The Ultimate Weekend- My 1990 Self-produced BMX freestyle video

This is the full video of The Ultimate Weekend, my 1990, self-produced BMX freestyle video.  This was the 8th BMX video I produced or edited, and cost about $5,000 of my own money to produce.  It sold about 500 copies in the U.S., through a sketchy surf video distributor, and I sold him the foreign rights.  I think he sold quite a few more overseas, but I have no idea how many.  

My Pinterest page with still shots from The Ultimate Weekend

This video idea actually started in 1986, when Andy Jenkins, my boss at FREESTYLIN' magazine, asked us other editorial guys if we had any ideas to produce a FREESTYLIN' magazine video.  Bob Osborn, aka "Oz," forked out a reported $40,000 to produce a video of the BMX Action Trick Team in 1985, Rippin'.  While it was well produced and had good riding, it didn't sell well, and lost a bunch of money.  So in 1986, if we mentioned video to Oz, it brought back bad memories.  

In that era, when you wanted to make a video, you hired a professional video production company, usually the kind that made TV commercials for local businesses, and industrial videos.  A mid grade professional camera could run $10,000 to $20,000 then, and a mid level editing system could run $50,000 to $100,000 or more.  "Broadcast quality equipment, like the local TV news and networks used, were much more expensive.  VHS home video cameras were still relatively new, and VHS editing systems weren't available.  To produce a decent quality video in 1985, you had to hire a pro team, and they were expensive.  Those teams didn't have a clue about BMX, so when they made this video for the BMX Action Trick Team, they did it in the traditional documentary style, with lots of cool close-ups, visually interesting shots, and a lot less riding than videos today.  While the video had great riding for its day, it just wasn't super exciting to BMXers.  In addition, a 30 minute VHS video could easily sell for $30-$40, retail price  A 1985 dollar is like $2.67 today, so paying $30 then for a 30 minute video back then is like paying about $80 today, for a video we could watch for free on YouTube, or stream for $9 a month from a service.  So that's the other reason they didn't sell a ton of those videos, they were really expensive for that time.  

So when Oz thought about videos in 1986, he thought of a big expense with little return.  But times were changing in video technology, VHS cameras were falling in price, and the smaller Video 8 camcorders were just becoming available.  It was the very beginning of the D.I.Y. video era.  A friend loaned Gork, the BMX Action editor, and my roommate, a video 8 camcorder.  Gork, assistant editor Lew, my other roommate, and me shot a bunch of BMX riding, and goofy little comedy ideas with it.  Gork edited a compilation, by tying it to our VHS VCR, and made a pretty cool home video.  It was entertaining enough that Andy got the idea to pitch Oz with the idea of producing a FREESTYLIN' magazine video, shot partly with Gork's camera, which would save a lot ton money in production costs.  So Andy called us other three editorial guys into an after work meeting, and asked us to come up with ideas for the video.  

My idea was simple, just follow our real life.  We spent our weekends going to contests and BMX events, or riding with some of the best riders of the day.  So in my concept, we would get off work one Friday night at 5 pm, and wander around riding with all top pros, on flatland, ramps, and maybe pools, all weekend.  Then we crawled in, tired from a great weekend of riding, back to work Monday morning, the end of the video.  Since we worked at the top freestyle magazine, and we all rode ourselves at some level, we did that anyhow.  The video would be us magazine guys having the ultimate weekend of BMX freestyle fun.  The other three guys promptly shot down my idea.  Their ideas were more exciting, and a couple sounded like they could be a cool video.  As things worked out, the idea never got pitched to Oz, and no FREESTYLIN' magazine video was ever made, except Gork's homemade video, which I'd love to see today, if it still exists.  

I got laid off a few months later, I just wasn't the right fit at Wizard Publications, and a couple months later they hired 17-year-old Spike Jonze.  He was the right guy for Wizard then, I went on to become editor at the tiny American Freestyle Association, or AFA.  The AFA was three people in a small industrial unit, in Huntington Beach, and we put on the local and national BMX freestyle contests at the time.  There were about 3,000 members of the AFA, and they all got the newsletter I edited every month.  

A few months into that job, Bob Morales, my boss, had me produce a 30 second TV commercial to air on local MTV, for a national contest in Austin.  Local commercial spots were cheap then, something like $25 each.  The commercial we not great, but pulled some more people to come check out the contest.  I later went on to produce six contest videos for the AFA that year, 1987, shepherded through the process by the people at Unreel Productions, the Vision Street Wear video company.  Vison sponsored our contests, and sent a cameraman to all the nationals, and part of the deal was that both Vision and the AFA could use the footage.  They did the editing for our videos, and I logged the footage, and picked the shots, and made sure the videos got made.  

