Cory Nastazio, big Superman at Sheep Hills, sometime around 98-2001. Still from the Animals video.
Do you remember that video I made that had Mat Hoffman, Dave Mirra, Jay Miron, Cory Nastazio, Ryan Nyquist, Jason Davies, Keith Treanor, Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther Mike Dominguez, Shaun Butler, Brian Foster, Chris Duncan, Bill Nitschke, Chase Gouin, Perry Mervar, and a whole bunch of other top Mid School riders in it? No. Neither do they. Almost nobody actually saw this video when I put it out. I think I sold 8 VHS copies (most with hand drawn aliens on the box), and gave away 4 or 5 copies. This is the story of my 11th BMX video, Animals, "the lost video." It's not on YouTube as I write this, but you can watch it on BMX Movie Database here:
Animals: The video that fat guy made (2002)
I got my start producing videos while working at the AFA in 1987. Bob Morales, head of the AFA, walked in the office one day and asked me, "Steve, do you want to make a TV commercial for the Austin contest? I can get local commercial spots on MTV there for $25 each." Since I had absolutely no freakin' idea how to produce a TV commercial, but I worked for Bob, I said, "Uh... sure." That was my start in video production work.
Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboard/Vision Street Wear video company, sent a cameraman to every contest, since VSW clothes sponsored the AFA Masters series. Bob said, "Call Don Hoffman at Unreel, he'll tell you what to do." So I called over there. About three days later, I had produced a pretty lame, 30 second, BMX freestyle TV commercial, thanks primarily to Dave Alvarez, the Vision video editor. He walked me through the process, and did the editing. The commercial played a few times on MTV in Austin, for a couple nights before, advertising the contest. Back then, BMX freestyle almost never got on TV, and the few guys that saw it were stoked at the little commercial.
Sea otter grooming itself, outside the Monterey Bay Aquarium, while I was on a solo road trip up to see the redwoods, the Spring of 2000. You can't have a video called "Animals" without some actual animals in it, can you?
Soon after, I produced six AFA contest videos, one for flatland, one for ramps, for the Oregon, Ohio, and Texas AFA Masters contests that year. Here are Oregon Pro Flatland, and Oregon Pro Ramps. That led to a job offer from Unreel Productions in December 1987, where I soon became "The Dub Guy," making copies of different videos for people throughout the Vision, Sims, Schmitt Stix, and Vision Street Wear empire. Basically, I was a production assistant, copying tapes most of the time, and running errands now and then.
I must admit, I'm a complete retard when it comes to operating any kind of electrical machinery, from today's cell phones to 1980's video equipment. The whole idea of working in a little room and getting 10 different video machines to talk to each other at the right times totally intimidated me. But I learned how those things worked, bit by bit, and learned the basics of video production over the next 2 1/2 years.
During that time, in the spring of 1989, Ron Wilkerson asked me to edit the first 2-hip contest season video, for the 1988 season, so that turned into the 7th BMX video I produced, and the first one I actually edited together myself, on a S-VHS system. It's now known as 2-hip BHIP, and includes the first Santee Meet the Street contest, as well as the King of Vert comps from 1988. That job earned me $500, which is the most I ever made to produce a BMX video.
Midget Cory Walters, stretched no footed can-can at Sheep Hills, around 2000.
During the late 1980's, besides BMX freestyle surging into its first wave of popularity, something else was happening. Consumer video equipment was rising in video quality, and the price was coming down. It was the beginning of what we call "prosumer" video equipment these days. Suddenly making videos was possible for average people. In the mid 80's, a pro caliber Sony Betacam (not Betamax) video camera cost $50,000, and Unreel's broadcast quality editing bay cost $500,000 to build. But Super VHS, or S-VHS, and Video 8 became decent alternatives, with cameras around $1,000 or so.
You could hook up your VHS VCR to your S-VHS camera, and "edit" videos, Play-Pause-Record style. It was sketchy, and each generation of copies got a bit more blurry. But it was halfway decent. That's when guys like Eddie Roman and Mark Eaton started making their videos. Eddie made Aggroman in 1989, and Mark made the first Dorkin' in York in 1988 or 1989, I believe. On the East Coast, Jeremy Alder, inventor of the barspin air, along with his brother, made a video around the same time. None of us really knew what the fuck we were doing, which is what made it great. We just started making the videos we wanted to watch.
