Skater's Quarterly Video Magazine #2- A skate video I edited in 1990 that you never heard of

I edited this video in 1990, shortly after quitting my job as a video guy at Vision Skateboards.  NSI video was a small surf/skate/snowboard video distributor, back in the days when there were several small distributors. Small operators like NSI would buy the various surf and skate videos coming out, then they would sell the VHS videos to surf shops, skateboard shops, snowboard shops, and mom and pop video stores around the U.S., and some other parts of the world.  The Skater's Quarterly videos were mostly compilations of other company's videos, with a little bit of original footage, and some short interviews.  This was years before 411 Video Magazine for skaters, or Props video magazine, for BMXers, came out.  411 debuted in 1993, and Props debuted in 1994. 

I think this video came out in early November of 1990, in time to sell a ton of them during the holiday season.  This is the first action sports video magazine video series the I know of, coming out about three years before 411 Video Magazine in skateboarding, and four years before Props Video Magazine in BMX.  Gerard at NSI had already produced Skater's Quarterly #1, several months before I started to work for him.  This video doesn't have the production quality, and it doesn't have the in depth interviews of 411 or Props.  But it was also aimed more at just average skater kids around the country, not the hardcore skaters.  

What it does have is a lot of good, solid, 1990 era skateboarding.  We used chunks of other people's videos, mostly from NSA contests, as I'll describe below.  Plus we used a bit of my own footage, of the wedding of pro skater John Lucero, and his wife Heathyr.  Yes, I asked their permission to use it in this video.  Heathyr was the women's clothing designer for Vision Street Wear, she created things like what you see the models in this video wearing, during the skateboard part.  They're mostly decked out in VSW women's clothes, the black and white pieces are VSW stuff.  So I worked with Heathyr on several fashion shoots at Vision, shooting video, and she asked me to shoot video of the wedding, when she married John Lucero.  John was was just getting ready to start Black Label Skateboards then.  It was the coolest wedding I have ever been to, and the Cadillac Tramps and the Vandals played at the reception.  How many weddings have a slam pit on the dance floor.  Not enough.  So that's were that footage came from.  

Now let's get into the skating.  In 1990, vert still ruled, and street was still a little offshoot, just coming up, and not taken too seriously by the major skateboard companies yet, those being Powell-Peralta, Vision, and Santa Cruz.  They all had street skaters on the team, but vert was the thing that sold big numbers of boards in 1990.  But not for much longer.  Skating went into a lull in the early 1990's, but not to the extent that BMX did.  The 1980's was skateboarding's third wave of popularity, and the second for BMX racing, and the first wave for BMX freestyle.  Each wave, the sports grew, and there was more of a base when the waved crashed, and they rebuilt from a higher level each time.  

In the Mount Trashmore segment of this Skater's Quarterly #2, that little kid skating the vert ramp is Danny Way.  For real.  Danny was about 16 then, several years younger than the seasoned pros on the deck.  Some of the older guys were really fucking with him, there's a shot where a guy drops in right behind Danny, and then throws him off when Danny goes for a McTwist, making Danny bail hard.  Gotta pay your dues, and Danny Way did.  I'd say Danny Way got the last laugh.  He's the guy who invented the launch part of the mega ramp, and later jumped the Great Wall of China with one.  The guy with the red T-shirt talking a lot in the Trashmore segment is Jason Jesse, who's funny, as ever.  

In the Shut Up and Skate contest in Dallas, there's a run or two by Mike Crum, who has a yellow helmet and black and white spotted shorts.  Mike was about 15 at the time.  He and Chris Gentry were the two young guys on the Vision skateboard tour I managed that summer, shortly before making this video.  I had to give him some props.  I'm not sure is Chris is in the Dallas or Houston segments.  At the end of the segment you see Jeff Phillips pulling a Phillips 66, a weird backwards invert trick he invented.  Then, at the Shut Up and Skate at Skatepark of Houston, we see a whole bunch of pros going for it, including the insane wall ride from Hell attempts off the side of the vert ramp.  Things are bigger in Texas, including the bails.  You'll also see a naked Ho Ho plant, by Steve Schneer, I believe.  It's kept marginally PG with the use of a sock.

In the Arizona NSA street contest, you see the era when the top vert skaters were also placing high in street contests, because the street course was basically a bunch of pieces of ramps.  Christian Hosoi, Tony Hawk, and Steve Caballero all tear it up in this section, but Eric Dressen holds it up for the New School of emerging street skaters at that time.  In the NSA Ohio vert contest we have Hawk, Hosoi, and Cab, but the standout in that segment is Tony Magnusson, doing ridiculously high airs.  He has the red T-shirt with the "X" logo in white.  Damn that guy could go high back then.  In the Rhode Island contest, there's a pretty good fight in the background of one shot.  See if you catch it first pass.  