After working on several AFA videos at Unreel, they hired me, when they needed extra help.  From December 1987 to early 1990, I was basically a production assistant at Unreel.  WE made all the videos needed for the Vision empire, which included Vision, Sims, and Schmitt Stix skateboards, Sims snowboards, and Vision Street Wear clothes.  Unreel had about 8 people, four of them producers, and I was everyone's assistant.  I spent most of my time making copies of video footage for people across the Vision group of companies, and running to pick up equipment or supplies.

Unreel was weird as production companies go.  Most production companies then were centered around one TV series, or made super cheap home videos.  Unreel was living off the crazy profits that Vision Skateboards were making during the 80's skateboard boom.  We shot a lot of footage, and then tried to figure out what to do with it afterwards.  We produced all the trade show videos, commercials, and random footage that promotions, the art department, or another department might need.  The company put out several home videos of skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX freestyle, and body boarding, like these:  Psycho Skate, Snow Shredders, Freestylin' Fanatics, Barge at Will, and Mondo Vision.  

Unreel also put out a syndicated TV series of six, one hour shows, called Sports on the Edge.  Action sports rarely got on TV in the 1980's, and usually only as a quick news segment.  ESPN didn't want to touch that series, though they had aired a couple earlier skateboard shows.  The quote from the suits at ESPN in 1989 was, "Nobody wants to watch skateboarding on TV, and what the hell is snowboarding?"  Unreel Productions was ahead of the curve.  

Unfortunately, in 1989 and 1990, skateboarding faded in popularity, the third big wave of popularity crashed, and Vision Street Wear went down in popularity, and BMX pretty much died.  The corporate money pulled out of those sports, and the business dropped dramatically.  While the Sports on the Edge series aired nationwide on local stations, thanks to our syndicator, and got good ratings, there wasn't money to do follow-up series the next year.  Instead, Vision dissolved Unreel in early 1990, and one woman and me, the two cheapest people on the payroll, were moved to the main Vision building.  She quickly found another job in Hollywood, leaving me sitting alone in a big office, with very little to do.  

I didn't really like the videos Vision was putting out.  There were pretty cool, but a little hokey, with older skating or riding, not the most current stuff.  Even though BMX freestyle had collapsed as an industry, the riding was evolving as fast as ever, particularly street riding.  The first well covered street contest was in the 2-Hip Meet the Street in the Spring of 1988, less than two years before.  I bought an $1,100 S-VHS camera on credit, and started shooting my own footage on the weekends in early 1990, just going wherever sounded interesting.  The idea of The Ultimate Weekend concept was still in my head, and that became the theme for this video.  

Initially, GT rider Jess Dyrenforth, who lived in Huntington Beach then, was going to be the main rider that the video followed from spot to spot.  But Jess was getting into inline skating then, which was still surging.  So when I called Jess to go ride and shoot video, he was usually busy.  A couple months into shooting, I met John Povah, an English vert rider living in H.B., and Keith Treanor, an unknown and super hungry rider, who had just moved to town from New Jersey.  Keith didn't have a job at the time, and was always down to go ride, and he ripped wherever we went.  So Keith became the standout rider of the video, with John close behind.  My flatland riding buddy from the H.B. pier, Mike Sarrail, went most of the places on the weekend, usually driving.  Mike was a really good flatlander, but didn't like being in the video.  

Little by little, word got around, and we went all over southern California, from the P.O.W. House backyard in Westminster, where guys like Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer, and John Paul Rogers lived, to the local jumps at Edison High school and Magnolia in Huntington Beach, to the Tijuana Skatepark, Mission Trails near San Diego, and the Nude Bowl, way out by Palm Springs.  There were no skateparks in southern California then, and street spots and backyard ramps were the main riding areas.  

