[This screening ended on February 15, 2026. Become a TSJ member for more exclusive digital happenings.]
In our current issue’s “Endless Joy,” author Tony John Andrews explores how famously elusive surf god Dane Reynolds has never been more accessible. As a companion to the print feature, we’re screening a hat trick of mandatory Reynolds viewing: his 2006 profile film First Chapter, an alternative cut of 2011’s Thrills, Spills, and Whatnot, and his candid 2017 reckoning for the surf industry, Chapter 11.
“Despite his substantial corporate backing,” Andrews writes about Reynolds’ early approach to filmmaking, “he took his marketing into his own hands, portraying himself in the style of the underground bands he loved. He was one of the first very surfers to recognize and successfully leverage the democratizing power of the internet: With the help of his longtime filmer, Jason ‘Mini’ Blanchard, he built a rudimentary blog, gave it a subtle, evocative name—Marine Layer Productions—and published remarkable little film-poems of his otherworldly skills set to music the surf world didn’t know existed. Between 2010 and 2016, Marine Layer assembled a corpus of videos that blended avant-garde aesthetics with razor’s-edge surf performance and came to define not only the prime of Dane’s career, but the look of surf films to this day.”
