This is my footage from the 2-Hip King of Dirt contest as Mission Trails in the spring of 1991. This clip is from
, the first S&M Bikes video (the whole video cost about $250). There had never been a King of Dirt jam/contest on a jump like Mission Trails' infamous Death Jump at that point, and this contest took riding to a whole different level. This was some of the craziest riding any of us had ever seen. Mat Hoffman made the first backflip attempts on dirt, and Mike "Crazy Red" Carlson hucked himself like a rag doll off Death Jump. Epic day in BMX riding.
For what it's worth, After getting started in video work in 1987, I produced the first six AFA videos, the first 2-Hip Video, and the first two S&M Bikes videos, among others. If you got some time to kill while the C-virus is wandering the U.S. (or your country)and causing hysteria and mayhem, here's most of the videos I produced, edited, or somehow worked on, back in the 1980's and 1990's. Enjoy.
My video career started in the Spring of 1987, when American Freestyle Association founder, Bob Morales, walked into the back office at the AFA, and asked, "Hey, you wanna make a TV commercial for the Austin contest? I can get local cable TV spots on MTV for $25 each." Since I had never made a TV commercial, had no fucking idea how to make one, got paid $5 and hour, and worked at the AFA, I said, "Sure!" He sent me to Unreel Productions (They sent a cameraman to each event, since Vision Street Wear sponsored the AFA that year. Both the AFA and Vision could use the footage). I called Unreel, and when I went over there, they handed me about ten VHS tapes, copies of the raw footage, and told me how to pick the shots I liked, and write down the time code numbers. I went home, did that, went and they walked me through the whole process of making a 30 second TV commercial. I was a 20-year-old BMX freestyler, a year or two younger than most film students are when they leave college to start a film or TV career.
After the Austin comp (which was epic!), Bob Morales said, "You know... I kind of advertised some contest videos a while back, and never really got around to making them. You wanna make 'em?" I said, "Sure." So I "produced" the first six AFA contest videos, for 1987 events. They were from the Oregon, Texas, and Ohio AFA Masters contests, one video each for pro ramps, one video each for pro flatland. Again, Unreel, mostly Dave Alvarez, the wizard video editor, shepherded me through the process of making the videos. Of those six, only this one below, is on You Tube. So here's the start of my video career, and my "film fest."
My job- producer/director, camera was by Gary Langenheim from Unreel Productions.
Texas Pro Ramps, Ohio Pro Flatland, and
Ohio Pro Ramps, the other three videos I produced in 1987
, are not on YouTube. I lost my personal copies of these videos in the 1980's. These six videos sold around 25 to maybe 50 copies each, which doesn't sound like much, but the AFA sold these for $30 each then, the standard rate for BMX videos, and they cost the AFA about $3 each to make copies, and I got paid $250 for producing each video. Unreel Productions sent a cameraman to each contest, because Vision Street Wear (Vision owned Unreel Productions) sponsored the AFA Freestyle Masters series in 1987. The deal was that both the AFA and Unreel/Vision could use the footage. In addition, Unreel would let us, at the AFA, edit, using their editor and their $500,000 edit bay. So the only costs to make these videos were what Bob paid me to produce them, $250 each. So each of these videos, even with small sales, made a little profit for the AFA, which was always strapped for cash. So making these videos were a good thing for both me, to learn how videos got made, and to the AFA.
1988- 1989- I got hired at Unreel Productions, Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear's video company, in December of 1987, and left the AFA. Nothing against Bob Morales, he was cool, though often frustrating, to work for. He just had so many things going at once back then, that there never seemed enough time to get everything done. Unreel was just a good opportunity, and better money. I was nicknamed The Dub Guy there, because I mostly made copies of different videos for people in Vision Skateboards, Vision Street Wear, and Sims Snowboards all day long. I was basically a production assistant, and didn't have a key role in their videos, but helped in some way on them. Here are the main Vision videos from that time:
Freestylin' Fanatics
Sims Snow Shredders
Vision Psycho Skate
Mondo Vision (has BMX and GPV's)
Mondo Part 2,
Mondo Part 3 (Vander, 2-hip Finals, Santee Meet the Street)
Vision Skate Escape-Final part- Hawk vs. Hosoi (Unreel worked with the NSA to produce this contest, so I did a lot of work helping with this actual event)
Red Hot Skate Rock- The Red Hot Chili Peppers performing at the Skate Escape event. I was in the slam pit during the show. A great way to blow off steam after a couple really long weeks of work before the event.