I shot video from February or March of 1990 until the beginning of September.  I quit Vision out of boredom in July, but was immediately hired to drive their dually and ramp cross country on a three week skateboard tour.  As soon as I got back, I flew myself to Indiana for a 2-Hip halfpipe contest, and shot footage at Bob Kohl's halfpipe, in Chicago, on that trip.  I also met my music guy, Jon Stainbrook, in Toledo.  He was a guy in a punk band who could get music out pretty cheap, from several Ohio musicians,  Jon's house was a waystation for touring punk rockers, and he knew everyone in that world.  He and his guys even recorded two songs that I wrote the lyrics to, for the video.  While I was visiting him, The Stain was the stage band for comedian Howie Mandell, back when he had hair.  I was a roadie for that gig, and got to meet Howie.  The guitar and bass playing at the end of the video, with Jeff and Mark, is from backstage at the Howie Mandell gig.  The shot of Jon is out front of the theater, in Ann Arbor Michigan, as I recall.

I paid $1,000 out of my own pocket to rent a 3/4" editing system, in the back of a video store in Redondo Beach, and spent 5 long days editing this video.  I actually paid for the music (OK, I still owe Jon $400but I paid for most of it), because I was afraid of bootlegging music and getting sued.  

The thing to know about this time period is that regular people, BMX riders, didn't make videos then.  BMX companies, like GT, BMX Plus! magazine, and Bully Bikes, made videos. Only a couple riders had made super cheap videos. Eddie Roman had put out the super low budget BMX movie on video, Aggroman in 1989, and Mark Eaton had put out Dorkin' in York, and Dorkin' 2, which I think were edited with two VHS machines, in that era.  I hadn't seen either video.  There were only a handful of BMX company made videos coming out at the time, like 2-Hip's Ride Like a Man (produced by Eddie Roman, with a bunch of contest footage I shot while at Unreel, at the end), and the Bully Slow Ride video were the main two.  Crazy as it sounds today, magazines still ruled as the BMX media, and videos were just starting to be a serious thing.  Everyone kept asking me why I was making a video, since it wasn't for a bike company.  "I want to make a video that shows the real riding we do everyday," was my best answer.  No helmets while riding flatland, no balance tricks on a miniature golf courses while wearing leathers (like BMX Plus! magazine videos), just what I thought of as "real" riding.  

Because of that, every video in that era had a lot of firsts in it.  The Bully Slow Ride video, for example, had Mike Krnaich pulling the first tailwhip jump.  2-Hip's Ride Like a Man had the first 900 air by Mat Hoffman, and the first street peg grind on a rail, along a walkway.  I think Dennis McCoy pulled that.  In The Ultimate Weekend, I had several BMX video firsts as well.  Keith Treanor did the first handrail slide down steps.  I had the first the mini ramps in a BMX video, the H-Ramp, skaters Primo and Diane Desiderio's backyard ramp, and Mouse's ramp near San Diego.  Keith and Gary Laurent did the first riding over a spine ramp at Primo and Diane's , in a BMX video, followed later in the video by Jess Dyrenforth, Chris Day, and Mike Tokemoto riding the big spine at  Mouse's ramp.  Keith did the first 360 over a spine, followed minutes later by Gary Laurent.  John Povah did the first ice pick grind down a street rail, the small rail at the Regional Pool.  I was the first guy to have BMX footage of The Nude Bowl, an abandoned nudist colony out in the desert, with a pool that was already legendary in the skateboard world.  Along with Keith, John, and myself riding, I got skatepark legend Brian Blyther to come out and ride there, along with former Pipeline local Xavier Mendez.  I also had Mike "Crazy Red" Carlson doing the first tailwhip jump over a set of doubles in the video.  He dragged a foot on the landing, but rode it out.  There are a few more tricks that were firsts on video in BMX, most technical tricks.  

I also managed to get several top 80's pros in the video, like Martin Aparijo, Josh White, Todd Anderson, Ron Wilkerson Woody Itson, Pete Augustin, Jess Dyrenforth, Bob Kohl, and my personal favorite, Eddie Roman.  This was the first video to get footage of pro racers and top dirt jumpers, Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer, and the P.O.W. House (Pro's of Westminster) backyard.  Even the now iconic S&M Bikes shield logo was first seen in a video here, spray painted on the side of a VW bus as I walked into the P.O.W. House backyard.

BMX freestyle, the initial explosion of the 1980's, with helmets and motocross style leathers being standard attire in contests, was fading after its first wave of popularity. Street riding and dirt jumping were just turning into their own genre's, and riding was going underground, into what became the long, ramen-eating recession, of the early 1990's.  "BMX is dead" we were told, but us hardcore riders wouldn't accept that, and kept riding anyway.  We didn't know what the future held for BMX freestyle.  

