There’s one scene in writer-director Sea Fahey’s film For Kicks that I can’t stop thinking about. The documentary by the Iowa City transplant covers a pair of Black martial artists who broke into the overseas kung fu movie market in its hey-day: Eugene Thomas, a native Chicagoan, and Ron van Clief out of Brooklyn, New York.
The scene in question stars Thomas, who appeared in about a dozen ninja movies filmed across Southeast Asia in the ’80s and ’90s. (He almost always played bad guys — more on that later.) Thomas’s henchman character is instructed to kill a guy, which for some reason involves walking up and rapid-fire punching him in the stomach for, and I counted, 14 seconds straight. It’s ridiculous — why does the dude just stand there!? — and everything I could ever want out of a 1985 ninja flick.
For Kicks follows Thomas and van Clief as they reflect on their careers as Black martial arts actors, contrasting the bombastic fight scenes they performed with the relatively quiet life they lead off-screen. When Fahey first struck up a friendship with Thomas, he had no idea the man was an action star.
“We’d always say hi and chat,” Fahey said in an interview with Little Village. “We’d occasionally have lunch together. I’ve always loved kung fu films, but I had no clue Thomas was involved in that world in any way. I’ve also practiced various martial arts throughout my life, so it’s always been something I’ve been attracted to.”
Fahey was near the start of his filmmaking career, working as an assistant editor in Chicago.
“One day [Thomas] asked if I’d be comfortable editing together a martial arts reel for him … I figured he was going to hand me some DV tapes of himself training in his garage or backyard or something,” the filmmaker explained. “Instead, he comes with a plastic bag filled with VHS tapes. His face was on the cover of all of them, usually in some striking pose, in his early 20s, looking like a total badass and fighting ninjas. My jaw dropped. My friend was this lowkey international movie star back in the ’80s and ’90s, and I had absolutely no idea.”
Fahey, who went to film school at Columbia College Chicago, edited the reel for his friend while continuing to pursue his career, which would entail gigs at production and post-production companies like OddMachine, Blueyed Pictures and Bow & Arrow. Fahey followed the production work to the coasts while also pursuing independent films. Credits over his two-decade career include The Tractor Builder, which won Best of Fest at the Chicago International Film Festival; Message from the East; and Ba Ne Jek Mal (We meet in peace), a short film made in South Sudan.
As it often goes with friendships and careers, the two lost touch for a while before reconnecting during the pandemic. Thomas agreed to make a short film with Fahey.
“I found a location, picked up some gear from rental houses in Chicago and we did this beautiful rooftop interview,” Fahey said. “It was supposed to last an hour. It lasted three.”
The conversation revealed there was much more to explore.
“These Black actors … instead of going to L.A. to try to break into the industry, did something completely different,” Fahey said. “They arrived at this fascinating intersection. In the West, the film industry had realized there was a strong market for Black films, while at the same time there was this huge attraction to Hong Kong martial arts cinema that had proliferated throughout Asia. These Black martial artists became part of this new genre — Blaxploitation meets the martial arts film.”
This new phenomenon — American Black actors starring alongside their Asian counterparts, mostly by playing against them in hand-to-hand duels — could lead to some unknown and complicated territory. For Kicks presents a clip from the 1986 Taiwanese film Ninja: The Final Duel in which the character Wang Chi Chung confronts a monk played by Thomas (credited as “The Black Monk” on IMDb), throwing out the line, “You Black son of a bitch.” Thomas replies in an overdubbed voice that is very much not his own, “You must be jivin’.”
Thomas said he would nudge the studios away from racial stereotypes, particularly in the English dubs. “A lot of times when we got through filming, they would go to the studio and I would race to try to … put my voice on there. Couldn’t catch them a lot of times,” Thomas says with a laugh in For Kicks. “But I realized what they were doing. So I guess, like, the question is, were they exploiting me?”
Fahey said he approached this fraught question with “frankness, honesty, and more than anything, empathy for what my friends went through.”
“They were confronting stereotypes, although sometimes different stereotypes than the ones they were accustomed to in the West. There’s a nuance to it—a sort of ‘prove yourself’ mentality and a learning curve that they had to understand, adapt to and ultimately thrive within.
“The reality is that opportunities like these largely weren’t available to them in the United States,” Fahey continued, “and that’s sad to say. So in a way, they were pioneering a new form of representation for Black actors on film.”
Thomas says as much in For Kicks: “They were allowing me to show my skills. I know for a fact that I wouldn’t have had that opportunity here in the States. Because at that time, in the ’70s, there was nobody doing that. We were having a hard time just from being Black.”
Fahey said his friendship with Thomas has only deepened since cracking the clapperboard on their first interview more than four years ago.
“Eugene and I jump on a call every couple of weeks just to check in. He’s like a brother to me now. The same goes for Ron van Clief.” Fahey beamed as he shared photos of the 83-year-old van Clief receiving his black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu after years of training with Relson Gracie in Hawaii.
“He called me to tell me about it! That was such a cool thing. These relationships have gone far beyond making the documentary.”
Sea Fahey, Eugene Thomas and Thomas’s wife Lenora will join movie-lovers at FilmScene in Iowa City on Sept. 16 for a Q&A and double-bill screening of For Kicks and Ninja: The Final Duel. It’ll also be an opportunity for Fahey to show his friends around the place he now calls home.
“I moved to Iowa City because I needed to come up for some air. Los Angeles was feeling a little suffocating,” Fahey said. “I’m grateful not to be stuck in L.A. traffic. I love the vibe of Iowa City, and I feel like it’s a great place for a creative person to find a home and do the good work.”
