Before The Ultimate Weekend Was Made

This is Freestyle's Raddest Tricks, produced by the crew at BMX Plus! magazine in 1985.  This is a good example of the handful of highly promoted videos in the 1980's.  What's way cool is that it is introduced by Bob Haro himself, the creator of BMX Freestyle.  What sucks is that the camera work is terrible because the professional cameramen had no idea which direction the riders were going most of the time.  Everyone's wearing leathers, usually a helmet, and Robert Peterson even has goggles on his helmet.  Everything is staged at a time when flatland jam circles were what really happened in parking lots and at contests.  On many occasions, the editors don't show the landing of a trick, which riders always want to see.  This video is what happened when the guys at a magazine hired a video production company which usually produced corporate training and promotional videos.  The budget for a video like this in the mid 80's was usually $30,000 to $40,000 or more.  I'm not kidding.  At that time, consumer video cameras shot poor quality footage, and professional cameras could cost $50,000 for a broadcast quality betacam (NOT Betamax) with a good lense.  It just plain cost a ton of money to make a video, which meant you had to sell thousands of copies to make any money.  Because of those dynamics, very few BMX freestyle videos got made back then, and they often lost money for the company that produced them.

To be fair, I was SO STOKED when I got this video in the mail, that I watched the whole video SEVEN TIMES the first day.  One time that day I watched the whole half-hour video while balancing on my bike, in the living room, in front of the TV.  I'm not kidding.

A year after I got this video, I was working at Wizard Publications.  The next year I produced a really lame TV commercial for the American Freestyle Association to promote a contest in Austin, Texas.  That led to producing six really simple AFA videos while I worked as newsletter editor there.  AFA owner Bob Morales had advertised the videos, but just didn't have the time to produce them.  So I went to Unreel Productions, the video production company owned by Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear.  Vision Street Wear sponsored the AFA national contests, and sent a cameraman to shoot video of each event.  I got to go through all that footage and pick the shots that I wanted in each video.  Then I took my paper list of tapes and time codes to Unreel, and they put me in their $500,000 edit bay with a young but incredible video editor named Dave Alvarez.  Dave showed me how editing worked, and I told him what riders wanted to see, like the landing of every trick, for example.  Then we argued a bit, and Dave edited the videos as I called the shots.  I was 20 years old at the time, and completely blown away by sitting in a room that looked like the bridge of the Star Trek Enterprise and actually producing videos.

I spent so much time at Unreel that year, that they hired me at the end of 1987 to make dubs of tapes.  In the real TV world, that job is called being a "production assistant" or "PA."  But at Unreel, they called me The Dub Guy.  During my time there, I watched the Unreel staff make skateboard videos, snowboard videos, fashion videos, BMX videos, and the first action sports TV series.  We also put on the Vision Skate Escape contest, and the '89 2-Hip King of Vert event, which were the biggest skate and BMX freestyle contests ever put on at the time.  I was the low man on the totem pole the whole time, but I was also the only BMXer in a office full of surfers, so I did get some input on the bike videos.  Not much, but a little.  One one hand, it was really cool that we made an action sports TV series, seven years before the X-Games.  On the other hand, all of our videos seemed kind of hokey to me, and they didn't really show the lifestyle I was living then.  I rode every night after work.  On the weekends I rode for crowds at the Huntington Beach pier, basically I was a street performer who never put out a hat.  I hung out with a bunch of freestyle skaters like Pierre Andre and Don Brown, and other street skaters would cruise by the pier.  Street skating was just beginning then, and Mark Gonzales, Ed Templeton, and a load of other great skaters were there often.  On the bike side, well known SoCal local Mike Sarrail was at the pier every weekend, and guys like Martin Aparijo and Woody Itson showed up once in a while.  The Lakewood Posse of amateurs: Jeff Cotter, Ron McCoy, Nathan Shimizu, Ron Camero, and others were there often.  We did flatland for the crowds, and then went off in our own directions to ride the streets and jumps the rest of the time.

What I was living and what I saw in the handful of BMX freestyle videos then were two different things.  Spanning the two worlds, Ron Wilkerson called me up and asked me to edit the 2-Hip video for the 1988 contest season, which was the seventh BMX video I produced.  You can find it online now as 2-Hip BHIP.  With that video I tied with Don Hoffman for the number of BMX videos produced.  He had also made seven BMX videos.  Don Hoffman?  Few of you know his name, but he was the top guy at Unreel, and he made a bunch of early videos with Bob Morales at the AFA during the skatepark era.  While I worked at Unreel, Don was trying to make Vision videos which were as cool as the Powell Peralta Bones Brigade videos, which were the top skateboard videos of that era.  He also led the push to get action sports on TV, which he did.  We called it the Sports on the Edge Series.  To give you an idea of how popular these sports were then, here's the reply Unreel got from ESPN when they tried to sell the network an action sports TV series in 1988.  The suits at ESPN said, "Nobody wants to watch skateboarding on TV... and what the hell is snowboarding?"  Don Hoffman and the Unreel crew was ahead of our time.  We actually did syndicate the series of six TV shows, but Vision started to have financial troubles at the same time.  The company hit its peak and sales started to drop as the skateboarding trend dropped off.  Vision wasn't prepared to spend $75,000 the next year, plus production costs, to keep the action sports TV series going.  Instead, in early 1990 Vision shut down Unreel Productions, and laid off everyone but the production coordinator and me, the two cheapest people on the crew.  Don Hoffman continued to work on a freelance basis, and the other crew members moved on to other jobs.  The two of us left got moved into an office at the main Vision warehouse, and we sat there and didn't do much of anything for months.  The production coordinator found herself a job in Hollywood.  Then it was just me... sitting in an office in Vision, waiting to be called to shoot video of one thing or another.  That happened maybe once a week.  The rest of the time I just sat there doing next to nothing.  I edited little videos and watched old footage and got paid for it.  But I was bored out of my skull.  I was tired of working on hokey videos.  I wanted to make a video that showed the BMX freestyle world that I lived in.  So I bought an S-VHS camera, some video tape, and I teamed up with Mike Sarrail and started shooting video of different riders almost every weekend.  And I saved my money up to make my own video.  I didn't really know if I could make a video all by myself.  But I wanted to try.  That was my goal for the year of 1990.