As it turned out, Chris Moller's tiny garage company, S&M Bikes grew during the recession, and Hoffman Bikes, Standard Bikes, Eastern Bikes, and FBM were all rider owned bike companies, started during that recession.  Most of those, possible all, got their bikes built in the U.S., by the time the recession ended.  Even ESPN came around, near the end of the recession, and started the Extreme Games in 1995, changing the name to the X-Games a year later.  BMX, other action sports, and TV finally merged in a big way, and BMX freestyle exploded into its second big wave of popularity, with rider owned companies and rider-made videos now at its core.  

Eddie Roman, Mark Eaton, myself, and the Alder Brothers, who produced our own rider-made videos in 1988-1991, had no idea what we were doing at first, and no idea we would spawn a movement.  By 1993, every fledgling company was making their own videos, with Hi-8 video cameras and "prosumer" equipment making video production possible for everyone willing to do the work of shooting, logging, and editing videos.  

The Ultimate Weekend was not a blockbuster video like Eddie Roman's later videos, Headfirst with Mat Hoffman (1991) and Ride On (1992).  But everyone who rode then saw this video, at some point, and it had the best production quality of the rider made videos when it came out, in October of 1990.  Us early video producers in BMX freestyle, skateboarding, and snowboarding, made the kind of videos we wanted to watch, and the way we made our shot and edited our videos, crazy as it was, changed the TV and video production industry to some extent.  More action shots, showing people land tricks fully, close-up shots with wide angle lenses, riding skateboards with the camera to follow riders for tracking shots, and fast editing, and raw, punk rock influenced, DIY editing, and crazy comedy bits, all rippled into other productions in the years since.  

I started working on The Ultimate Weekend not sure I could actually produce a video on my own.  Just getting a finished video that was "pretty cool," with fresh, innovative riding, was my goal.  I did accomplish that.  I sucked at sales, so I didn't sell a ton of them, but the distributor did pretty well with them.  All in all, I lost about $2,500 making the video.  While this was not a monumental video in the history of BMX freestyle, it was solid for its day, and I'm proud to have it on my reel, as they say in video production.  In the years after, I went on to produce and edit the first two videos for S&M Bikes, Feel My Leg Muscles I'm a Racer (1991), and 44 Something (1993).  I also stumbled into TV production work, and wound up as a crew guy on American Gladiators.  Just over a decade later, I self-produced another video, Animals, to try and get back into the BMX world.  It didn't really work, though I did a better job putting the video together.  So that's the basic story of The Ultimate Weekend. in my Freestyle BMX Tales blog, I tell about some of the sessions for T.U.W. in more detail, starting with this post, and going back, earlier in the 2016 posts.  

I totally wanted to do a 20 year anniversary follow-up to The Ultimate Weekend in 2010, but life was super sketchy then, and it didn't happen.  Same thing goes for a 30 year anniversary video in 2020, I just couldn't make it happen.  I'd still like to do The Ultimate Weekend II at some point.  But it'll be a while longer.  Maybe along while.  We'll see.  I need to get my personal situation stabilized first, and that's a whole different issue.  Will it happen someday?  I hope so.  

I started a new blog, check it out:

The Spot Finder

 

It was 30 years ago today...Meeting Keith Treanor and John Povah

Keith Treanor.  New Jersey born and bred.  Moved to Huntington Beach with his Mom, brother & sister in 1990.  Got known for a hot temper BITD, but also a fun, occasionally even goofy, rider who was always down to push the limits.  I'm stoked that Keith with this huge fakie wall ride shows up when you pull this video up.

"The first time I saw you was in the video that fat guy made."

-Pete Augustin to Keith Treanor, in 1993 or so.  Keith shared the line with me, some time later, and I thought it was hilarious, since I'm the fat guy (I wasn't fat then, but wasn't ripped abs thin, either), and the video is The Ultimate Weekend.

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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:

The Spot Finder

The Ultimate Weekend video story 3: The H Ramp

The part of the video I'm talking about today is the H-Ramp, the mini ramp segment from 2:06 to 4:28.  The main rider is Keith Treanor, in the white T-shirt, and also Alan Valek in the black shorts.   Local Huntington Beach flatlanders Sean Johnson (the black dude) and Andy Mucahy are in there, and I can't remember the name of the guy with the long hair.

Sit down my little childrens, it's time for a lesson in bikin' from way back in the dark ages.  If you just watched the clip of the H-Ramp at the times above, you're probably thinkin,' "That's some really boring mini-ramp riding set to some guitar guy playing elevator music."  OK, fair assessment by today's standards.  But this was waaaaaay back in 1990.  Money was tight, sponsors were largely gone, we burned all our uniforms in a huge bonfire at the last AFA flatland contest.  OK, that last part didn't happen, but it should have.