Vision Street Wear commercial
We shot this commercial in the same Hollywood studio where Motley Crue shot part of the "Girls, Girls, Girls" music video two weeks earlier. We filled the whole building, even their offices, with the fog we used for a couple shots, which smelled like Strawberry Quick. The studio's office staff wasn't too happy about that.
Vision BMX compilation- This was not an official Vision video, but it's a re-edit of a whole bunch of BMX stuff Vision put out. It may be one of the videos we made for a trade show. It's a bunch of Unreel produced, Vision Street Wear BMX stuff, all edited together in chunks. But it contains segments not in the videos above.
We made videos like these, looped to play for two hours straight, for every trade show.
Vision Barge at Will- (1989) This was Don Hoffman's best attempt (and a good one) to make a Vision skate video as cool as the Powell-Peralta Bones Brigade videos, which ruled skateboarding at the time.
Barge at Will had real good skating, and much better music, than the Bones videos. I was a cameraman for Mark Cernicky, Kele Rosecrans, and some other parts, and you can see my sitting on the rail in the background in Ken Park's section, a few times. I also edited one segment of this video, my first official editing at Unreel.
Tom Petty "Free Fallin'" music video- Easiest day of video work ever. We (Unreel Productions) didn't produce this video, and had nothing to do with it. But I got sent up to this film shoot to shoot behind-the-scenes video footage, since our skaters, Eric Nash, Kele Rosecrans, and Joe Johnson, were in it, along with the Vision mini-ramp. I just wandered around, watched, shot some video now and then, and ate free food from the craft service table all day. Tom Petty was as cool as could be.
2-hip BHIP- Part 1- Originally called
2-hip: The '88 Adventure, Ron Wilkerson called me up in early 1989, and asked if I could edit the 1988 2-hip season video for them. I said sure. I made $500 for editing this video, took the money, got a money order, and sent it all to my sister, who was in college, and needed money then. So I'm either a helpful, or stupid, brother. She's been a school teacher for a lot of years, after graduating, and this video helped her get through her freshman year. This section pulls up the other sections of the video on YouTube.
2-hip BHIP Part-2 - This is my edit of the Santee Meet the Street, the first BMX street contest most of us knew about. Dave Vanderspek actually had a small street contest about a year earlier, but it didn't get any media coverage. So this was "the first ever BMX street contest" for most of us. This day changed BMX bike riding
forever. I just realized that I'm sitting behind on my bike (blue shirt) as Craig Grasso paints at :23. I also put the shot of me ghost riding into the wall in the clip. The cameraman was Pat Wallace, Unreel's main camera guy then, who gave me a ride to the contest.
1990-In January of 1990, as the Vision empire was basically collapsing from the inside (it grew too big too fast), and Unreel was dissolved. So I was kept, and moved to the Vision main office in Santa Ana. I basically sat in a room, bored out of my skull, did one little project every week or two, and got a check, for 6 months. Then I quit, and started trying to do freelance video work.
All through 1990, I was shooting bike footage on the weekends, on my own S-VHS camera, hoping make my own bike video sometime later in the year. At that time, individuals didn't make their own videos. Eddie Roman made the BMX movie-on-video, Aggroman, the year before. And I heard Mark Eaton in Pennsylvania was making low budget flatland videos, but I hadn't seen one yet. The "rider-made" video idea wasn't really there yet. I just thought all the Vision videos were kind of goofy, and had old footage, not the newest tricks, for the most part. I wanted to make a video that showed riding, as I knew it.