I was working at Unreel Productions/Vision, and our producers were making videos like Snow Shredders, Psycho Skate, Skate Escape, Mondo Vision, and Freestylin' Fanatics. Oh... and we did this video with this one band, too. That was pretty cool. Unreel also produced the first syndicated Action Sports TV series, called Sports on the Edge, in 1989, six years before ESPN put on the X-Games. The Unreel videos were high quality, but the riding and skating was always a bit old, never the latest tricks, and they were kind of dorky videos, I thought. So in 1990, I started working on my own video project, totally self-produced. That became The Ultimate Weekend, my 8th BMX video. Not epic, but a pretty decent video for 1990. The super hungry New Jersey transplant to Huntington Beach, Keith Treanor, became the star of that video.
Keith Treanor, carving the steps at the Nude Bowl, 1991. The site of an abandoned nudist colony form the 1970's, the Nude Bowl has been a favorite of skaters and BMXers since the 1980's. It's way the heck out in the desert, near Desert Hot Springs. Alex Leech, from England, also carved the steps that day, in the opposite direction.
Several months after I made The Ultimate Weekend, Chris Moeller found me, working up in The Valley, and said he had an idea to do a video for his bike company, S&M Bikes. At the time, S&M was being run out of the garage of his one bedroom apartment on Alabama Street in Huntington Beach. We went super low budget for Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer, and had a lot more fun, and he brought the punk rock, DIY vibe into that video. I ended up getting fired from my video duplication job during the making of that video, and became Chris' roommate, where a guy named Shaggy was already sleeping on the couch.
A couple of years later, in 1993, we upped the ante with S&M's second video, 44 Something, which became one of the bestselling BMX videos of the 1990's. S&M was growing like crazy then, during the early 1990's, "ramen days" of the BMX industry. That's when the riders took over the industry, with S&M, FBM, Hoffman, Standard, Eastern, and several other rider-owned companies starting.
Over a decade later, 44 Something was listed in BMX Plus' Top Ten BMX videos of the 90's list in 2001, I think. That was my 10th BMX video I produced, and/or edited. I also edited three low budget skate and snowboard videos in early 1991-92 for a video distributor called NSI.
Forget Burger King, Bill Nitschke popping the first Whopper (bunnyhop tailwhip) ever, at The Spot in Redondo Beach, 1991, a legendary flatland sessioning area for decades.
I was living really low budget in the early 90's, at the P.O.W. House a couple of times, and roommates with Chris Moeller and some other the rest of the time. I was moving furniture or working at porn store for most of the year, and then working on TV show stage crews, like American Gladiators, in the summers. If you freeze that clip at :24, that's me in the background, on the left. I also worked on Knights and Warriors, and Blade Warriors. Yeah, there's a theme there, many of the crew people were the same on those shows, and those were my TV world contacts then.
The whole time I wanted to make "my next BMX video," a really cool video, taking what I did right on The Ultimate Weekend (TUW), and what I'd learned from making the S&M videos, and putting it all together. But I was still super shy back then, and didn't have the personality to actually get a business going. I just couldn't sell stuff, and selling stuff is what businesses do. But I took my S-VHS camera, that I bought in 1990 to make TUW, to different contests, and shot video when I wasn't riding. So I started collecting footage, mostly contest footage. Chris Duncan with a one handed tailwhip at at Core Tour contest, in Huntington Beach, about 2000.
One thing that bugged me about 44 Something was that a lot of the footage was shot by the riders, and while really good riders, they sucked at being cameramen back then. Shots were shaky, didn't have any pre-roll (footage before the trick you need for editing on tape), or were shot from sketchy angles, they were too dark, or turned away during the trick.