In the NSA Visalia (central California) contest, the announcer says, "This is our Masters Division, all these guys are over 27" (years old).  That's funny to hear now, when Steve Alba is still schralping in pools at 60, and Chris Miller is still amazing at vert in his late 50's, along with many others.  Chris Miller has the yellow helmet at that event, and the black and white striped shirt.  Also mixed in this video is footage of the Dog Bowl from about 1980, a night session at the Nude Bowl in 1990, and some footage at Baldy Pipe.  I think that's Dave Duncan leading that pack at Baldy, but I'm not sure.  Then we see a bit of the San Francisco street contest in the drained pools at the city hall.  

Then, at the end, there's a session on the halfpipe with the big faces painted on it.  That's a Tracker trucks demo at the Action Sports Retailer trade show. That character on the ramp is an Andy Jenkins character, from his Wrench Pilot comics in Transworld Skateboarding.  So I assume Andy J. and crew painted that ramp.  This was three years before Andy became art director at Girl Skateboards.  Cool.  I shot this footage of the demo, which features Tony Hawk, with his hair about as long as it ever got, and Joe Johnson who has the super long pony tail, and several other skaters.  I edited in a bunch of really technical stuff that Tony was doing, since that's what you didn't see in most other videos at the time.  The very last trick in that segment is Bucky Lasek, an new pro on the scene at the time.  That was the first time I ever heard of Bucky.  He busts out with a backside 360 ollie, a trick Tony couldn't even do then,  Tony freaked, when he saw Bucky do that, and that's why I turned the camera to Tony, who was sitting on the ramp pretty much next to me freaking out over Bucky's trick.  When Tony Hawk freaks out while seeing you land a new trick, it's a pretty damn hard trick.    

I've said several times, I've never actually met Tony Hawk.  I've never actually been introduced, or talked to him.  I have shot photos and video of him skating, worked at 3 or 4 contests he was at, shot video at his Fallbrook house of Ken Park and Joe Johnson, with Don Hoffman (when Tony was off doing demos) in 1989.  I saw Tony's first 900 live, from the side of the ramp in 1999.  I was standing about 20 feet form the halfpipe, by some weird quirk of fate.  So I've been around places he was skating, but never actually talked to him.  That's kind of a bummer, since I first saw him skate live in 1988, and we've all seen him grow into this household name since, doing all kinds of cool things along the way.  

In any case, all that, plus quite a bit more, is packed into Skater's Quarterly #2.  Watching it over, I was stoked, it's a shitload of great skating from that era, when vert was the thing, and as street was just beginning to really take off big time.  My favorite shot of this whole video though is John and Heathyr, after the wedding, on the merry-go-round, and especially on the bumper cars.  I love it when John just drives into the wall.  Too funny.  Heathyr and John went their separate ways many years ago, but that was, by far, the coolest wedding I've ever been to, an one of my coolest video jobs I ever had.  John still owns Black Label Skateboards and does a lot of design work, and Heathyr runs Mantrap 1989.

Now, a look back to that era in action sports, as the 1980's ended and the 1990's began, led by a big recession.  In 1990, BMX had been declared "dead" for a year, and skateboarding was heading that way.  The new sport of snowboarding was just hitting mainstream people's radar, and mountain biking was where the bike industry had decided to focus its attention and its money.  I don't know what waves exist in the surfing industry (no pun intended), but it was flowing along.  It was an era where VHS videos were the thing, and Friday night trips to the local video store to get videos for the weekend were a popular thing.  While major video store chains like Blockbuster existed, there were plenty of small, mom and pop run video stores.  Working as a video store clerk was one of my many odd jobs, later in the 1990's.  In addition, there were small bike, skateboard, and ski/snowboard shops in many places.  

This is the RCA model of the S-VHS video camera I bought in 1989, forking out $1,100, on my credit cards, and making payments well into the 1990's.  The higher quality, and relatively low cost of S-VHS, SVHS-C, and Hi8 video cameras made low budget video production available to everyday people.  I was one of the first BMX freestylers to start producing my own videos, and the same thing was happening in skateboarding, snowboarding, and surfing.  

At the same time, the prosumer video camera and equipment industry was in its early days.  "Prosumer" equipment was somewhat better quality than the standard consumer VHS or 8mm video equipment, but was much cheaper than the broadcast quality equipment used by TV shows and local TV news stations.  The late 1980's into the 1990's was the period that began to democratize video media, giving anyone willing to learn the basics, the chance to make videos and share them (on VHS tapes).  

This democratization of the media began with the Apple Macintosh in 1984, and the rise of desktop publishing.  That technology allowed anyone to create newsletters, zines, magazines, and even books.  Prosumer video equipment did the same for video media.  Then came the internet, and eventually enough bandwidth to share text, audio, and video worldwide, on the internet.  Social media platforms later built on this.  The overall positive effect of all this technology in giving voices to the voiceless cannot be understated.  These technologies completely changed society.  This is why so many people in certain (highly ignorant) groups are now trying to censor everyone left and right these days.  The older power brokers of the world loved the days when they controlled ALL of the media.  Those days are gone.

