PORT ANGELES — About 30 people cheered, laughed and applauded in the Little Theater at Peninsula College on Saturday during the 1 p.m. premiere of the pilot episode of a proposed television series, “The Olympians,” which was shot entirely on the North Olympic Peninsula.
“This is the first of hopefully many productions to happen here on the Peninsula, start to finish,” said Ryan Herring, a Port Angeles resident who directed and co-wrote the hour-long episode set among the forests of the Olympic Peninsula portion of the Washington Territory in 1874.
Herring led a team of about 30 cast and crew members during the 16-month-long process of filming and editing the show, an effort the filmmaker described as one that could not have been done without the community members who chipped in.
“A production of this scale and this magnitude, it takes a family,” Herring, 34, told the crowd at the Little Theater after the showing.
“The greatest thing for me I gained throughout this was the family.”
“The Olympians” is Herring’s first screenwriting and directing effort.
Herring, a 1997 Port Angeles High School graduate who has lived on the Peninsula since 1995, hopes to sell the show to a television network or cable company that produces historical dramas.
Herring thanked community members, friends and family — especially his wife, Molly Herring — during a question-and-answer session after the premiere.
“My wife just sort of non-stop encouraged me,” Herring said.
Herring, Port Angeles native Loyal “Tommy” Ruddell — brother of Port Angeles auto dealer Howie Ruddell — and Kayla Stapleton, an actress from Bothell now living in Los Angeles, fielded questions from the audience during question and answer period.
One audience member asked Stapleton, who played a prostitute in the pilot, what it was like to wear 19th century garb.
“After eight hours in a corset, you are a little bit sore in the back at the end of the day,” Stapleton said, getting a laugh from the audience.
Multiple audience members asked where the story line of the “The Olympians” will eventually take main character Jacob Miller, played by Ruddell, and the homesteading family introduced in the pilot.
Herring said he did not want to reveal too much about what happens to the family, but said Jacob, a mysterious ex-lawman from San Francisco looking for a new beginning in the frontier of Washington, will eventually make his way to a Peninsula settlement in search of work.
The pilot, titled “Shanghaied,” had Jacob getting accustomed to his new surroundings as an outsider on the Peninsula after he encountered some trouble with a group of locals intent on selling him into slavery on a ship bound for Asia.
The second episode is about half-written and the entire first season has been outlined, Herring said, although he wants to get more exposure for the pilot before filming any more episodes.
“My hope is to approach the second episode with a bigger audience and a little bit more support,” Herring said.
Herring said his vision of a re-created settlement, Port Crescent, as a setting for later episodes will take much more than the estimated $14,000 — made up of donations and money from his own pocket — that he spent on the pilot.
Herring said he has always loved the Western genre, and that he was partially inspired by the 2011 novel West of Here by Bainbridge Island author Jonathan Evison, which was set in Port Bonita, a fictional town he said he based on Port Angeles.
“It really got my juices flowing,” Herring said Friday.
The pilot was shot in such Peninsula locations as Lincoln Park’s log cabins, Bar N9ne in Port Angeles and on a private plot of second-growth forest near the Sol Duc River.
More information is available at www.olympianstv.com.
Ruddell, now living in Los Angeles and working as an actor, said he was thrilled to volunteer for the production and create the character of Jacob.
“This is a different kind of Western,” Ruddell said.
“Instead of deserts and ox skulls, you have big tall trees, which are kind of like characters themselves.”
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Reporter Jeremy Schwartz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jschwartz@peninsuladailynews.com.
Reporter Arwyn Rice and Managing Editor/News Leah Leach contributed to this report.
