OK, it wasn't exactly 30 years ago today, but pretty close. It was just about this time, late April or early May, of 1990, when I rode up to the Oceanview flyout jump in Huntington Beach. It was early evening, maybe an hour before sunset. You can see the Oceanview segment in the The Ultimate Weekend, above at 23:22. There were a couple of guys there that I didn't know. Those guys turned out to be recent New Jersey transplant Keith Treanor, and English vert rider who moved to SoCal, John Povah.
I'd lived in Huntington Beach, California for three years then. Bob Morales brought me to H.B. to edit the AFA newsletter in January 1987, and got me into video work, kind of by accident. That led to a job at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear's video company. Being socially retarded, and not having a girlfriend most of the time, I spent my evenings hitting street riding spots, or doing a little flatland by the Taco Bell at Bolsa Chica and Heil. I spent weekends doing flatland for the crowds at the H.B. Pier, hanging with Mike Sarrail, and freestyle skaters Pierre Andre', Don Brown, Hans Lingren, Jeremy Ramey, and whomever showed up.
The Oceanview jump, located at Oceanview High School, on the corner of Warner and Gothard, was the perfect freestyler's jump. A long, concrete sidewalk led up to a 6 1/2 high flyout jump, under a huge tree. At that time, jumping contests were just becoming a thing, mostly held at BMX races. Chris Moeller was about the craziest jumper of that time period, and he had just taken over his little garage bike company, S&M Bicycles, from co-founding partner, Greg Scott. Greg was the "S" and Chris was the "M," their last initials. They had different ideas on how to run the company, and Chris went solo with it in 1989, I think. Chris changed the name to S&M Bikes, and worked like a mad dog to sell BMX bikes actually made for dirt jumpers.
The S&M guys, like Chris, Dave Clymer, and John Paul Rogers, summed up racer jumping at that time. Tricks like X-ups, nac-nacs, no footers, no handers, and 360's over big (for the time period) doubles were what the serious racers that jumped were doing. But the freestylers, like myself, were still partial to flyout jumps. Ride up to the jump slower than the racers did when hitting doubles, get some hang time, and try to weirder tricks, like a one-hand 360, or maybe a tailwhip (which hadn't been pulled on dirt then) or even a decade attempt. There was still a big chasm between pro BMX racer jumping, and freestyler jumping. Over the next few years, the styles blended, as dirt and street comps progressed during the ramen days long recession of the early 1990's. Racer jumpers started trying crazier tricks, and freestylers learned how to pedal. Then the next generation, like th eSheep Hills Locals in the H.B. area, rose up as dirt jumpers. Most didn't race much, and rarely, if ever, did flatland freestyle, just street and dirt.
I think my first reaction to Keith jumping at Oceanview was something like "Holy FUCK!" Nobody, no-fucking-body, even came close to getting as high off of this jump as Keith Treanor did. It's not an accident that a high contrast shot of Keith jumping over John's uplifted hand was on the box of The Ultimate Weekend video. Keith is 9 or 10 feet off flat ground in the Mike Sarrail photo I used for the video cover. I personally saw Keith get a full two feet higher than that once or twice, but not when I had video running.
John Povah was no slouch either. He was a solid vert rider from England, who moved over here a year or so earlier, I think. He was riding street and some dirt then, and hitting backyard ramps, when possible.
We had a good session that day I first saw Keith and John, and in typical BMXer fashion then, I had no idea what their names were when I rolled away. I'd been shooting a little bit of footage on my RCA S-VHS- camera on the weekends, and I was thinking about trying to produce my own freestyle video. Unreel Productions had been dissolved a few months earlier, in January 1990. All of the main people were let go, and I was moved to the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear main offices in Santa Ana. I worked cheap, compared to the rest, and knew how to work most of the equipment. That's why they kept me.
At Vision, I sat in a room all day, alone, and got called to shoot some video every week or so. I got a good check for doing nothing, which is a dream job for many people. But it was driving me crazy. I wanted to produce my own video, to show BMX freestyle as I saw it. The Vision videos, like Freestylin' Fanatics, were goofy, the footage was old, and I pretty much hated it. Fanatics was cool because it gave some props to a bunch of younger riders, but it didn't show what riding was really about in my opinion, and missed the rapid progression happening in riding then.
Eddie Roman made Aggroman a year earlier, which I saw as a funny, goofy, movie-made-on-video of freestyle. Us riders didn't make freestyle videos then, just companies like GT or BMX Plus! made freestyle videos then. I wanted to create my own take on riding. I wasn't actually sure I could even produce a video from start to finish. The idea scared the hell out of me. But around the time I met Keith and John, I was getting pretty serious about the idea.
I saw them again at Oceanview a few days later, we had another session, and I think that's when I got their names and numbers, and started calling them to go session and shoot footage for this video I wanted to make. And that turned into a few months of taking my big video camera, using full size S-VHS tapes, around to our sessions, and hitting a bunch of places we may not have normally.
In October of 1990, I rented a video editing system for $25 an our, located in the back of a video shop. I spent 40 hours, $1,000 out of my pocket, to edit The Ultimate Weekend. The whole video producing process cost me $5,000 of my own money. OK, a grand was borrowed from Mike Sarrail, and then paid back. That's what making a self-produced video cost in 1990. I made about $2,500 back, selling VHS tapes through a surf video distributor. I lost my ass, then lived off my credit cards for a while, when I was working freelance. Why did I did I live off my credit cards? Because I was only working part of the time, and because I was 24 years old, and I was an idiot. I lost money on The Ultimate Weekend, but I'm stoked I made it. I had a crazy idea, I gave it a shot, and I finished a big project, something I really struggled with then.
This year is the 30th anniversary of The Ultimate Weekend, my first totally self-produced video. Over the next few months, I'm going to do a series of posts about making that video. I really wanted to make a sequel ten years ago, for the 20th anniversary. But I was broke in North Carolina, and it just was not going to happen. I wanted to make a 30th anniversary sequel this year, and... well, we'll see. Maybe it'll happen. Either way, I'll tell some of the stories of the making of this video, as I wind down this blog, and start up my next main blog... Stay tuned.
I have a new blog about BMX, skateboard, and action sports spots, check it out:
No comments:
Post a Comment