Into that world of low budget, niche videos, many opportunities came along.  Gerard, a SoCal business guy from Hermosa Beach, with a knack for sales, started a video distribution company.  He mainly sold surf videos in the early 1980's. He expanded to skateboarding, and then into snowboarding, later on.  Yes, he's the guy who distributed by self-produced, 1990 BMX freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend.  NSI sold about 500 of my videos in the U.S., which was pretty damn good since I didn't have a name, a business brand, or history of making previous videos.  

I can't remember how I met Gerard, I think I got to know him in early 1990, when Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company, was dissolved.  By early March 1990, it was just me and some video equipment in an office at the Vision headquarters in Santa Ana.  I took a lot of phone calls from people who had been doing business with Unreel in the years before.  Unreel founder Don Hoffman worked freelance after that, project by project, as Vision went into a downward spiral in to the recession.  

For nearly six months, I sat in a big office, day after day, and had nothing to do.  Many people would love that, but it drove me nuts.  I've always been motivated to do something.  I quit at the end of June, then got hired to drive the dually and halfpipe trailer on a three week skateboard tour across the U.S..  As soon as the tour ended, I hopped a plane, on my own dime, and flew to Indianapolis, to shoot video of the 2-Hip King of Vert contest there.  I also drove to Chicago for a couple days, and shot footage of Bob Kohl, Brian Dahl (injured at the contest), and a new vert rider coming up, named Jon Peacy.  Then I drove my little rental Mazda from Chicago to Ohio, topping it out at 108 mph on the Ohio turnpike, in the rain.  I met and hung out for a couple of days with Jon Stainbrook and his band The Stain, whose music I used for my video.  Most of the music from Skater's Quarterly is by The Stain, as well.  I also went to see my grandma near Akron, who was 85 at the time.  

When I made it back to Huntington Beach, I had no job, no income, some savings, and about 12 credit cards, one of which I had put $1,000 on during the skate tour.  Vision paid me that money back, but, being a 24-year-old idiot, I didn't pay off my credit card.  I paid it down a little, then made monthly payments and lived off of the money for a while.  Sometime around August or September of 1990, I think I met Gerard at NSI, and started doing some freelance work for him.  I worked part time shooting the bits, and then editing Skater's Quarterly #2.  In October, I spent a lot of time, and money, editing The Ultimate Weekend.  It cost me $1,000 just to rent the edit system I used to edit the video for 40 hours.  If I had any business sense back then, I would have just kept working at Vision, and used their equipment for free.  But I just had to quit Vision out of boredom.  

At the time, Gerard had a little office for NSI in Gardena, inland of the South Bay area of Los Angeles county.  For you Old School freestylers, Gardena is a few miles from the Velodrome at Cal State Dominguez, where we had so many AFA contests in the 1980's.  NSI was a small, operation, three people at most, but Gerard sold a lot of videos.  He sold them in groups of two or three, or maybe 10 or 20 videos, on a big order.  He sold the popular videos, like the top surf videos of the day, and all the Powell-Peralta Bones Brigade videos.  He sold them to thousands of small surf shops, skate shops, and mom and pop video shops.  

At the time, it cost about $3 to make a VHS copy of a 60 minute video, plus maybe a quarter each for boxes and labels, if you got enough printed up.  He would buy them for $5 or $6 from the companies, I think, and wholesale them to the shops for $9 or $10.  Something like that.  Small distributors like NSI made around $2 to $3 a video, and he often shipped out 100 to 150 orders, usually 2 to 5 videos each, every day during the holiday season.  It was a lot of work packing and shipping, but he worked the phones hard, and did pretty well, with minimal overhead.  I helped with a lot of that packing and shipping during the 1990 Christmas season.  He also had some other streams of income, I think he had a rental house or two.  The guy worked hard, sold a ton of videos, a few at a time, and small surf, skate, and snowboard companies loved him, because he sold a huge percentage of their videos to his vast network of little shops.  

Now we finally get to the idea behind Skater's Quarterly.  This was a brilliant idea for that time.  If you watch this video, most of it is footage from NSA skate contests.  You'll see the big names, Tony Hawk, Christian Hosoi, Steve Caballero, Chris Miller, Eric Dressen, mostly in NSA contest footage.  Since he sold so many videos, he'd call up the people he knew at the NSA (he sold their videos), and other companies, and say, "Hey, it's Gerard here.  I'm gonna make a skateboard video magazine, do you mind if I use some of the footage from your latest video?  I'll be promoting your video, and it'll help me sell some more of your videos."  Something like that.  Every time, they'd say, "Uh... sure... go ahead."

