Journey of the White Bear 1985 to 1989

This is one of the craziest bits of footage I shot, from the 2-Hip King of Dirt at Mission Trails in the spring 1991.  This clip is from the first S&M Bikes video, the ultra low-budget, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer.  There was no jump in BMX like the huge Death Jump at Mission Trails at the time, and in my opinion, was really the first mega ramp.  It was an epic day for BMX jumping.

In the last post, I gave an overview of my life as a kid, up to the time I was 19 and moved with my family to San Jose, California.  Here's stuff that I did and worked on after that

1985
-Moved to San Jose, California from Boise, Idaho in late August.  Started a BMX freestyle zine called San Jose Stylin' as a way to meet Bay Area riders.  It worked.  I did 11 self-published issues of the zine, paid for with my Pizza Hut job earnings.  I worked up to a free mailing list of about 120 people across the U.S..  If you don't know what a zine is (pronounced "zeen."), watch this.

1986
-I became the team manager of the Off The Wall BMX freestyle team, and hooked five or six NorCal amateurs up with the team.  The bikes were neon, Taiwanese made pieces of crap, and we all bailed on the team pretty quickly.  The company turned into Air-Uni and eventually Ozone, which had good bikes.
-In April, I got a surprise call from Andy Jenkins, the editor of FREESTYLIN' magazine, asking if I could write an article about the AFA Masters contest in Tulsa, Oklahoma that month.  I met then unknown riders Josh White, Joe Johnson, and Mat Hofman at that contest, and hung out with the Haro factory team all weekend.  Epic weekend for a BMX freestyle kid from Idaho.
-My article appeared in the July issue of FREESTYLIN', along with my blog being named the #1 freestyle blog in the country in another article.
-I appeared in this Bay Area TV segment (at 5:07, chasing my bike) focusing on the Golden Gate Park freestyle scene and Skyway factory pro Maurice Meyer.
-I got hired at Wizard Publications, publishers of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN'.  Andy Jenkins had been the editor of  FREESTYLIN' for two years, and made the push to hire me.  I worked there from August 1 to the end of December, when I was surprisingly laid off.  I became roommates with co-workers Craig "Gork" Barrette and Mark "Lew" Lewman.  I was really an uptight dork then, but the main reason I got fired is because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy, Andy and Lew's favorite band.  On the plus side, I leanred the basics of Xerox art from those guys.  A couple months later they hired a kid named Spike Jonze to fill my old job.  Really.  He fit in much better than me with that crew.  He's done pretty well for himself since, as well.

1987
- I spent the month of January unemployed and riding all day, every day with Craig Grasso, (in this clip at :24, 1:54, 2:36, 4:11, 4:34, 4:45, and 5:35) a damn good rider and a hilarious dude.
-I got hired at the American Freestyle Association (AFA) in late January to write, shoot photos, and edit their newsletter.  Went to work for Bob Morales, the guy in the red T-shirt in this clip.  Bob was the iconic young entrepreneur, he always had a million ideas and not enough money to pull them off.  I did a little bit of everything that year for $5 an hour.  Bob's the guy that turned BMX trick riding into the sport of BMX freestyle by holding first skatepark, and then flatland and ramp contests.
-Bob walked in one day in the late spring and asked if I wanted to make a TV commercial for the next contest.  With the help of Unreel Productions (the Vision Skateboards video company), I made a really bad commercial, and then produced six contest videos for the AFA.  That was the start of my video career.  A couple shots from those early (and pretty lame) videos wound up in this trailer (at 2:18 and 2:19) for the documentary, Joe Kid on a Stingray.  Vision Street Wear sponsored all the AFA contests, and they sent a video cameraman to shoot footage of each one.  So Bob sent me to Unreel Productions, Vision's video company, and they told me what to do, step by step.  I spent so much time at Unreel, that they hired me in December of 1987.  I didn't have a title, but I was what they call a production assistant in the TV/video world.  I spent most of my time making copies of tapes for people at Vision.  Like the two previous jobs, I just learned by doing.  Dave Alvarez, the amazing (and highly underpaid) video editor at Unreel taught me tons, as did the producers there.  I continued to ride my freestyle bike two or three hours every day in hopes of becoming a pro freestyler.

 
1987 to 1988

Led by producer Don Hoffman, I was basically the assistant to all 10 or so people at Unreel as they produced videos and TV shows like these: Sims Snowshredders, Vision Psycho Skate, Freestylin' Fanatics, Vision Skate Escape, Sims Snow Daze, BMX Extremes, Mondo Vision, and Red Hot Skate Rock.  You might recognize the guys in that last one.  We also did a whole bunch of trade show videos and commercials, like these:  Gonzo goes to New York,  VSW 1987, and Street Tough.