Tuff Skts promo- Few people remember that Christian Hosoi teamed up with Vision Skateboards, for a new company called Tuff Skts, in 1990. The idea only lasted a few months, but I got to go hang with Christian and his crew for three full days, shooting footage, which was an adventure. Venice Beach, his halfpipe, a backyard pool, and a larger pool way up on a mountain in the Antelope Valley. This was the only Vision video I made completely alone, as cameraman, director, and editor, on betacam. This is a chopped down version of the original promo, which was 7 minutes long, and had Bad Brains and Muddy Water music. But my copy of that tape is lost.
In late 1990, I worked freelance for Gerard at NSI video, a surfing and skateboard video distributor. I edited two episodes of
Skater's Quarterly, and one of
Snowboarder's Quarterly. I don't have copies, and the only part Skater's Quarterly online is this clip, from the year before. Gerard was a crazy character, he's the guy talking in the little circle in
this clip. He's also the guy who sold 500 copies of my BMX video later that year.
The Ultimate Weekend- In 1986, working at FREESTYLIN' magazine, Andy Jenkins decided he was going to try and talk Oz (the publisher, and our boss) into making another BMX video. Andy told Gork, Lew, and me to think up some ideas for a video. We had a little meeting in the parking lot one night, and I pitched the idea of us getting off work on a Friday afternoon, and just going and riding with all the best riders over a whole weekend, then coming back in exhausted Monday morning. The guys thought my idea sucked. And no idea was ever pitched to Oz. But four years later, I took my idea, and I shot, self-produced, edited, and financed ($5,000 out of my pocket, with some last minute help from Mike Sarrail), my own video. If Old School riders remember me for anything, it's usually this video.
BMX freestyle had officially "died" in 1989, mountain bikes were the new hot thing. But progression was going crazy.
The Ultimate Weekend had a lot of firsts in it. The first time most people saw Keith Treanor ride. The first handrail slide down stairs. the first mini-ramps in a BMX video. The first spine ramp in a BMX video. The first 360 over a spine in a video. The first ice pick grind on a rail. The first footage of the Nude Bowl in a BMX video. The first video of the P.O.W. BMX House and riders. The first S&M Bikes shield logo and S&M riders in a video.
About six months later, Eddie Roman came out with
Headfirst,
the single most influential BMX video of all time. No question.
Headfirst blew
The Ultimate Weekend out of the water. But those six months in between, everybody saw, and watched, this video, and I'm glad I made it.
1991- Chris Moeller, who had this tiny little bike company then called S&M Bikes, called me up and said, he wanted to make an S&M Bikes video. His idea was to take a porno video, show the bad acting scenes, and when they cut to sex, we'd cut to bike riding. That was the initial idea. Here's part of what this super low budget video ended up looking like. The title ended up being,
Feel My Leg Muscles... I'm a Racer. That was a Dave Clymer pick up line that he used to pick up his girlfriend at the time.
Leg Muscles- Jimmy Levan
Leg Muscles- Alex Leech
Leg Muscles- Dave Clymer
Leg Muscles- Chris Moeller
Leg Muscles- Mission Trails (The clip at the top of this blog post)
1992- I got a job working on the the crew of the 1991 Supercross and Monster Trucks TV series, for GRB Motorsports. Here's one of the shows from that season,
Anaheim Supercross. I'm actually in the credits. I've never seen one of these shows on YouTube.