The Idea for The Ultimate Weekend video

Here's my 1990, self-produced BMX freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend.  This month (October 2015) is the 25th anniversary of the release of that video.  I really wanted to make a sequel and "where are they now" companion video for this anniversary.  But it just wasn't in the cards.  So I'm going to spend some time blogging about the story behind The Ultimate Weekend, one of the first rider-made videos.  Many thanks to Alan Valek for uploading it to You Tube. 

Every human-made creation, whether it's a movie, a book, a piece of art, a product, or a company, first starts as an idea in a single person's head.  The Ultimate Weekend came out in the fall of 1990, but the initial idea goes back to the fall of 1986.  I started a BMX freestyle zine in 1985 in San Jose, California.  Over the course of several issues, I interviewed Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Hugo Gonzales, and several other pros and amateurs from the San Francisco Bay Area.  At that point, freestyle had become the focus in my life, and I reported on the NorCal scene, which was like no other in the freestyle world at that time.  Much to my surprise, my zine led to writing a contest article for FREESTYLIN' magazine.  Even more to my surprise, that led to a full time job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  Suddenly I was not only part of the freestyle industry, but I was getting paid to help put out the coolest magazines, and I was riding all the time. 

One evening, at the end of our working day, FREESTYLIN' editor Andy Jenkins summoned Lew, Gork, and me out to the parking lot.  He said he'd been thinking about approaching Oz (aka Bob Osborn, our publisher and boss) with the idea to make a video.  The bad part was, Oz had paid a huge sum of money to have a video production firm make a video about the BMX Action Trick Team a few years before.  The video was well produced, but it cost tens of thousands of dollars to make, and it lost a lot of money.  There just wasn't a market for BMX videos in those early days.  Andy wanted us to brainstorm some ideas for a new video, one that could be done for much less money, yet have the backing of the two Wizard Publications magazines.  But the idea had to be amazing before Andy would take it to Oz.  We sat on the curb and threw ideas around for half an hour or so.  My best idea was to recreate our real lives.  We would get off work on Friday night, and just have "The Ultimate Weekend," riding with top pros, going to shows, contests, and even doing some "street riding," which was a new idea then. 

That was basically what we did every weekend.  Gork, Lew, and I were roommates, and Andy lived a few doors down with his wife.  If there was a local contest, we'd pile into Gork's van and go to it, or to a show in the area.  If there was nothing going on that weekend, I'd wake up Saturday morning, make a HUGE stack of pancakes, watch the Bones Brigade II, Future Primitive skate video, and then go ride all day.  Part of the day I would explore Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach and the surrounding area on my own.  Part of the time I'd ride with the locals, like Craig Grasso, Lew, Gork, Chris Day, and even R.L. Osborn now and then.  To me, that seemed like it would make a great video. 

But it wasn't a strong enough idea for Andy.  In fact, none of our ideas were strong enough, and Andy never did take the video idea to Oz.  We did, however, make a home made video.  Someone loaned Gork a 8mm video camera, and he shot random riding and funny bits, and chopped them all together.  For an intro, he intended to spell out the letters V-I-D-E-O on his computer.  Keep in mind, this was a Kaypro, mid-80's word processor.  There were no fancy graphics back then.  So Gork spent hours making a huge "V" out of little v's on his computer screen.  Then he shot a few seconds of it on video.  Then he erased the "V" and made a big "I" out of i's.  He literally spent hours doing this.  When the whole thing was edited together on a VHS tape, Gork showed us his masterpiece.  One small problem.  Spelling wasn't Gork's strong suit, and he spelled the intro V-I-D-I--E-O.  It was a pretty funny video with some good riding in it.  We called it the "Gork Vid-I-eo."  I don't know how many people actually saw it, but the biggest thing that video did was to make us realize that we could actually make a low-budget video that was worth watching.  At that point, there were only a handful of BMX videos, and they were all made by "professional" video production companies.  Those people knew video, but they didn't have a clue about BMX.  So they would often lose the rider out of the shot.  Or they wouldn't show someone landing a trick.  Or they spun the camera around and made the watcher dizzy.  Those videos were good on one level, but totally sucked from a hardcore rider's perspective. 

At the time of our parking lot meeting at Wizard, I think the only rider-made video was Eddie Roman's "Aggro Riding and Kung Fu Fighting," which I think he did as a school project.  Actually, there was also a professional video editor named Carl Marquardt (I think that's how he spelled it) who was also a rider in New York City.  He made short videos, five minutes or so, and sent them to us at the magazine.  As far as I know, those were the first rider-made videos. 

After that brainstorming session at Wizard, I kept that idea of a video showing a really awesome weekend of riding in my head.  In 1990, as my job at Vision was dying, I started shooting video on my own, different riders or locations each weekend, and made my first self-produced video, and that became The Ultimate Weekend.