Screaming Man: New documentary tells the story of fabled graphic artist Jim Phillips

What would the quintessential Santa Cruz life story look like? 

Nobody has a better case to make for such a life than Jim Phillips. Grew up in the Eisenhower years as a sandy-haired Santa Cruz surfer kid — “The Mayor of Sharks Cove,” they used to call him as a teenage surf rat. Lived the idyllic “surf all day, party all night” life as a young man. Lived in a commune. 

Dropped acid — when it was still legal to do so — and realized he had to get his act together. Went to art school, became a commercial artist. Made a living doing rock posters, in the golden age of that particular art form. And when the surf/skateboard scene matured enough to become a bona fide culture, Phillips was there to provide the visual iconography, creating images and cartoons that gloriously captured the defiant and disreputable vibe of both surfers and skaters. 

Then, he created the Red Dot and the Blue Hand, among the most famous logos in skateboarding. Today, at 80, he’s a titan in the world of graphic arts, and a legend in Santa Cruz. No single individual, in fact, is more responsible for exporting the name, even the idea, of Santa Cruz around the world than Jim Phillips.

It’s all there, the man’s remarkable life story, in a new documentary titled “Art and Life: The Story of Jim Phillips,” which comes to the Rio Theatre on Feb. 6. The film’s director, John Makens, will be on hand, as well Phillips himself. 

“Most people are aware of who Jim is in Santa Cruz,” said Makens, himself a graphic artist deeply influenced by Phillips. “But there’s also people who’ve seen his artwork everywhere but just don’t know who he is, and want to learn more about the artist behind everything they’ve seen all their lives. And then there are a lot of people who feel they know Jim pretty well, but they watch this movie and they learn a lot of things they never knew.”

Phillips is famous, of course, for creating two of the most recognizable images both on the streets of Santa Cruz and in skateboard shops around the world: The iconic Screaming Hand, and the “Red Dot” logo for Santa Cruz Skateboards and NHS, featuring his own font design, which has made Santa Cruz famous everywhere where people wear T-shirts. 

Among the talking heads interviewed in the film is the great Neil Young, who was fronting his band The Ducks back in the 1970s when Phillips was getting his foothold in local culture. And it’s Young who captures the essence of the Phillips aesthetic. “There’s a lot of joy in it,” he says in the film.

At the center of the film is the subject himself, whose personality embodies a kind of Santa Cruz style — easygoing, humble, amiable. That personality stands in stark contrast to his artistic style, which is often comically gory, bizarre, aggressive and/or subversively funny. Within that contrast is the secret to Phillips’s success. His art is part psychedelic stoner, part Black Flag-style punk rocker, part Mad-magazine-loving 11-year-old boy. 

“For the times, it was pretty eye-popping,” said Makens of the Phillips signature style, which, he said, pushed the edges of public tastes back when it was first introduced. “He was kind of in a world of his own. These days, things are way more X-rated, but back then, putting a severed hand on a skateboard? That was crazy.”

Makens, who lives and works in San Diego, first met Jim Phillips about 15 years ago. He was a fan of Phillips, dating back to Makens’ time as a teenage skateboarder. “I had spent my whole life as a kid trying to redraw Jim’s graphics. I’d just lock myself in my room and draw skateboard graphics. Basically, he taught me how to draw.”

Makens is both a filmmaker and an entrepreneur who runs a small business making insoles for shoes and boots. In the late 2000s, Makens was looking for someone to do some logo design work for him. So he decided to reach out to the famed designer. The two men became fast friends.

“I was working in the film industry as well in those days,” said Makens. “So we went up to hang out with him at his house, and to shoot this little interview series. And he just spilled his guts and had these awesome stories, and was just really good on camera. And so he’s sharing all these things that no one really knew about him. And the light bulb went on, and I just asked him, ‘Hey, what do you think about doing a documentary?’”

Phillips was reluctant at first, but soon warmed to the idea. That was 12 years ago.

Phillips is particularly revealing in the documentary, talking about everything from his alcohol abuse to health scares later in life.

“I became a teenaged alcoholic,” he says in one of the film’s interviews. “And I was really becoming a horrible person in a lot of ways. I punched one of my buddies in the nose … and things were spinning out of control.”

That’s when he decided to take LSD. “That made me see myself in a different way. It made me realize that I need to look deeper into myself.” 

That led him to enrolling in art school: “That seemed to be, to me, the solution to my psychosis, or my hangup, or my addiction, or whatever it was. By turning on, I became more artistic and less party-prone.”

For the surf-culture nostalgic, the film goes back to the halcyon days of the 1950s and early ’60s, chronicling a young Phillips and his love for both surfing and art. 

He talks of inviting many of his surfing buddies over to his house to give them caricatured cartoons of themselves. The film tells the story of his meeting his wife, Doll,y and the beginnings of the remarkable generational legacy that Phillips has handed down through his son Jimbo Phillips, a prominent Santa Cruz graphic artist in his own right. (One of the film’s fun reveals is that when Phillips first started his graphic arts business, he called it “Phillips and Son Graphics,” even though Jimbo was only 3 years old at the time.)

If there’s a dominant theme in the film that Makens wants viewers to get, it’s that Phillips didn’t just luck into his success, draw a doodle that through random chance became the most well-known symbol in an entire industry. “What people don’t know,” Makens said, “is how much hard work and the struggles he went through to get where he is.”

The film follows Phillips’ efforts to find a way to make a living through his art skills, as he emerged from a low point, living in his mom’s house and smoking pot, to finding a job designing rock posters through his friend James Mazzeo, another legendary Santa Cruz rock ’n’ roll visual artist. It was through that job that Phillips met his wife, Dolly.

In another way, the new documentary is also a tribute to a disappearing method of graphic arts that has been all but replaced by digital technology. “Today, people aren’t drawing with a pencil on paper anymore,” said Makens. “Everything’s computer-generated and you can see it. But with Jim, it was all by hand, pen-and-ink and color separations. And there’s a difference there, whether people know it or not, there’s just a lot of time and authenticity put into it.”

“Art and Life: The Story of Jim Phillips” will be screened at the Rio Theatre on Thursday, Feb. 6. Showtime is 7 p.m. Advance tickets are $20.

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