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.