In 1990, the widepread popularity of flatland was fading, street riding was still growing in leaps and bounds, there were no skateparks in Southern Caliornia (really... NONE), and halfpipes had taken over in place of the quarterpipes of the years before.  Two and a half years earlier, on a back street in in Costa Mesa, CA, a legal battle took place that ultimately changed both skateboarding and BMX forever.  But almost no BMXer knew about it.  But me.

Led by skateboarder Paul Schmitt, a handful of skateboarders rented a house on Towne Street, lodged between Placentia and Monrovia, and 18th and 19th, in the Costa Mesa industrial area.  Schmitt's skate company, Schmitt Stix, was part of the Vision world, and Vision's main building was a couple blocks one way, and the wood shop that built the boards was a couple blocks the other way.  And Unreel Productions, the Vision video company where I worked, was housed in a new, upscale office complex a block from Vision.  The skaters, Paul, John Lucero, and a few others, were close to work, close to their sponsor, and on a chill little street hoping they'd have fairly tolerant neighbors.  So, being skaters, they built a 9 foot tall backyard halfpipe.  Some of the neighbors complained, since there's always some douchebag who hates any noise in every neighborhood.  The city was called, and code enforcement came to check out the ramp.

Now at the time, backyard skateboard ramps were completely unknown to normal people.  Most people had never seen one, and didn't know they existed.  But Paul Schmitt and crew, being smart and pretty industrious, had built a halfpipe that was solid, not dangerous by construction standards, and didn't even qualify as a fire hazard.  Being the only halfpipe anywhere around, attracted skaters from quite a ways for evening sessions.  But, code enforcement, being the nebulous world of obscure city ordinances that it is, found a law that the ramp broke.  You couldn't build anything over six feet high in a Costa Mesa backyard without getting the plans approved by the city.  Paul and the skaters argued their case, and all of us at Vision heard about legal fight day to day.  The Man was keeping good skaters down.

After a lot of back and forth, the skaters simply chopped the top three feet off of their nine foot tall vert ramp.  The six foot ramp was no longer an issue, and the guy who complained the about the noise was told he just had to deal with it.  The skaters began stopping sessions at dusk, and a relative peaceful state was achieved on Towne Street.

But something else happened by accident.  The ramp was suddenly quite a bit under vert, since it was chopped off, which made airs pretty much impossible, but it made a lot of lip and coping tricks more possible.  Paul Schmitt and the skaters of the house, in their battle with the city of Costa Mesa, created the world's first skateboard mini ramp, as seen at 1:12 in this 1987 Schmitt Stix video.  At the time, skaters like Schmitt, Lucero, Mark Gonzales, Gator, John Grigley, and a whole bunch more started skating the Towne Street ramp.  They realized that there was quite a bit to be tried on an undervert ramp, and word got around the skate world.  I heard about this, and saw some video from time to time, because I was the guy who made copies of any video that anyone in the Vision Skateboards world needed.  Mostly a boring job, but I heard about the Towne Street ramp, new pools, new ditches, and other spots sessioned by Vision skaters.  As a hardcore BMX guy, that was a great perk of my job.

But the rest of the BMX world heard none of this.  BMXers built launch ramps, and the early 2-Hip Meet the Street contests, starting in 1988, had small ramps, often like bits of a cut up mini ramp.  But the 4 to 6 foot tall, under vert halfpipe, was a skate only thing for a couple of years.

A few other people started building mini ramps, since they could fly under the radar of local authorities, and since they opened up transition riding to a lot of street skaters.  One of these early mini ramps was the H-Ramp, several miles inland, in Santa Ana.  A dad who was good at building things had a big backyard and a son who liked to skate.  He built two mini ramp halfpipes, 4 or 5 feet tall, side by side.  Then he added a middle section that connected them, with a 3 or 4 foot spine, an idea born in the Powell-Peralta, Bones #3, Animal Chin video.  When asked later about the secret Animal Chin ramp, the Powell skaters said the back to back vert ramps with a spine was actually too gnarly to try most of the ideas they had.  So when Unreel Productions got the job of putting on the biggest skate vert contest ever in 1989, we melded the two ideas, and made a ramp with a vert spine to a mini ramp at the Vision Skate Escape.  It was the first time a lot of skaters ever rode a spine ramp, and set the stage (literally) for some new tricks that weekend.  The Vert/mini spine combo was way more shredable than the huge spine of the Chin ramp, and got the idea of both mini ramps and spine ramps into the skate world.

