Journey of The White Bear 1990

In the late 80's, skater Christian Hosoi was known for his high airs and style, and always battling Tony Hawk, the technical vert trick master, for the win in vert contests.  Christian teamed up with Vision Skateboards in 1990 and did a company called Tuff Skts.  It didn't last that long, but it gave me a chance to shoot video of him and his crew for three days, and then edit a promo video.  The original promo was 7 minutes long, and had music from Bad Brains and Muddy Waters, two of Christian's favorites.  But the women in the Vision promotions department told me that it made them look like hoodlums.  So I edited it down to four minutes they approved of.  This little clip of that from Sk8-TV is the only part that survived.  Bummer.

I got a great education about video production at Unreel Productions.  But I didn't really like most of the videos they produced while I was there.  The weird thing about Unreel, was that it didn't have to make money.  We were basically going out and shooting all kinds of events, and every video would sell 3,000 copies or so because of all the shops that carried Vision.  But we didn't have a TV series contract like big production companies.  So we'd just shoot all this footage, and then months later, someone would say, "let's make this kind of video," and we'd go through the archives.

The reason that bugged me is because skateboarding and BMX freestyle were progressing like crazy, but our videos weren't on top of that progression.  Plus everything had to have a million Vision Street Wear clothes and logos in it.  So in early 1990, I got an S-VHS camera of my own, and I started shooting footage of my friends and riders that I knew.  I wanted to produce my own video of what riding was actually like.  Nearly every weekend, I went one place or another and shot whatever riders I could find that were up to something cool.

As fate would have it, the Vision empire was collapsing.  It just got too big too quick, it was micro-managed, and key people were bailing like rats on a sinking ship.  At one point, we were having two or three going away parties for good people every week.  So it wasn't completely surprising when there was a meeting in early 1990, and we were told that Unreel was being dissolved.  Don Hoffman, the head of Unreel, kept working as a freelancer.  I was still the lowest guy on the totem pole, which meant I was cheap and knew how to work most of the equipment.  So the woman just above me and I were moved to the Vision main office in Santa Ana.  She found a new job on a real TV show soon after.  From then on, I sat in an office with nothing to do, and read through all the computer files of my former co-workers, and watched videos all day.  That sounds great, but I was bored out of my mind.  So I quit around the first of July.

On my last day, one of the women in the promotions department (where my office was) asked me if I had any plans for the next few weeks.  I didn't.  "Do you want to drive the mini-ramp rig cross country on a little skate tour?" she asked.  Here's the funny part, one of my goals as a BMX freestyler was to go on a summer tour doing shows.  I never did it with a BMX team, but I jumped at the chance to drive/manage the skateboard tour.  The next Monday I hopped in the dually pick-up with a skater named Mark Oblow, hitched up the ramp trailer, and headed east towards Atlanta.

In a great bit of luck, it turned out to be over 100 degrees every single day, wherever we were.  On top of that, the blue Ford Vision dually was geared to pull trailers.  It chugged up hills, not even whining, while pulling the 24 foot ramp trailer.  But on the flats, it did 55 miles per hour.  Period.  Maybe 60 on a long downhill stretch.  In case you didn't know, the American West is huge.  It's ridiculous at 55 mph.

Mark and I left the hotel a couple hundred miles west of San Antonio on the morning of day 3.  We had to be in Atlanta the next evening.  We weren't going to make it.  On top of that, we had to stop in Houston and pick up a couple of 15-year-old skaters named Mike Crum and Chris Gentry.  As soon as we pulled away from the house, they asked if I could buy them cigarettes.  As the responsible "tour manager," I said, "No."  So I pulled over at the next 7-11 and made Oblow buy them cigarettes.

We headed east through Texas, and I wound up driving 24 hours straight to make it to Atlanta by Friday evening.  I finally let Oblow drive for three hours, so I could get some sleep.  But I couldn't sleep with him driving the rig.  So I took over for the last three hours.  27 hours of driving in 30 hours and I ended up by doing head nods while stuck in Atlanta's Friday night rush hour.  Don't ever do that.  It was stupid.  But we made it on time.

We met old school vert skater Buck Smith in Atlanta, and did a week of demos at Stone Mountain, and then headed back west, doing demos all the way to El Paso.  It wasn't the craziest tour ever, but it definitely had its moments.

After the tour, I started doing some work for a little surf video distributor called NSI video.  That fall, I finished my $5,000 self-produced video, The Ultimate Weekend.  The video had a lot of firsts in it.  The first handrail slide down steps by Keith Treanor.  The first ice pick handrail slide by John Povah.  The first mini ramps in a BMX video.  The first spine ramp in a BMX video.  The first 360 over a spine in a BMX video.  The first footage from the Nude Bowl (an empty pool out in the desert) in a BMX video.  I only made about $2,500 back, so it was a financial failure.  But every rider around saw the video, and it made it around the world to some extent.  So in that context, it was a success.  Here it is:
What I didn't realize at the time was that I was one of the pioneers of the "rider-made" video movement, which spread through BMX, skateboarding, and snowboarding in the 90's.  A handful of us riders, Eddie Roman, Mark Eaton, and myself in BMX freestyle, made our own videos the way WE wanted them to be.  Soon every little start-up company in action sports was doing the same thing.