The Cancer Ditch

Back to the 25th annivesary posts about my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend.  If you go to 9:54 in the video, you see a quick little night time street session at a place in Huntington Beach many of us called the Slater Ditch.  It's some kind of a pump house or something along a canal that feeds into Bolsa Chica wetlands.  The younger guys, like Andy Mulcahy, whose mug is in this section a couple of times, called it The Cancer Ditch.  They called it that because the water at the bottom of the riding area was so nasty that it would probably give you cancer if you fell in. 

At one time, this had been a well known skate spot, but the city workers built some speed bumps across it to deter skating.  After that it was a place for BMXers to session, usually late at night, like in this video.  Personally, the best I could do was footplant the wall, and jump this little step up on the other side.  In this clip you see Keith Treanor and Randy Lawrence sessioning, while Andy and Sean Johnson look on.  Back in 1990, video cameras could not handle low light well, so I wasn't even sure I could use this footage.  I used the editing system to pump up the video level so it was just barely watchable.  The Stain's quick song, "My Grandma's Got a Mohawk," worked perfectly to end the "Friday Night" phase of the video.  I can't even count how many times I rode this spot in the late 80's and  90's.  Usually alone, but sometimes in groups like this.  The Cancer Ditch is one of those obscure little places that got a little famous because of BMX.

The Original Pitch of The Ultimate Weekend

In 1985, Wizard Publications hired a professional video production company to make a home video of the BMX Action Trick Team, then featuring R.L. Osborn and Ron Wilton.  The resulting video was Rippin.'  It was one of, if not the, first BMX freestyle videos.  Rippin' had a profesionally written script, many hours of thought and pre-production, and highly qualified cameramen and director.  It cost somewhere  around $30,000 to $40,000 to produce, I was told.  Unfortunately, sales were terrible and it lost a ton of money.  This is where the story of  my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend starts.

One night after work at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines in late 1986, editor Andy Jenkins asked Gork, Lew, and me to come out into the parking lot for a little meeting.  I don't think any of us knew what it was about.  We sat on the curb near the T.O.L ramp, and Andy filled us in.  He thought it might be time for Wizard Publications to make another video.  But Bob Osborn, known to the BMX world as Oz, still had a bad taste in his mouth from the financial loss of the 1985 video Rippin'.  Andy thought that we could make a much more interesting video for a lot less money...IF we could come up with a really good idea to pitch to Oz. 

Not long before that, someone loaned Gork an 8mm video camera, which was really new technology at the time.  We goofed around doing little skits and shooting footage of us and our friends riding, and Gork editied it all together in a single video, which turned out to be pretty funny.  I think that video, The Gork Video, got Andy thinking.  In any case, we threw different ideas around for 20 minutes or so.  My idea was pretty simple.  The life we were living was pretty amazing to me.  We worked on BMX and freestyle magazines all day, then, on the weekends, we'd ride, go to shows, go to the occasional contest, and hang out with some of the best riders in BMX freestyle.  My idea was to start the video with us getting off work and having an amazing weekend riding with the top riders in freestyle.  It would be the ultimate weekend, I told them. 

That idea was quickly shot down as not creative enough, and the brainstorming continued.  As it turned out, we never pitched a video idea to Oz, and the second Wizard Publications video never got made.  But that basic idea stuck in my head. 

Three and a half years later, in early 1990, I was working at the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear video production company, called Unreel Productions.  I was sick of the videos Vision had been making, and decided to start shooting my own video, based on that idea I tossed out to Andy, Gork, and Lew years earlier.  That video, of course, was The Ultimate Weekend, and wound up being one of the first rider-made videos.  If you rode bikes in the early 90's, you know that rider-made videos took off, and changed the BMX, skateboarding, and snowboarding worlds, and also eventually influenced the mainstream TV and film world.  My video, like Rippin', lost money.  But it didn't lose near as much, and it led to better things for myself, and many of the riders in it.  And it all started with an idea that popped in my head one night in the Wizard Publications parking lot.