At Unreel, I'd become a pretty good cameraman, and I wanted to make a well shot, well edited, fast paced video, with the newest tricks, good street riding and dirt jumping, some flatland, and some pool or vert riding if I could find places to shoot it. There were no skateparks or vert ramps in SoCal for most of the early 1990's, until Moreno Valley opened up. Then there was the Nude Bowl, way out in the desert, at an abandoned nudist colony. There were a few guys, Mike Tokemoto in particular, riding empty backyard pools with skaters, but not many.
In 1995, I burned out on TV production work. I was tired of working on other people's stupid ideas, I wanted to work on my own stupid ideas. I didn't figure out how the "Hollywood" TV/film world worked. The way to do it is to work on the crew of good paying shows, produced by other people, make good money, and save a bunch of it up. Then you take some of that money, take some time off, and do your own project. I hadn't figured that out.
Around the same time, in the summer of 1995, Chris Moeller and I, who had been roommates for most of the previous 4 years, had an argument about something stupid. I moved out, and rented a room from a woman who lived in some apartments near Beach Boulevard. I worked full time as a furniture mover, and rode my bike nearly every day through the late 1990's. But I was riding solo, just for myself, and pretty much lost touch with most of the BMX world. In late 1996 or early 1997, I moved to a cool apartment, three blocks from the beach, in downtown Huntington Beach. I was about 4 blocks from the Blues Brothers Wall, and the 18th Street jump. It was a fun scene there at the time, mostly young people in their 20's or early 30's, and all working class types. Construction workers, bartenders, servers, a few office workers, and some strippers. Damian Sanders and his crew of snowboarders and motocross riders lived two blocks away. I think Seth Enslow lived in one of those houses for a while. And it was Huntington Beach, surf city, so almost everyone surfed. The X-Games had begun, action sports were growing fast, and Huntington Beach was a worldwide hub for those sports.
Emmett Crooms sliding the ultra gnarly rail from the vert deck to the Black Bowl area at the Van's Skatepark, The Block at Orange. To the best of my knowledge, Emmett is the only one to ever slide this rail. One shot, and he nailed it. If he missed, it was headfirst into a 10 foot deep bowl. Huevos.
During that time working as a furniture mover, I bought a new video camera, a Digital 8 one. It was like Hi8, but actually a digital signal, so it had better video quality. To break in my new camera, and figure out how to use it, I made a trip down to the San Diego Zoo. I wandered around all day, shooting footage of animals. Much like BMXers and skaters, animals don't do what you want them to, and you're never exactly sure what they'll do next. I got a bunch of cool animal footage on that trip, including the shot of the gorilla picking his nose and eating his boogers. If that isn't proof of evolution, I'm not sure what is. I also started going back down to Sheep Hills every once in a while, and shooting footage of whoever was riding. So I started building up more footage of both animals and BMX riding.
After moving more than 900 houses and apartments worth of furniture in 2 1/2 years, I decided that TV production wasn't such a bad job after all. I called around the few contacts I had, and wound up working at a Hollywood lighting company called ELS, like a roadie, but in the warehouse, up in North Hollywood. I really liked that job, but after about a year, a minor injury that got worse made me quit. I couldn't manage to get the minor surgery I needed, and started driving a taxi. I just couldn't do all the heavy lifting anymore.
Financially, things went downhill from there. After living in my taxi for a few months, while I learned the business, I got taxi driving figured out, and I was able to rent a room inland in H.B., from a crazy old guy who did construction work. That was in the Spring of 2000. I found a wedding video guy selling his old Hi8 edit deck, two VCR's in one, and bought that for $750. So suddenly I could start editing videos at home. I started playing around with the edit deck, and had the urge to start making BMX videos again. I had been riding daily all through the late 90's, but was still out of touch with the BMX industry, and most riders.
Dave Mirra, one handed toothpick grind over the spine... at speed. I'm pretty sure this is not physically possible. Anaheim B3 contest, 2000?
During that same time period, I scammed a press pass to the 1999 X-Games, as a writer for Dig Magazine in the U.K., and shot more footage during practice sessions. I ran into Maurice Meyer up there, and we got talking by the BMX vert ramp. While talking, we decided to walk over and check out the skateboard best trick jam. That's when Tony Hawk pulled his first 900. I had my camera in my hand... with a dead battery, standing 20 feet from the side of the ramp. Actually, it was kind of cool to just watch that one happen. Once Tony started getting close, we all sensed it could be an epic moment in skateboarding, which it was.