That's where I came in.  He had me edit video parts from other people's videos, a whole bunch of them, into the Skater's Quarterly.  Then we'd shoot the intros, most right in the office (he'd moved back into his garage by this point).  For SQ #2, we spent the weekend at the Action Sports Retailer trade show shooting video (the skate session at the end, with the Andy Jenkins character painted on the ramp), plus we went up to the Bones Brigade 7: Propaganda video premiere, in Santa Barbara.  Total costs were my hourly rate to shoot and edit, a hotel room for two nights at the trade show, and some video tape.  He had an S-VHS edit system, and the line on cheap labels and boxes.  For maybe $600 total production costs, and $3 per VHS copy, NSI had Skater's Quarterly Video Magazine #2. 

Here's the smart part.  When he called up all those shops, he'd say, "Hey, it's NSI video, we have three new surf videos out this month, and two skateboard videos.  They'd order 3 or 4 of the videos, and he made About $3 each.  Then he'd say, "I also have this skateboard video magazine, Skater's Quarterly, it's an hour of great skateboarding, with all the top names."  then they'd order two or three of the Skater's Quarterly videos.  But since he produced the video, he made about $6 per copy, not $3.  So a $12 profit jumped up to $12 plus $18 (3 SQ videos X $6), or $30 profit per sale.  That extra $6 to $18 per order adds up when you ship out 50 to 80 orders on a good day, and 150 orders per day over the holidays.  I made $9 or $10 an hour for my very limited editing skills.  That was my freelance job for the second half of 1990 and into 1991.  

I pretty much forgot about these videos.  I haven't seen any of them since I edited them, in late 1990 and early 1991.  I was just telling a friend about these videos a couple of days ago.  Then I looked up some skate video, and Skater's Quarterly popped up on the side on YouTube.  SQ #2 is the only one of the three NSI videos I edited on YouTube, but it was cool to watch it over again, 33 years later.  The footage is a lot better skating than I remember.  I also edited Skater's Quarterly #3, and Snowboarder's Quarterly #1, where we covered the premiere of Snowboarder's in Exile, my favorite snowboard video of the 90's.   

So that's the story behind one of the other little video projects I did in the early 90's, and three of the 16 bike, skate, and snowboard videos I produced or edited, between 1987 and 2001.  

Christian Hosoi and crew- skating in 1990 as Tuff Skts

The only version of the Tuff Skts promo on the web, when Christian Hosoi and Vision Skateboards worked together for a short time in 1990.  I shot and edited the original promo (7 1/2 minutes)) and a shorter version (4 1/2 minutes), using Bad Brains and Muddy Waters for the soundtrack.  This is a further cut down version, dubbed with canned music, to avoid copyright issues, to air on Sk8-TV on Nicklodeon in 1990.

While known primarily as a BMX industry guy from the 1980's to Old School freestylers, I actually worked for Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Street Wear video company, for 2 1/2 years from late 1987 to mid 1990.  I was mainly a production assistant, the other six people, plus a few women in promotions, and most anyone in other Vision departments, could tell me what to do.  My nickname was The Dub Guy, I spent most of my time making copies of video footage for all kinds of reasons.  I pretty much lived in a little 6' by 8' room, filled with all kinds of VTR's, professional grade VCR's, basically.  I made dubs, copies of one thing or another, for the whole Vision empire.  Betacam raw footage to VHS with a window to log footage?  Yeah, I did it.  1" to 3/4" for offline editing, I was the guy.  50 copies of the four second shot of a Psycho Skate skateboard that appeared in some lame ass TV sitcom, yep, I'll make copies.  I'll hide in my room, and make them, three at a time.  

In 1989, our staff camerman, Pat, found another job, and I got upgraded to cameraman (while continuing as The Dub Guy).  All of our producers and tech guys were also cameramen when we did big shoots, but I did the little jobs.  The cool part of that was that I got sent to all the 2-Hip events that year, which Vision sponsored, and occasionally I got sent out to shoot video of Vision Street Ware fashion shoots, skateboarding footage, whatever.  I even went to this video shoot, the skateboard part, and shot behind-the scenes footage all day (Kele Rosecrans, Joe Johnson, Eric Nash, and Micke Keller were the skaters).  That was in 1989, when BMX freestyle was "dying," as corporate America deemed the "fad" over, and pulled their money out, followed by the mainstream bike industry.  Vision also began to struggle that year.  Their massive sales growth didn't double that year, like expected, it only went up about 15%.  The 1980's skateboarding "fad" era was ending, and skate and snowbard sales began to fade.  In January of 1990, Unreel got dissolved, and the two cheapest people, myself and our production coordinator, were kept on, and our boss, Don Hoffman, went to freelance mode.  We moved out of our plush office, with the upstairs ocean view, at the end of Brioso Drive in Costa Mesa, and into the Vision main building in Santa Ana.  