In the GRB main office worked motorcycle stuntman Johnny Airtime. So I sent him some of the raw footage from the Mission Trails King of Dirt contest, through interoffice memo one day. Much to my surprise, and everyone else's he called over t our office. No one couldfigure out why Johnny was calling me, the least important person in the office. They didn't know I had sent him BMX footage. I picked up the phone, and Johnny said, "You BMX guys are crazy!" That's really something, considering it was the guy who did
this stunt, and
this stunt, and many others, saying that. GRB's main TV shows were
World's Greatest Stunts and
Stuntmasters. Johnny was a stunt coordinator, and well as the best known motorcycle jumper of that era, between Evel Knievel, and Seth Enslow. I'd never met him, so it was a trip having him freak out on the phone about the BMX footage from the Mission Trails King of Dirt. He asked what kinds of stunts a BMX rider could do. So I tried to hook up my friends, thinking mostly of Chris Moeller's and Dave Clymer's skills. I said they could jump and do a 360 over 2 or 3 cars. We talked about several ideas, and he liked the car jump, but said it had to be more exciting. I said, "What if you light the cars on fire?" Johnny liked that idea, and I pitched Chris Moeller as the guy to do it. Then Johnny said, "I've seen video of that Mat Hoffman kid, could he do it?" I said, "Yeah, Mat could do it."
In the TV industry, though I was new, I was learning there is a lot of talking about cool ideas in the office, and most of those ideas never, ever happen. I wound up meeting Johnny at the Las Vegas Supercross that year, and we talked about the idea some more. But I left the production for another job, a couple months later, and didn't think any thing else about the flaming car jump.
Two or three years later, someone told me they saw Mat Hoffman on a TV show, doing a 360 over three flaming cars. That blew my mind. Somehow the original trick idea actually wound up happening, with Mat nailing it, of course.
Here's the video of that stunt. Another cool fact, I read years later in Mat's book, is that Johnny Airtime, on this stunt shoot, was the guy who gave Mat the idea to build the first mega quarterpipe, so Mat could get past the 14-15 foot air threshold, where he had plateaued, on a regular halfpipe.
1992-1995
American Gladiators- "Turbo punches Kyler"- in the summer of 1992, I got a job on the stage crew of American Gladiators, as a spotter. I worked on this crew for our seasons, and led the crew of 8 in 1994 and 1995. If you pause this clip at :24, I'm the guy black in the background, on Wesley Barry's tower.
Kyler's Storm's crazy move- I saw this one happen right in front of me. Pretty freakin' cool.
Wesley "2-Scoops" Barry is the most talented athlete I've EVER met. He has an incredible story, and was one of the coolest people I've ever met, as well. His first day of practice, we were sitting on the bungee towers, and he said, "I think I'm going to take this thing." I asked, "The bungee event." He said, "No... I'm going to win the whole thing." He did. It was bravado. It was solid confidence.
Of all the American Gladiators I worked with,
Elektra (Salina Bartunek)and
Siren (Shelly Beattie, were the ones I got to know the best. Both amazing women.
1993- Since I got to know a bunch of crew people on American Gladiators, I got a call to work on a similar show, staffed by several of the people I worked with at GRB Motorsports. Again, I was a spotter on the only season of
Knights and Warriors.
1993- I wound up Chris Moeller's roommate after we made "Leg Muscles," and that story became a BMX urban legend for a while. But we teamed up for one more video in 1993, the second S&M Bikes video.
S&M Bikes 44 Something
1994- Another year, another call to be a spotter on the crew of
another Gladiators-style show. This time it was the Inline Skating show
Blade Warriors.
This set had about 25 ramps on the set, including a halfpipe. But my
bike was down in Orange County, while I stayed in the Santa Monica area
during this whole shoot, since I didn't have a car. I did have a
skateboard, so I had some fun on that set.
2000- I tried to get back into making BMX videos again, while working as a taxi driver. This video was basically an edit of a whole bunch of "lurktographer" video I shot, from several contests in SoCal, from the 1999 X-Games (scammed a press pass), and some local H.B. and Sheep Hills footage. I bought a Hi-8 edit system from a wedding video guy, and made a "practice" video I called
Animals. I called it
Animals because I mixed in a bunch of animal footage I shot at the San Diego Zoo, and a few wild shots (the coyote was on the Bolsa Chica mesa in Huntington Beach, right off Warner Ave.).
I have a new blog focused on side hustles, gig jobs, small businesses, and making a living in the coming recession. Check it out:
