The story behind The Ultimate Weekend 1: It's time to make my own video

Then unknown Keith Treanor, with a crazy high fakie wall ride for 1990.

In 1990, the BMX freestyle world was in turmoil.  Let me set the scene.  BMX trick riding started the 1980's with Bob Haro and a handful of other young guys doing tricks on bikes.  Haro formed a team with friend Bob Morales, and they toured around and did some shows, letting BMX racers know there was more to be done on  BMX bike than just race and jump.  Racing itself was only a decade old then.  R.L. Osborn and Mike Buff formed the BMX Action Trick Team, and toured more extensively around the U.S., and BMX freestyle found a handful of followers across the U.S. and in Europe as magazines printed photos of tricks.  The weird little activity grew slowly.

 Bob Morales put on skatepark contests in 1983, Bob Haro created the Haro Freestyler, the first bike designed for trick riding, about the same time.  In 1984 Morales started the American Freestyle Association, and the first flatland and ramps competitions took place.  BMX freestyle became a sport.  Bob Osborn, publisher of BMX Action magazine, saw this new thing growing, and started FREESTYLIN' magazine to cover it.  Bob Haro, Bob Morales, Bob Osborn.  If it wasn't for guys named Bob, freestyle wouldn't exist, I guess.  I never thought about that until now.

Around the U.S. and U.K., little scenes sprang up, local trick teams were formed everywhere, and competitions and magazine coverage spread the weird little sport.  BMX freestyle grew exponentially in the mid-1980's.  A few videos were made, the most popular being the BMX Plus! videos: riders in leathers and helmets flatlanding in miniature gold courses and at the beach while McGoo added colorful commentary.  But the sport really got out to the world in print magazines.  By 1988, there were 400 or more riders entered at AFA Masters contests, which was a lot, considering almost all of them rode flatland, and many ramps as well.  Haro, GT, CW, Kuwahara, and other factory teams crisscrossed the country spreading the word about this new sport, and showing it to kids in person.

And then, in January of 1989, something happened at the main bicycle industry trade show in Long Beach, California.  I was there walking around, and I heard major bike business guys, in booth after booth, saying the same thing, "BMX is dead, mountain bikes are the new thing."  Just like that, corporate money fled from the BMX racing and especially the freestyle world.  As far as the big time bike industry was concerned, BMX freestyle was dead.

But nobody told us riders.  We kept riding.  It was our life.  The lack of money in the sport got so bad that I showed up at the 2-Hip Meet the Street in New York City, at the already famous Brooklyn Banks.  I had a room in midtown Manhattan with Rich Bartlett, paid for by Vision Street Wear.  I was the Vision cameraman, Rich was the Vision street rider and vert rider.  We rode to the contest site, and sessioned with everyone.  As we were heading back, Rich told me, "Hey Dennis, Mat and some guys need a place to stay, I said they could crash in our room."  I said, "Cool."  Next thing I knew, Dennis McCoy, Mat Hoffman, Steve Swope, Rick Thorne, and a couple other Kansas City guys were sleeping on our floor for the weekend.  Why?  They didn't have sponsors.  Dennis McCoy was the top overall rider in the world for two years straight.  Mat was the top ramp rider pushing the sport, and a new pro.  THEY didn't have sponsors.  That's how much things had changed in a year.  So things went ghetto.  Ron Wilkerson put on the contest, low budget style, and it was the best weekend of my freestyle life.

A few months later, Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear, decided to shut down Unreel Productions, Vision's video company, which was where I worked.  They kept me, laid off all the higher paid producers, and I sat in a office with almost nothing to do for six months.  I realized it was time to try and make my own freestyle video.  I didn't know if I could actually do it by myself.  But I knew I needed to try.