Before the Brioso building was all cleaned out, I got a call one day.  "We need you to go shoot Christian Hosoi and his guys for a couple of days, then make a promo video for a new joint venture company."  I thought, "Hell yeah!"  I'd worked at contests where Christian and Tony Hawk skated, even been to Tony's Fallbrook ramp to shoot film, but I'd never actually met either of them.  I was stoked to meet one of the two best vert skaters of the era.  

I packed up the $50,000 Sony Betacam, one of our huge "TV news cameras," that were full broadcast quality.  The beasts also weighed 35 pounds each, which made shooting airs from a ramp deck a workout.  While most BMXers and skaters were using the new "prosumer" S-VHS cameras, or the brand new Hi8 video cameras, Unreel was still in broadcast quality mode, when there was still a huge difference between consumer and broadcast quality video.  

Day one of shooting was at Christian's home ramp, a full size halfpipe hidden at his hilltop house in Echo Park, not very far from downtown L.A..  The idea I heard that was behind Tuff Skts was that Christian's top skaters on Hosoi were intimidated when competing against him, because not only was he one of the top two vert skaters, but his name was on all the boards.  At least that was the idea.  So he decided to work with Vision, starting a new brand called Tuff Skts, under their corporate umbrella.  Vision also ran Sims and Schmitt Stix skateboards, and Sims Snowboards, so it would save Christian headaches on the business side of things, and it could be a huge new source of board sales for Vision, who made their own boards.  At the time, the deal made a lot of sense.  

Christian and Tony Hawk were the consistent top two vert skaters then.  Christian was known for his really high airs, super smooth technique, and amazing style.  Tony was known for having less style, but doing incredibly hard, far more technical vert tricks.  Contest after contest, it was high air and style versus tech.   Usually one of the two won the contest.  Occasionally Steve Caballero, Chris Miller, or even Vision guy Gator might sneak in for a win.  But mostly Tony and Christian battled for the top spot, contest after contest.  

As 1990 rolled in, Christian was tired of being known just as the "high air guy," and he worked on some more technical tricks.  Part of his plan that day was to debut some new tech tricks.  In the promo above, you can see him doing tail grab nose grinds, and alley-oop nosegrinds, and a blunt, along with the standard grinds in his trick bag.  In this video, edited by Sk8-TV (a Nickelodeon TV show in 1990, hosted by Gerry "Tater" Hertado), Christian talks a bit about Tuff Skts, and you can see his classic style in a good pool skating session.  Here's another good video, it's just Christian skating vert in 1990, going through his reportoire of tricks.  He's even wearing a Tuff Skts T-shirt part of the time, so it was in the era I'm talking about.

Always the showman and host, my first day shooting footage of Christian was an event, not just a casual video shoot.  After reaching Echo Park, I drove the little Unreel Toyota van up this steep, winding driveway, where several cars were already parked, precariously, on the edge.  I crabbed the wheels, pulled my gear out, and headed up to the house.  Not only was I there, representing Vision, but a handful of magazine photographers were also there, as was surf filmaker Herbie Fletcher, shooting 16mm movie film.  Herbie's son, pro surfer Christian Fletcher, another friend of Hosoi's, was also there.  Christian's am guys, friends Block, Little Man, and Joey Tran, were there as well.  

The house had trees around much of it, a full size halfpipe hidden a bit below on the hill, and an amazing view of downtown L.A. from the driveway.  Word was that it was old time actor W.C. Field's house at one time.  It was the most rock star skateboard day I could have imagined.  The house had a 25 yard lap pool, long and skinny, something I'd never seen before.  From the pool, it looked a lot like the house from 5:00 to 5:16 in this video, but the driveway is different.  I did a little research just now, and I just figured out it wasn't the W.C. Fields mansion, but the story that day was that W. C. Fields lived in the house back in the day.  What I remember thinking is "Holy crap!  Skateboarding paid for all this?"  

Everyone was gathered in a room of the house, and when I showed up, Christian was the gratious host.  He introduced me as Vision's video guy, and walked me out and showed me the ramp, and gave me a run down of the plans for the day.  He was as friendly and cool as could be.  I think I set up the camera on the tripod outside, and went back inside, where everyone was watching skate videos, (and smoking some weed).  Within ten minutes or so, everyone wandered out to the ramp, and the session began.  Christian wasn't the only one skating, Christian Fletcher, and Christian's am guys took some runs.  But he was the star of the show, and we all spread out on the deck to get shots as Christian tore it up run after run, talking with us guys on the deck between runs.  