In 1987 I was still ridiculously shy and naive, and started dating a woman five years older than me who was a singer in a band.  I decided I would write her a hit song, so I started writing lyrics.  I soon realized a couple of things: 1) If you can't sing, writing songs is really writing poetry, and 2) poetry is a really cheap form of therapy.  I wrote dozens of really bad poems and threw most of them away.  When she dumped me in the spring of 1988, I was crushed, and I spent most of the night listening to Don McClean's "American Pie," and writing a poem called "Journey of The White Bear."  It was the first pretty good poem I ever wrote.  I kept writing poetry and not telling anyone.

1989
In early 1989, I got a call from pro rider/contest promoter Ron Wilkerson to edit 2-Hip contest season video.  I borrowed an S-VHS edit system from Unreel, and edited 2-Hip: The '88 Adventure as a side project.  It was later renamed 2-Hip BHIP.

I also became the staff cameraman for Unreel that year, which included getting sent to all the 2-Hip contests that year to shoot video.  At the first King of Vert contest, in Ontario, Canada, I was shooting video when this happened.   It was a really big deal in BMX freestyle.  You can see my footage of it at 14:43 in this clip.  At the Colorado Springs contest, you can see me in this clip.  I'm the left deck of the ramp, second guy from the far end, in a black and white shirt.  At 1:02 Mat Hoffman does a barspin disaster right in front of me.

By 1989, Vision's nemesis, Powell-Peralta, was ruling the skate video world with the Bones Brigade videos.  Don Hoffman and us at Unreel stepped up our game and put out Vision's Barge at Will video.  For once, I had some footage I shot in a video that the public saw.  I shot all the footage for the Mark Cernicky section, some of Kele Rosecrans' section, and a bit in the Joe Johnson and Ken Park sections.  We shot both of those sections at Tony Hawk's Fallbrook ramp.  I didn't get to meet Tony, but I had lunch with his dad, Frank Hawk, which was cool.

I showed up for work one morning, and one of the women in the promotions said, "Oh, today's the Tom Petty shoot."  "The what?" I asked.  I wound up going up to the valley side of the Hollywood Hills for the skateboard shoot for Tom Petty's "Freefallin'" video.  It was the first major music video to feature skateboarding, with Vision skaters Eric Nash, Joe Johnson, and Kele Rosecrans featured in it, and Miki Keller, the only woman there who could actually skate a ramp, is in the background.  She went on to be a pioneer in women's motocross.  As for me, I got to hang out, eat free food from the craft service table, and shoot behind the scenes footage.  That's about as easy as a day can get.  Good times.

Unreel tried to sell a series of action sports TV shows to ESPN that year (six years before the X-Games).  The reply from the suits at ESPN was, "Nobody wants to watch skateboarding on TV... and what the hell is snowboarding?"  Classic.  So Unreel syndicated the shows as the Sports on the Edge series, which was the first syndicated action sports series on TV.  

While Unreel Productions was trying to sell high quality action sports shows to ESPN, BMX pioneer and force of nature Scot Breithaupt reappeared on the scene as a TV show promoter.  His salesmanship powered through the ESPN brass, and he sold them a bicycle based TV series.  His production company, the aptly named L.M. (Last Minute) Productions, didn't have a crew, equipment or a place to edit.  So he came up with ideas, pulled crews together at the last minute, shot vide of different events, and quickly edited shows.  He rented the Unreel edit bay at night to do his editing.  I got the job of staying there at nights as they edited, and making sure Scot didn't "borrow" any Unreel footage (or equipment) for his shows.  As they finished editing a show one Sunday night, Scot was wondering what he was going to do for the next show, which needed to be at EPSN two weeks later.  I talked him into the idea of doing a street riding show.  It took me about 20 minutes to convince him that "street" was the new thing in freestyle, and somebody needed to put it on TV first. 

Scot and I worked together to put on a street contest the next Saturday.  I got about 50 good riders to show up, and Scot got ramps, and old car, and a parking lot to hold it.  The "Huntington Beach Street Scene" turned out to be the first made-for TV bike street contest ever.  Eight days after the event the show was completely edited, and shipped off to ESPN.  For anyone who's ever worked in TV production, the idea to think up a show and have it at the network two weeks later is ridiculous.  We did it anyhow.  The show aired a few days later, and got the highest ratings of any of Scot's series.  Unfortunately, the show never made it on You Tube, and the master tape is probably in a garage somewhere.  Scot, now known as the Godfather of BMX, passed away a couple of years ago.