Meanwhile, in the big backyard in Santa Ana, the two mini ramps with the middle mini-spine connector section made it look like a big letter "H," and it became known as the H-Ramp.  Skaters from far and wide showed up to session there.  The "H" shape lasted for a year or so, and then the ramp got re-configured and rebuilt in a few different ways as time passed.  You can see the H-Ramp a year earlier, with skater Marty "Jinx" Jiminez sessioning it at 50:14 in Vision's Barge at Will (1989).  If you watch Barge at Will, you'll see the mini ramp idea was all over the skate world by 1989, just two years after the Towne Street Ramp, with 10 or more different mini ramps showing up in the video.

Sometime in early 1990, BMXers John Povah and Keith Treanor got wind of the H-Ramp, and got the OK, to start sessioning it on a regular basis.  So why am I going to so much detail about this mini ramp, in a video segment that's alright, but definitely doesn't blow your socks off?  Because the H-Ramp segment in The Ultimate Weekend was the very first time a mini ramp showed up in a BMX video.  Serioiusly, the first one.  Much of the footage in this section was shot on the second time Keith rode there, which is the second time he ever rode an actual mini ramp.  Keith went on to become a mini ramp ruler later on, but this is him just getting used to one.  That's why he seems ot be doing a lot of tailtaps.  This was one of the earliest segments I shot for the video, and I didn't go back to get better footage of Keith there because I knew there were a couple more mini-ramp segments later on.

Making The Ultimate Weekend, I didn't set out to have the first "this" and the first "that."  I just wanted to make a good quality, "professional" video, that showed the actual riding all of us were doing in my Huntington Beach area scene and around Southern California in 1990.  I wanted fresh riding, a lot of different riders and styles, and one rider that was going to session with all these people that the video would seem to follow around.  That rider, who I actually had agree to the idea, was former GT rider Jess Dyrenforth.  He was a good all around rider.  I knew him fairly well, we was pretty well known, and my video was going look like I followed him around to all these sessions in one amazing weekend.  But Jess was getting into Rollerblading really seriously then, and he just kept flaking out on me.  He wasn't being a dick, he was just super busy.  Then I met Keith Treanor and John Povah at the Oceanview jump, and Keith was this hot, new rider, who was hungry as hell, and always had time to ride.  So he became the main guy in the video, and John was there a lot as well.

I have a couple of more memories from the H-Ramp, besides me sucking at riding it, that is.  My boss at Unreel, Don Hoffman, went to shoot some video there for one of our Vision videos.  Don is the guy on the left in this clip, interviewing AFA head, Bob Morales.  It might be the Marty Jiminez footage I linked above when this happened, I'm not sure.  But at the time, the deck on the H-Ramp was eight feet wide on one part, and four feet wide on another.  So Don was shooting with one of Unreel's huge, $50,000, 35 pound Betacam cameras.  He stepped back, thinking the deck was 8 feet wide, but was on the narrow section, and fell off the back of the ramp, which was 5 feet high.  That sounds pretty funny, but he fell backwards, with his eye up to the viewfinder, and the massive 35 pound camera landed on his face.  He did something like $5,000 damage to the camera, and $7,000 damage to his face.  Plus he looked like the elephant man for about a week.  Poor Don.  But he eventually healed, and we all gave him shit about it for a year or so. 

My other memory is one day, probably after I made the video, I was riding the H-Ramp with Keith, John, Jess, and Jess's girlfriend, a chick named Angie Walton.  Angie was riding there on rollerblades, and was about the first woman riding ramps on blades.  Jess was switching, riding his bike a bit, and then the blades.  At one point, we were all tired, and sitting there on the parts of the ramp talking.  Angie was trying to learn some kind of handstand drop-in thing.  She needed someone to hold her legs up in the handstand, as she tried to figure out how to balance so she could actually drop-in from there. I was the closest person, so she asked me. 