I rode after work around Huntington Beach, and I rode at the H.B. pier on the weekends, doing flatland for beach crowds with Mike Sarrail, freestyle skateboarders Pierre Andre, Don Brown, and a few others.   Sometimes I'd go ride with other people.  I wanted to make a video that showed the world of riding I knew.  No uniforms, no helmets when riding flatland.  All kinds of riding: flatland, ramps, street, dirt jumping, and pools if we could find them. The big money may have left the sport, but bike riding, and skateboarding, which the bike world followed in ways, were changing dramatically.  Things were going more to the streets, and the whole idea that we ride mostly to progress, not to compete, was just starting to really settle into our consciousness.  Contests were cool, but we rode because we loved to ride, and we wanted to learn and invent new stuff.  Things were changing really fast in 1990, and I wanted to show it in a video, since I just spent 2 1/2 years at Unreel learning about how to make videos.

As crazy as it sounds now, the idea that every rider gets their own section in a video wasn't the standard yet.  Nobody went out to "shoot a part."  We just went out riding, and a few of us had video cameras.  Pretty much all riders had "real jobs" then.  So my basic idea for the video was the same idea I pitched to Andy Jenkins, Gork and Lew in 1986, in the Wizard Publications parking lot.  Andy was toying with the idea of a FREESTYLIN' magazine video then.  My video idea was simple:  Get off work on Friday afternoon,  ride all weekend with as many different people, in as many different places, as possible.  End it as an exhausted rider on Sunday night.  For a rider, it would be The Ultimate Weekend.  That was the idea.

So I just started taking my $1100, full size S-VHS, RCA camera out every weekend and riding with everyone, and everywhere I could.  We packed up the little blue Datsun pick-up I bought off Mike Sarrail, and went out to session.  Flatland.  Street.  Flyout dirt jumps.  Racer-made double jump trails.  Freestyle shows.  Ramps.  Pools.  Even a skatepark in Tijuana , Mexico.  I shot video, (and rode) with legendary freestylers from the 1980's, up-and-coming riders, H.B. locals, racers, and met a few new friends who went on to legendary status in the 1990's.  Because things in riding were changing so fast, my video wound up having a lot of firsts in it.  It was a struggle to finish it, it took about 8 months, but I managed to shoot, log, edit, and put out a full length video, which cost me $5,000 out of my pocket.  Mike Sarrail came through with a last minute loan to help me get it done.  I dropped The Ultimate Weekend with little fanfare in October of 1990.  Since rider-made videos, and videos in general, were few and far between then, so there was no premiere party.  During the process, I quit at Vision, and started working freelance for a surf video distributor called NSI.  It was a sketchy, but fun place to work, and he sold about 500 copies of my video in the U.S., and bought the foreign rights.  I have a feeling he sold a bunch more videos that I got paid for.  I was super shy, and a horrible salesman then, so I let NSI handle it.  For an independently made video, it sold fairly well.  But I only maid about $2,500 back, so I lost about $2,500 producing the video.  I had bad and expensive habits from working at Unreel, where money never mattered.  I didn't know how to make a good video cheap then. 

Eighteen years later, in 2008, after over five years struggling as a taxi driver, and a year living on the streets of Southern California, I moved to North Carolina to live with my family and regroup.  In a 5 foot by 5 foot storage unit in Huntington Beach was all my raw footage, my master tapes for The Ultimate Weekend and other videos I'd made, my magazine collection (including a complete FREESTYLIN' magazine collection), and my other stuff.  I arranged for some friends in Cali to pay the late fee on my storage unit and ship all the good stuff to me.  But I needed to borrow $150 from my parents.  My mom said she could loan it to me before I flew to NC.  Two weeks after I got to NC, things changed, as they often do with her.  She said, "Oh, I can't afford to help you with that."  And that's how I lost all my BMX stuff, including one of the best BMX freestyle video footage collections, ranging from 1989 to 2007.  Poof.  It was all gone.  It probably got sold to one of the people now on Storage Wars, most likely, since it was sold in a storage unit auction.

I went into a deep depression, and then I started blogging about my memories of my days in the BMX freestyle world.  Memories were all I had left.  Ten years later, I'm still telling some of those stories.  This is my main tie to the BMX freestyle world, now.  In the next few weeks, I'll tell the stories behind The Ultimate Weekend, section by section. It was a crazy time, and I recently realized that I never told any of those tales.  Hopefully it will be (mostly) worth reading.