Memories of Scot Breithaupt part 3

This You Tube clip shows various incarnations of Scot Breithaupt as a TV announcer in the late 1980's.  That was the time I worked closely with Scot on a few projects.  The other on-camera guys are veteran alternative sports announcer Dave Stanfield, and BMX freestyle promoter Ron Stebenne.

I crossed paths with Scot Breithaupt again in 1988.  I forget exactly how he came back into the picture, because two things were happening at once.  I was working at Unreel Productions, which was the video company owned by Vision.  At the time, several companies were under the Vision banner. Vision, Sims, and Schmitt Stix skateboards, Sims snowboards, and Vision Street Wear clothing were all part of the Vision  family.  Don Hoffman, a former surfer and skateboarder, was into video work, and put together Unreel to do all the video work for Vision's companies, as well as trying to make TV shows about alternative sports.  Vision was growing in leaps and bounds at that time, and put a lot of money into Unreel.  They built a half million dollar edit bay in a nice office unit in Costa Mesa, California and hired about eight people to staff it.  Unreel produced a skateboard halfpipe contest called Holiday Havoc, and made a TV show out of it which they pretty much gave to ESPN to try to get their foot in the door with the young sports network.  In 1988, Unreel was producing high quality TV shows about skateboarding, BMX racing, BMX freestyle, snowboarding, and body boarding, which they planned to sell to ESPN.  But ESPN wasn't interested in those sports at that time.  So Unreel was having trouble selling the shows.  ESPN didn't think there was a large enough TV audience to justify airing action sports. 

Unreel hired Scot Breithaupt as an announcer for the 1987 Socko AFA Masters finals TV show.  I was just a production assistant at Unreel, so I don't know exactly what the deal was, but they hired Scot to try to sell Unreel's shows to ESPN.  Scot saw an opportunity, and wound up selling ESPN a TV series of his own.  He found a video editor, found some events to cover in the bicycling world, and approached Unreel to rent their edit bay to edit his shows.  The heads of Unreel didn't totally trust Scot, but he was paying good money to rent the edit bay, so they let him and his editor come in at night to edit his shows.  I got the job of staying there with Scot and his editor to keep an eye on him.  It was totally easy.  I would do some of my dubbing work, and when I ran out of my work, I sat around down stairs watching surf videos.  When that got old, I'd sit in the back of the edit bay and watch Scot and his editor put the shows together.  Scot called his production company L.M. Productions, which stood for "last minute."  His logo was a clock with the hands set at two minutes til midnight. That summed up his production practice.

Scot's shows were hurriedly put together, and didn't have near the quality of the TV shows Unreel was making.  The difference was that Scot actually sold his shows because of his incredible ability as a salesman and promoter.  I think Scot was a salesman and promoter first and foremost, and then a BMXer.  I'm not trying to put him down, but he was such an enthusiastic guy by nature, that he blended that with his love of BMX and was a main force in building BMX racing in the 70's.  In the late 80's, he put that same enthusiasm into producing TV shows.  That's how one particular show came about.

Scot was editing his show on a Sunday night, and asked me if I had any ideas for the next show.  He needed to shoot video of some kind of bicycling event and make a TV show in two weeks, which is unheard of in the TV world.  He had already covered cycling, mountain biking, trials riding, and GPV's and skateboard luges.  He wasn't sure what to do next.  At the time, BMX street riding was just starting to take off.  Ron Wilkerson at 2-Hip held the first major bike street contest earlier that year. Dave Vanderspek actually held the very first bike street contest in northern California, but it didn't get any magazine coverage.  Ron's contest in Santee (near San Diego) really sparked freestylers to take to the streets en mass and ride the world like it was one giant skatepark.  So I replied to Scot, "How about street riding?"  His first question was something like, "What, just riding around the street?  BMXers had always done that, jumping curbs and riding off loading docks.  I explained to Scot that street riding was becoming its own thing, just as dirt jumping was beginning to do at the time.  I told him we were doing wall rides, box jumps, wall fakies, footplants, and all kinds of other tricks in urban environments.  I can't remember specifically, but I probably pulled out some of the footage of the 2-Hip Meet the Street contest to show him.  I do remember that it took me about 20 or 30 minutes to talk Scot into the idea.  It sounded weird to him, but he needed a show, and he agreed on a street contest.  Then came the interesting part, where Scot's amazing ability to make stuff happen came into play.  We started planning the contest.  Scot decided he would get the "stonehenge" ramp from GT, a junked car, and a few other obstacles.  He would find a place to hold the contest.  My job was to get word out and make sure a lot of good riders showed up.  By the time we were done talking, his enthusiasm had transferred to me.  I was totally stoked, we were going to put on a BMX street contest, and it was going to be on TV.  Holy crap.

Scot and I worked out details each night while his editor was working on that week's show.  Somehow, Scot made his promoting magic happen.  He got the parking lot of the old surf theater in downtown Huntington Beach, which was right behind Wimpi's burgers, for any of you old school HB locals.  By that next Saturday, we had GT's stonhenge jump ramp, a wrecked car, some oil drums, and some wall ride ramps.  My work alerting the riding community panned out as well, and we had about 50 riders show up.  Craig Grosso and Pete Augustin were doing huge (for the time) wall rides, Rich Bartlett, Randy Lawrence, and many others launched over the jump ramp, and the Huntington Beach Street Scene was a rousing success.

Scot and co-announcer Dave Stanfield met myself, Randy Lawrence, and a few other flatlanders at the Taco Bell at Bolsa Chica and Heil in Huntington Beach, and we shot the introduction to the show in about half an hour.  Everything was totally low budget and on the fly.  Then Scot and his editor showed up the next Sunday night to start editing the show.  To put this into perspective, Unreel spent several months working on each TV show it produced.  Scot and I agreed on the idea on a Sunday night, had the contest the next Saturday, and the show aired on ESPN eight days after that.  It was insane, but a lot of fun.  The Huntington Beach Street Scene wound up getting the best ratings of any of Scot's shows, by far.  It also was the first made-for-TV BMX street contest ever, seven years before the X-Games began.  I'd love to show you all the show, but it's not online.  The master tape is probably in a box somewhere with the rest of Scot's footage.  As I learned over and over again in the BMX world, amazing things happen when you wind up in the right place at the right time.  What started as a boring job for me, staying up all night while Scot edited, turned into something really cool.  I got to see Scot's promoting ability in action that week, and it reminded me how we can all make cool things happen if we focus our energies on an idea.  That couple of weeks are my best memories of Scot Breithaupt, the Old Man of BMX.