So Angie is upside down, in a handstand on the coping, wearing T-shirt and pretty short shorts, I'm holding her legs as she's doing a handstand, and her boyfriend Jess is 20 feet away.  The weird part was that I could see right down her shorts, and she kept directing me to lean her legs a little one way of the other, I'd look down, and be looking down her shorts by accident.  Sure, I'm a guy, and she's was really good looking, but I really was actually trying to be a gentleman about the whole thing, and not stand there staring at her down her shorts.  And Jess was watching, trying to help her figure out these drop-in things while I'm trying to not to look down her shorts.  I'm a dork to start with, and it was just this weird situation that stuck in my mind.  Her underwear was pretty standard issue white women's panties, I couldn't avoid getting a glimpse.  I guess it never occurred to Angie, she just wanted to learn that trick, oblivious to the weird view she had on display from my angle.  So if you stumble across this post Angie, I really was trying not to be a perv that day. 

Angie, by the way, went on to start Daily Bread, the top inline magazine for years, and to start this other little idea with roadie/promoter Kevin Lyman... called the Warped Tour.  Really.  I actually called her up looking for a job on it when I first heard about it.  She didn't know who the fuck I was.  Kevin, was the guy whose crew built the stage for the Vision Skate Escape contest, linked above.  Looking for a clip of Angie skating, I found this interview, which I listened to the first 20 minutes of, it's pretty damn funny. 

The Ultimate Weekend Story 2: the Intro

The Intro starts at :55 in this video, and ends at 2:00, that's the segment this post is about.

I started shooting footage for this video in about late February or March of 1990, as my employer, Unreel Productions was being shut down by parent company Vision Skateboards.  Vision blew up to huge size in 1988 as vert skateboarding, BMX, and the emerging sport of snowboarding hit peaks.

Then Vision Street Wear clothes, the logo that pretty much identifies the 1980's in action sports, caught the attention of the real, New York City fashion world.  After the preppie, big name brand, snobby 1980's lagged on and got even more boring, shit was happening in the urban environment.  Hip hop music was breaking through to the mainstream world with the Aerosmith/RUN DMC collaboration, LL Cool J,  Salt-N-Pepa, Kid N' Play, D.J. Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince,  Tone Loc, The Fat Boys, Public Enemy, N.W.A. and, of course, The Beastie Boys.  New wave had faded, metal had spawned the glam hairbands, and the weird people were looking for something fresh.  And the urban world was just that.  Rap and Hip Hop had grown out of the tough streets of New York City, and it couldn't be held to the black community anymore.  The hyper trendy fashion world looked to these scenes for inspiration, and along with hip hop, skateboarding was starting to take to the streets in a big way thanks to guys like Mark Gonzales, Tommy Guerrero, and Natas Kaupas.  Then Vision made clothes, and just put that feel in words in a simple, yet powerful logo: Vision Street Wear.

As over-hyped as it seems to us old schoolers looking back.  When it broke, the Vision Street Wear logo was fresh.  The fashion world loved it, it got some mainstream TV hype, helped by then Vision skater, The Gonz himself.  Vision grew to $50 million in sales in 1988, I think.  They bought the huge, 100,000 square foot, former Ocean Pacific (Op) building in Santa Ana (a block from where S&M Bikes is now), and planned to do $100 million in sales in 1989.  Vision Street Wear didn't realize how trendy the fashion world is, and didn't have a whole new line of "street wear" coming out in 1989.  So the big time fashion world moved on.  Vision geared up and spent big, banking on that $100 million in sales year.  But they only made $60 million or so.  Good, but not enough to keep the gravy train rolling.  The skateboard industry started to tank in its 10 year cycle.  The mainstream bike world gave up on BMX and freestyle, and put their money into mountain bikes.  And the long contract with Snowboard pioneer Tom Sims ended, so Tom and Vision fought over who owned the name Sims Snowboards.

Unreel Productions, the video arm of  Vision that never had to actually make money, became a big expense to cut.  So the building was closed down, a woman named Laura and I were kept, and all the producers were let go.  Don Hoffman, the who started Unreel with Vision owner Brad Dorfman, went to freelance status.  I got the job of taking inventory of the entire building, and getting it ready to move out.  In that process I found about $10,000 worth of video equipment that wasn't listed on the previous inventory.  I didn't sell any to pocket the money.  Being the dork that I am, I dutifully listed every piece.

Laura and I moved into a single office in the Vision main building, and in a month or so, she found a job in the real TV world, just over the hill from Hollywood.  Then it was just me.  Sitting in a big office with the leftover equipment, and almost nothing to do.  That's when I started really planning my own video.  I started shooting video on the weekends, not every one, but when I found a cool session somewhere.  Mike Sarrail went along most of the time, shooting photos and riding.