After maybe an hour of skating, Christian said, "OK, fatty break!"  Most of the guys headed in the house to smoke some more weed.  Again, this was 1990, years before the trouble Christian ran into in later in the 90's, and before cleaning up his act after that.  When they headed inside, I asked him if I could ride my bike on the ramp.  The skater vs. BMXer vibe was still strong in much of the skate world, but Christian just told me to go for it.  So while most of the group went inside, I got some runs in on his vert ramp.  I could never ride vert worth a damn, I'd do airs a foot under coping on any ramp.  Six foot quarterpipe, I'd air a little under coping,  On an 11 foot skate halfpipe with a foot of vert, I'd air a foot under coping.  In the San Juan mansion pool, with 8 foot transition and four feet of vert, I aired a foot under coping.  The funny thing was that day, while everyone was inside, it was me on my bike, and a guy with dreads down to his waist, who someone said was Christian's weed dealer, on his skateboard.  We took turns on the ramp while most everyone else was getting stoned.  

When guys started wandering back out to the ramp, someone told me to get my bike off the ramp.  Much to my surprise, Christian walked up behind him, and said, "No, let the video guy ride.  Let's see what you got."  So I did a few under vert airs, and Christian seemed stoked to see I had some skills on a ramp, if not a lot, even if wasn't skating.  That really surprised me.  On local backyard ramps, I often got vibed by skaters.  But at the backyard ramp of one of the top vert skaters, he was down to let everyone get some runs in, bike or board.  That was really cool, and totally unexpected.  I took my bike along mostly in case I had to ride some distance with the camera, following them skating.

At that point, Christian herded us into a small guest house.  Herbie Fletcher had set up his movie projector, and was going to show everyone some film footage he shot of Christian a few weeks before.  It was high speed film, meaning it played back in slow motion.  Christian put some music on a record player, since the film didn't have sound.  Once he saw the slow motion, he said, "Wait, I've got the perfect music for this."  He pulled out a Muddy Waters blues album, on vinyl, and put that on.  It blended perfectly with the slow motion skating footage.  

I just sat there on the floor watching, wondering how this weird day had happened.  I was  a dorky BMXer/industry guy, sitting in a room with Christian Hosoi, a few of the top skateboard photographers, top pro surfer Christian Fletcher, and surf filmmaking legend Herbie Fletcher was showing his footage.  I'd heard of all these guys before, but didn't expect to meet any of them.  It was kind of surreal, like, "This is cool as hell, how did this happen?"  The Muddy Waters music inspired me to do the same thing in the promo video, I edited a couple minutes of slo-mo footage of Christian doing airs to Muddy's song, "King Bee."  It worked out really well.  

When the day's sessions were over, we made arrangments for the next day, and I headed back down to Orange County.  I can't remember exactly what order we went which places.  Over the next two days, I shot some more of Christian, and his guys, Little Man, Joey Tran, and Block.  They were more good friends who were good skaters, then top amateurs, and all Venice locals, I believe.  We went down to Venice Beach, and I shot footage in their local skate shop, skating the curb out front, and then on the board walk, skating and hanging out.  The guy with the surfboard in the mural, in the top clip, that's Block, who was also the founder of the MSA, the Mexican Surfing Association.  

The short wall tricks of Venice local skater Tim Jackson, in the last post, is what inspired me to write this post.  I knew Block had some different tricks on that same wall, one of which is in this clip above.  Block would also skate with "sky hooks" on his board at times.  Those were little plastic clips that went on the outside of your feet.  They would screw into your board, then you're kind of clipped in, with plastic bits around the outside of your feet.  That's how he does the method off the curb, and "bunnyhops" over Joey and Little Man.  Those things were kind of hokey, but Block was a guy you didn't make fun of, and he could do cool stuff with the clips on his board.  

One the second day of shooting footage, we also went to the blue pool in the clip.  It was a drained backyard pool in Van Nuys, at an abandoned house that was next to a crack house.  That was a great session, partly because Christian tore up the pool, and partly because we ran into this unknown guy skating named John Swope.  John was doing Smith grinds that were more stylish than Christian's, which was a tall order.  Christian started calling him "Johnny Grind" while we were there.  We had a great session, They all skated, I shot video, and Block shot some photos.  

Christian was so impressed with John's skills that he invited him to session another pool the next day.  That's the big rectangle pool.  But first we headed out to session another backyard pool, also The Valley, but it was half full of water or something.  There was some reason it wasn't skateable.  I think that's when he headed back to Venice to finish up the afternoon, actually.  

