Life on the ledge: the legacy of John Thomas

If there is such a thing as a ‘Type A’ personality, John Thomas was ‘Type 4 A.’ He was walking adrenaline. From the time he got up at 5 o’clock in the morning until he went to sleep, usually late at night (and then only under orders from his wife, stuntwoman Betty Thomas), he was obsessed by an unbridled passion – special effects. It was as if he didn’t want to miss a moment to invent some new device or try out some new technique or maybe just take his craft that one step further.

On March 22, Vancouver’s ‘godfather of special effects’ died of a brain tumor. He was 46.

Thomas’ love affair with the film industry began in 1967. He had just graduated from a hotel administration program and was about to embark on a career in the hospitality industry. Then he saw a newspaper photo of a man falling off a roof and plummeting several hundred feet to the ground.

In an interview with Playback several years later, Thomas said: ‘It was like being hit with a bolt of lightening – I knew instantly when I saw that picture that was what I wanted to do. Past associations became unimportant, the motion picture industry became an all-consuming obsession for me.’

British Columbia’s film industry was still in its infancy when Thomas frst discovered his calling. He began studying with an ex-Hollywood stuntman living in Vancouver and worked part-time as an electrician to pay the bills. There were no special effects technicians in Western Canada at the time so Thomas had to provide his own cables and rigging equipment for his stunts. Gradually, he amassed a vast stock of equipment.

By 1973, he had gravitated into special effects where the work was more plentiful. Thomas had found his niche. He quickly built an impressive reputation for his meticulous attention to detail and constant willingness to try anything new.

Today, mention special effects anywhere on the West shores of North America and Thomas’ name is bound to follow. His list of credits reads like the history of film in b.c.: Superman, Bear Island, The Grey Fox, First Blood, Days Of Heaven, Star 80, Stakeout, The Fly II, Bird On A Wire, Run, K2, Alive, Stay Tuned, to mention just a few.

Says Don Ramsden, president of IATSE Local 891: ‘When producers and directors were looking for an effects specialist here, Thomas was always first on the list. They didn’t even bother to ask for his resume.’

Nothing excited Thomas more than to invent a new device or technique to create one of his special effects. In 1991, l.a.-based producers Jim Green and Allan Epstein were in need of a low-budget, poltergeist-type of effect for the miniseries It. Thomas came up with a system using high pressure in a way that it had never been used before, making doors open and close and telephones slide off desks with nothing but air.

His main goal in life, says Betty Thomas, was simply to be the best special effects expert in the world.

‘He would only do a job if he was able to do it from beginning to end, and it didn’t matter to him if the show was a tv movie, a low-budget student film or the biggest feature film of his career, like Journey To The Centre Of The Earth,’ she says. ‘He gave everything his maximum energy and time. He never said no to a person phoning and looking for work or trying to get into the business. He had the time of day for everything and everybody when it came to special effects.’

Thomas was demanding of himself and others, sometimes to the point of abrasiveness. He was a workaholic who was fond of saying ‘Weekends are for weaklings’ when his staff occasionally asked for time off. But what his friends and foes alike never fail to mention is that Thomas always gave his all.

His company, Thomas Special Effects, which, depending on the project, employed up to 50 effects specialists, was the first to design, manufacture and use a double-descender cable system that allows two or three people to be safely dropped in a high-speed death-slide on a non-vertical slope.

In the film Alive, which he considered the crowning achievement of his remarkable career, he had 54 effects specialists working 18 days straight to rig the three remote-controlled gimbals used to make the plane crash look real.

Producer Fitch Cady, who worked with Thomas on numerous films including Bird On A Wire, Stakeout and Look Who’s Talking Now, says what made Thomas so exceptional in his field ‘was his fanaticism with excellence. He was a perfectionist that was always trying to go one better. If he created a new rigging to fly someone in one picture, he would learn something from it and improve it to make it even better for the next picture.’

Tim Storvick has worked as a special effects co-ordinator with Thomas Special Effects for the past four years. ‘The most important thing I learned from John,’ he says, ‘was to always take the extra step. He told me, `If the director and producers want one thing, have three ways of doing the same thing. Be prepared and take the extra two and three steps beyond what is required.’

‘There’s one level, he said, that’s good enough, another level that would impress most people, but the third was the Thomas way. It would usually take more time, cost more money, give you more gray hair, and take more energy, but it would always reach a new level of excellence.

‘When it came to aerial rigging, be it Sean Connery suspended 200 feet up in the air on rocking cables in the Mexican jungle for Medicine Man, or the recreation of a plane crash in the Andean mountains for Alive, or the Sylvester Stallone climbing scenes in Cliffhanger shot in Italy, there was no one better than John.’

Storvick says Thomas’ talent was to borrow from three different technologies: high-lead (forestry) logging, theatrical flying and industrial rigging/crane technology. ‘He blended those three systems into his own unique motion picture aerial rigging devices. A producer could just tell John what he wanted to see in a certain scene and John would custom design the rigging to achieve it.’

Thomas’ talents went beyond inventing, says Cady. ‘John was an artist as well as an engineer. He designed shots. If he had a rig in a shot he would involve himself in what was happening in the storytelling of the shot that moved well beyond just special effects.’

Thomas was fascinated with height. ‘We would joke about how long it would take him from the moment he arrived anywhere with a ledge, be it a cliff or building, before he would be standing on the edge,’ says Cady. ‘He usually never made it past the 40-second mark.’

Cady recalls being in the dining lounge on the top floor of the Hotel Vancouver while scouting for Bird On a Wire, trying to decide where they could suspend Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn on a wire over the street. Before anyone could stop him, Thomas had opened the windows and climbed out on the ledge, moving around the support pillars. He climbed back in through another window just as the hotel manager turned around to gasp a sigh of relief.

Even though fear appeared to be a stranger to Thomas, safety was one of his closest allies. Safety procedures were always adhered to – be it finely tuned engineering or the coiling of a hose, says Cady. ‘When you had John Thomas dangling someone over a cliff, as a producer, you were attentive to it, but you were absolutely confident that it was being done safely and that they weren’t going to be errors.’

Adds Storvick: ‘Everyone working in the industry here owes him a debt of gratitude, he set a standard of excellence that we all aspire to. Whenever I’m working there’s always a voice in the back of my head that keeps saying, `Take the extra step.’ That’s John.’