I shot sporadically until September, never really sure if I could actually make a video all by myself, start to finish.  I'd never done a big project like that all by myself.  Most riders thought the video footage  I was shooting would never show up anywhere at first.

I edited it in late September or early October of 1990.  I picked the best shots to make a fast paced and intense, grab you by the shirt collar and wake you up, intro.

When I finished the video, Keith Treanor came over to my apartment, and I showed the video to him alone.  That was the "premiere," I guess you could say.  After the intro, he turned around and said something like, "Holy shit, I didn't think your video was actually going to be good."  I just started laughing.

So as the flatland, quarterpipe, leathers-and-helmet-wearing era of the 1980's was fading, and the halfpipe, dirt jump and street-inspired, shorts and T-shirts, no-sponsors-left, 1990's were just starting, I got a wide range of riders in front of my camera.

Here's the guys in the intro:

Close-up backflip- Jeff Cotter- SoCal local flatlander to most people at the time
Close-up backyard to switch-up- Unknown flatlander at a Rose Bowl AFA contest
Rock-n-roll sprocket fakie on over-vert tombstone- Chris Day- young flatland wonder kid
Wall ride over my sister's head- Me (Steve Emig)- industry guy, cameraman, and mediocre rider at best, to most people.  My sister Cheri, then in college, is now a very experienced 4th grade teacher who's earned her Masters and National Boards.  Thanks for sitting there, sis!
Leary in the P.O.W. House backyard- John Paul Rogers- P.O.W. resident, S&M racer and jumper
Barspin tailtap on a quarterpipe- Todd Anderson- Camarillo ramp legend and 80's vert pro
1 hand 1 foot flyout jump- Keith Treanor- then unknown rager who just moved from New Jersey to Huntington Beach.
Rope-a roni (?)- Joe "Red" Goodfellow- H.B. local flatlander
Can-can on dirt at Mission Trails- Gary Laurent- Vert pro and Vegas show rider
High tailwhip to feet flyout on quarterpipe (a show trick)- Dan Hubbard- SoCal local rider and trick team owner
Front wheel 540 (with Stacy Peralta-esque hair flying)- Jeff Cotter
1 hand no footer at Mission Trails- Randy Lawrence- Desert rat turned H. B. local and bike shop mechanic
1 footed turndown over doubles- Josh White- legendary 80's vert rider who considered himself a ground rider
Nosepick to rockwalk drop-in over mini-spine- Unknown rider, 2-Hip show, I think.
1 hand no footed seat grab over long set of doubles- Mike "Crazy Red" Carlson- jumping nutcase
Tailwhip footplant on mini-ramp- Gary Laurent
Poorly timed double wall ride- Randy Lawrence (going opposite!) over me
Huge fakie wall ride- Keith Treanor
Lookback table thing off the tombstone- Jess Dyrenforth- GT rider turned inline stud
360 flyout- Keith Treanor
Chicken butt air at the Nude Bowl- 1980's skatepark and vert pioneer and legend Brian Blyther
Rockwalk drop into the Nude Bowl- Keith Treanor
Rock n' roll wall fakie- Keith Treanor
360 over mini-spine- unknown rider at 2-Hip show
High 1 hand no footer on halfpipe- John Peacy- Newcomer on the vert scene
No hander flyout- John Povah- former U.K. vert rider turned Orange County local
No footed X-up over doubles- Josh White
Street abubaca- Alan Valek- H.B. area local ripper
Nac-Nac over doubles- Alan Foster- AA pro racer, P.O.W. House resident (now known mostly as Brian Foster's older brother)
1 foot tabletop over doubles- Josh White
Bank hip 270- Alan Valek
Booster footplant on bench- Keith Treanor
Big 360 over doubles- Mike "Crazy Red" Carlson
Long sprocket grind on ledge- Eddie Roman- Skyway pro, street legend, and guy who made "Aggroman"
Jump over John Povah's head to flat- Keith Treanor.  That became the logo of the video in high contrast white on black, from Mike Sarrail's photo.  I've seen Keith get a full two feet higher on that jump than he did in this shot.

Oh, and the guy who's screaming "Are you ready?!" at the beginning- John Stainbrook- Toledo, Ohio punk rocker, lead guy of The Stain, and motel to traveling punk bands in the 1980's and 1990's.  Now he's a top Republican Toledo politics.

I'm going to be sharing most of my old school BMX stories on the new Block Bikes Blog from now on, check it out...