On day three, we met up somewhere, picked up John Swope, and head to some obscure driveway up the 14 freeway, way north of L.A., on the way to Palmdale.  It's about as 'middle of nowhere" as you can get, and still be in Los Angeles county.  We parked at some little spot, then had to hike over a pretty high ridge, then down the other side, to get to this big rectangle pool.  That was the day I wished I had a little Hi8 camera, not the big, heavy Sony Betacam.  But we got to the spot after a solid hike, and no one was around.  It was a big rectangle pool, larger than a big backyard pool, but much smaller than Olympic size.  Everyone got some good skating in, and Christian just tore the place up.  He would do whole lines of just cess slides, like 8 different variations of slides in one line, with that great skidding skate wheel sound.  Then he'd air, grind, do corner airs.  It was hard picking the best shots for the original promo video, which was 7 1/2 minutes long.  There was a lot of great footage from the three days of shooting.  As is the case with nearly all the raw footage in the Unreel tape library, there's a bunch of great footage sitting in a box, right now, somewhere, that no one has ever seen.  

After a great session, we made the hike back to the van, and had dinner at some restaurant near the 14 and the 5 freeways.  It was a great dinner, and Christian was telling stories to the skaters and me, from his travel and adventures.  Then he gave the ultimate pro skater advice, how to skate a contest properly.  He told his guys to have a big pasta dinner the night before the contest, to do some carbo loading.  Then he told them to wake up the morning, take a big shit, smoke a fatty, have some breakfast, and "you're ready to skate hard all day."  It actually was good advice (if you smoked weed), but it was so funny the way he said it.  They all piled into the other car at that point, and we parted ways.  I got in the Unreel Toyota "toaster" van, for the long drive back to Orange County.  

Over the next 3 or 4 days, I did something I'd never done before.  I actually edited the clip in our broadcast caliber edit bay.  That place always intimidated me.  I never in a million years thought I would be able to work that room, technology has always scared the hell out of me.  It was simple cuts editing, and luckily no one else was in the building to hear me cuss and watch me struggle.  But that was the one bit of video I edited in the actual edit bay, on the Big Boy system.  I'd never make it as a real video editor, doing broadcast TV caliber work.  I was used ot having Unreel's wizard editor Dave Alvarez doing the editing.  But the whole staff had been cut at that point, except for two of us.  So I managed to edit a mediocre promo video for Tuff Skts.  When the women in the promotions department saw it, they wanted me to cut it down.  So I made a shorter, 4 1/2 minute version.  That's what got shown at trade shows, and sent out to anyone who needed to see one.  I made a 3/4" copy of the original version.  That was one of the tapes I lost in 2008, when I lost everything in my storage unit.  I wanted that one for my demo reel someday.  

So that's my story of spending three epic days with skateboard legend Christian Hosoi and his crew, in the spring of 1990.  It was an great skate adventure for me.  Tuff Skts ended up lasting about 6 or 8 months, as I recall.  I quit Vision in July, 1990, so I wasn't around for the end of it, I'm not sure what the story was.  But there's a little known piece of skateboard history few people know of, or remember.   

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Small Business Futurist

Little known Venice Beach street skater Tim Jackson- 1990

When I first moved to Southern California, Venice Beach was the place you went to see the crazy side of California in one afternoon.  It was the freak show people in the rest of the world expected of California.  The boardwalk area had the weirdest, craziest, coolest range of people anywhere.  There was no skatepark back then, but there were curbs, short walls, and open sidewalks.  Here the cameraman and editor of what I think is a Santa Cruz/OJ's wheels video, re-cut the footage of Venice local Tim Jackson.  For you Old School BMX freestylers watching this, the 1984 and 1985 Venice Beach AFA contests were held on this same sidewalk area.  

Although he won't take credit, Mark Gonzales is generally considered to have sparked street skating in about 1984.  Boards were big and wide for those early years, and a bunch of skaters, inspired by the skating of Gonz, Tommy Guerrero, Natas Kappas, Mike Vallely and others, began to see what was possible to do with a skateboard on the urban freatures around them.  Tricks were simpler, generally, but more creative and with a wider diversity, every skater had their own ideas, style, and usually a few original tricks.    

Also in 1990, when this footage was taped, the skateboard hype bubble of the late 80's had popped, and sales and interest in the mainstream was going down.  The skateboard and BMX industries were going into recession, as was the whole country.  The long recession of the early 1990's found the hardcore skaters going underground, and street skating blew up, and grew exponentially.  This era is also when the big dogs, Vision (who I worked for) Powell-Peralta, and Santa Cruz, lost their stranglehold on the business, and new companies like World Industries, New Deal, Black Label, Plan B, Blind, and a slew of other small companies, rose up.  By the time ESPN decided to jump on the action sports bandwagon in 1995 with the Extreme Games (renamed the X-Games in '96), skater run companies were the norm.  

This video is a great edit of that time just when the posers were fading from the scene, and street skating was evolving in many places.   

Tony Hawk just broke his femur... here's a classic Hawk/Hosoi showdown from BITD

On March 7, 2022, three days ago, 53-year-old pro skateboarder Tony Hawk broke his femur on a bad McTwist attempt.  In an article linked on his Twitter, he said he didn't have enough speed, and caught a sketchy grab, and crumpled on landing, breaking his femur.  For those of you who don't know, that's the really big bone in the top half of your leg, one of the worst things to break.  So good vibes and much luck healing to Tony, as he heals up and makes the long recovery back from that injury.  

