Meanwhile, his bread and butter called for him to edit top-shelf surfers performing next-level maneuvers on pretty much identical equipment. To subvert this, R.T.’s approach to BS! was to make a salty little surf comic strip full of absurdities. At one point in the film, he also tries to draw some board-design commentary from Dusty Payne, Mitch Coleborn, and Alex Gray as they lounge in Dusty’s condo:

R.T.: What does the general conversation go like when you’re ordering a board?

[All three surfers groan and laugh in unison.]

Alex: Who wants to start?

Dusty: I just want a 5’11”. Yeah. That works good.

[End of conversation.]

The surfing in the film is no joke. Dusty, Mitch, Alex, Ozzie, Nate Tyler, and Andrew Doheny lay down an array of deadly, serious shredding on conventional shortboards. But toward the end of filming for BS!, R.T. also began hearing reports from his first-string cameraman, Matt Shuster, about a young surfer in Encinitas named Ryan Burch. Burch was a former NSSA champ—a thruster-bred contest-machine who
had morphed into an open-minded 20-year-old now experimenting with the same weird-board interests as R.T. Better still, Burch was on the Volcom amateur team. 

“Shuster knew I had been itching for someone like Burch to point the Volcom camera at for years,” R.T. says. “He went down to Encinitas to shoot with him for a day in March 2009. Then I went down the next day. Burch and I surfed each other’s boards and I interviewed him while Shuster kept the camera rolling. It was easy to tell that he was the real deal.” 

R.T. had found his new muse. He managed to squeeze a very brief design segment into BS!, featuring quirky animations that illustrate a folktale about the origins of the Hawaiian shaka. The fingers on the hand represent various fin setups, from zero to three. Burch appears riding a dual-keeled board and a finless. The rest of the footage that R.T. and Shuster shot of Burch over those two days in Encinitas ended up as an extra feature on the BS! DVD titled Tweakin’ on Boards with Ryan Burch. 

In average San Diego surf, Burch rips through a variety of craft, from homemade alaias to a finless Greenough-inspired hull to a 4’11” × 23″ Simmons-inspired planing hull. One thing is clear in the footage: the dude is having a hell of a lot of fun and going really fast in weak, Southern California waves. It was a message that appealed to thousands of viewers. 

BS! premiered at the Lido Theater in Newport on July 23, 2009. Meeting the release deadline took a toll on R.T. The post-production editing-grind culminated in a stacking pattern of all-nighters. One night, he thought he was having a stroke. On another, he ended up in the emergency room, convinced he was having a heart attack. He decided afterward that once the stress level from making BS! subsided, he would make an independent surf film, on his own terms and on his own time. 

“I decided I needed to make a film where I got back to shooting every single bit of it myself,” he says. “A film that had a slower pace and was devoted more to images of nature.” He titled his self-prescribed therapy project Temporal Collections. 

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With the exception of a trip to Java (with Ryan Burch during the summer of 2011), R.T. shot Temporal Collections from late 2009 through 2010, mostly locally, documenting the sessions of talented friends such as Justin Adams, Tyler Warren, Mike Black, Steve Hadley, and Travers Adler riding a variety of boards in scenes purposely composed to portray the natural beauty that can be found in California, including Orange County. Whenever possible, he edited and selected music for the sessions immediately after shooting them. Due to overlapping film and video productions, however, plus a divorce and a remarriage, Temporal found itself on the backburner. 

By 2014, he was deep into production on his next Volcom feature, Psychic Migrations, along with cinematographers Matt Shuster, Nate Leal, and Scott Stinnett shooting on a mix of Super-16mm and RED cameras. Though Psychic Migrations played a role in interrupting the completion of Temporal Collections, both films tap the same source. The wholesale intrusions of civilization and human folly that invaded R.T.’s early Super-8 films are gone. Humans abide with nature, and nature reigns supreme.

In both films, he also manipulates music and visuals to transcend the ordinary. The effect is one of total immersion, an almost psychedelic intimacy with the waves being ridden and the natural phenomena the surfers experience on their journeys. Through sound and vision, a deft use of micro and macro imagery, a focus on natural patterns and life forms, the films cut through the day-to-day clutter of material existence and get right down into the subconscious. No words are spoken. Identities dissolve and disappear behind cactus paddles, corals, stones, and seashells.

In the build up to the climactic sequence of Temporal, the viewer journeys to a lush, primeval world, a land of towering volcanoes where a living rainforest meets a living reef. Existence is everywhere, in infinite forms and colors. It scuttles, stalks, oozes, and prowls across the frame. A shimmering sea pulses with energy. Burch is there to meet it and ride it, the lone human, a creature among creatures. The camera follows his bare feet in a series of close-ups as he slowly makes his way across the vast expanse of low-tide reef. 

It is hypnotic, mesmerizing, and beautiful. The session ends with a wide shot of Burch wading landward, framed by the rainforest. Then we cut to a treetop where the rainforest meets the beach. The camera pans slowly from the upper branches to the sand—except it is not the shoreline that captures our attention. It is the garbage—plastic bottles, Styrofoam, other manmade refuse—littering the shore.

In both Psychic Migrations and Temporal Collections, R.T. takes great care to spare us from graphic depictions of reality—with the exception of this one, jarring scene. Even on the shores of paradise, the foul detritus of civilization proves inescapable. He brings us to the realization that nature is both all-powerful and vulnerable, threatening and threatened, eternal and temporal. 

The same could be said of human beings. There is nature. And then there’s human nature. His films take us to a place where it is sometimes difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins—a place like Southern California, where the absurd, the sublime, the material, and the spiritual jostle together in a bizarre matrix, where artifacts like Disneyland, freeways, and the films of Ryan Thomas are forged.

[Feature image: Photo courtesy of Ryan Thomas collection, Scott Stinnett, Brian Bielmann, Nate Tyler, Jeff Beck.]