If you've read my blog much, you know I was a BMX and skateboard industry guy in the 1980's and early 1990's.  So my stories I tell in this blog, and previous blogs, are my memories of working and hanging out with the riders and skaters back in the day.  I never actually met Tony Hawk, but I was at a couple video shoots at Tony's Fallbrook house, and saw him at contests events now and then.  I just never introduced myself, because we didn't really do that in those days.  

In 1988, I was working at Unreel Productions, the video company owned by Vision Skateboards.  I was basically a production assistant, mostly making copies of different videos for people in the Vision empire all day.  But Don Hoffman, the head of  Unreel had this crazy idea of getting action sports on TV, which WAS NOT happening in the 1980's.  So Unreel produced five well produced TV shows, called the Sports on the Edge Series.  We ended up syndicating the series across the U.S., six years before the X-Games started in 1995.  The series included bodyboarding, skateboarding, BMX racing, BMX freestyle, and snowboarding.  Unreel actually tried to sell the series to ESPN in 1989, but the suits there said, "No one wants to watch skateboarding on TV, and what the hell is snowboarding?"  So we hired a woman to syndicate the series, which actually played really well, and got good ratings, across the U.S..  

For the skateboarding show, we at Unreel worked with National Skateboard Association to put on the biggest skateboard contest ever at the time.  Following the huge progression in ramp construction in the Bones Brigade 3/Animal Chin video, we had a vert/spine/mini ramp combo built, as you can see in the video clip above.  Spine ramps were brand new then, and mini ramps were only a couple of years old, so this contest broke new ground in that way.  It was also unusual then to have a skate event in a big arena then, with a "huge" crowd of 3,000 spectators.  Most skate contests at that time were outside, where you could just walk up and watch in most cases.  

Someone also came up with the idea for this crazy, head to head format, rather than a big jam format like we see today.  I think I was there was a jam to figure out the top 10 or so skaters, and then they skated head to head against each other, which you can also see in this clip above.  So one guy would skate, and then the other, and you had to lose twice to get eliminated, much like a basketball tournament or something like that.  The main result was it wore the skaters out.  So this was a really huge, crazy, big event for skateboarding at the time.  Unreel hired SoCal radio D.J. The Poorman from KROQ to host, with Skatemaster Tate and Vision pro skater Ken Park for color commentary.  To top it all off, Unreel hired this crazy punk band called the Red Hot Chili Peppers to play after the contest.  

Not surprisingly for vert skating in 1988, the contest came down to Tony Hawk versus Christian Hosoi for the win.  Hawk was the master of hard, technical vert tricks, and Hosoi was the master of big , high, super stylish airs, and flow.  Crazy, head-to-head format aside, it actually made for a really cool live event, and a great TV show.  When you watch the video above, you see why Tony and Christian were continually battling it out for the top spot in vert, they both ripped, in completely different ways.  Tony got the win on that day, but it could have gone either way after those final runs.  

That's it for my look back at an epic skate contest from the 80's.  You can find more clips of Skate Escape on YouTube.  The show got made into a home video later, their may be a few VHS copies in someone's collection still.  Here's the Joe Rogan podcast from 2020 with Tony, which I was listening to while writing this blog post.  Again, best wishes to Tony as he heals and recovers from his broken femur.  Like everyone, I hope he's able to get mobile again, and back on a ramp as soon as possible.  

 

The Year of the Tent # 10: Happy Customers

 This is Erin, who got a drawing I did of singer Lana Del Rey for her 16th birthday recently.  Her mom Lisa said she was "over the moon."  Finishing a drawing I really like feels great.  But seeing a photo of someone who got one of my drawings as a present is as cool as it gets.  There's a close-up photo of the drawing a few posts back.

 As a long time skateboarder and one time skate industry guy, I was really stoked on this opportunity.  In this photo, all three ladies are in the Skateboarding Hall of Fame.  On the left is Vicki Vickers, in the middle is Deanna Calkins, and on the right is Robin Logan, from the family that created the Logan Earth Ski boards.  After receiving a drawing of mine as a gift herself over a year ago, Robin has had me do drawings of friends as gifts.  This past Mother's Day, Vicki and Deanna got these drawings as gifts from Robin, both of photos from their heyday as pioneering women skaters.

 As a Sharpie artist, what do I do when my brain is tired from concentrating?  Adult coloring... sort of.  I draw freehand "doodle art" pieces, and then color them.  This "Love is the Answer" drawing full of hears still isn't finished, but you can see it if you find me at the Winston-Salem First Friday Gallery Hop tonight (6/1/2018).

Here's the first drawing Robin Logan (above) had me do, her older brother Bruce Logan.