So I got a bunch of footage from the X-Games, and from an X-Games qualifier contest in Anaheim. I also started going to the Core Tour contests, and shooting footage of dirt jumping. Basically, I was a Brotographer or lurktographer at that point, however you want to look at it. I also went to ride the Combi Pool at the Van's Skatepark, after it opened, and got a bit of footage there, too, of the original vert legends, Fiola, Blyther, and Dominguez.
In the Spring of 2000, I went to a book signing by Julia Butterfly Hill, the activist that lived up in a Redwood tree for over 2 years, so they wouldn't cut it down. Much to my surprise, former BMX industry guy, Frank Scura, was there, he was a friend of Julia's. So he introduced me to her, and I bought her book. After reading it, I dropped my taxi off one day, and took a week and drove up the California coast in my Datsun 280ZX, to see the redwoods. It was one of the coolest weeks of my life. I saw young elephant seals near San Simeon, and went to the Monterey Bay aquarium on the way up where I shot more footage. I also saw a herd of elk near the redwoods, so my collection of animal footage kept growing.
Chase Gouin with a stalled Jerry, or peg decade, at The Spot in Redondo Beach, 1991.
By that time, in early 2001, I had maybe 30 hours of video footage, from 1990-1993, and from 1997 to 2001. I wanted to make a really cool, hardcore, street, dirt, park video, with some good flatland. But I didn't really know any of the up and coming riders of that era, except the Sheep Hills guys. So I decided to make a kind of low budget "demo tape," using some of the Sheep Hills and contest footage I had accumulated. I figured I'd make a fast paced, low budget, pretty cool video, and sell 100 or so copies, to make a little bit of money. I'd also show it to up-and-coming riders, to give them an idea of the kid of video I wanted to make. Then I would make a really cool follow-up video, with hardcore street riders, great dirt jumping, and some park and flatland footage, and get back into the BMX world that way.
I really liked my weird collection of animal footage, too, and wanted to do something with it. I sold 5 or 6 shots to the Planet's Funniest Animals TV show, and made $100 per shot plus a T-shirt. But I wanted to add it to my BMX video. I knew a bunch of people would think it was stupid, but I didn't really care. In the meantime, I'd lost my driver license, to some mix-up at the DMV, so I had to quit taxi driving. I was struggling and homeless at times, making hardly any money. Sometime in 2001, I sat down for about a week, and edited the Animals video. I used a bit of my old footage, Keith Treanor and Alex Leech form 1991, as well as an epic flatland session I taped of Bill Nitschke, Perry Mervar, and Chase Gouin at The Spot, in Redondo Beach, also in 1991. Those are the flatland shots in between sections.
This was the "demo tape," which I planned to use to get some good young riders stoked to be in the follow-up video, and that follow-up video never happened, because I was struggling too much, trying to just make a living, as the taxi industry went downhill in the early 2000's.
Mat Hoffman with a no handed, double front peg grab, at serious height. 1999 X-Games practice session.
I scraped up money, had a few copies of Animals made, and sold 3 or 4 myself, and sold a few to A-1 Bike Shop in Westminster, close to the old P.O.W. House. I also gave a few copies away to some riders I met at the Van's Skatepark. I didn't have money to really promote the video, or to get a legit business started, so that was pretty much it. I wound up a homeless taxi driver again in 2003, and all my footage sat in my storage unit, along with the all my master tapes, including the Animals master. When I wound up going to stay with my family in North Carolina in 2008, I lost my storage unit to an auction, and lost everything from my BMX and my creative career, except my Haro brake lever key chain. I lost all my magazines, including a complete set of FREESTYLIN' magazine, all my DVD's, and all my own footage and master tapes. I started blogging soon after that, since all I had left was memories at that point. I was planning to make a BMX documentary some day, with all my footage. But after losing it all, that idea we gone.
Until about a month ago, I thought the Animals video was lost. Then Alex Leech had a post on Facebook, with some footage from it. He mentioned that Animals was on BMX Movie Database. I was like, "Holy shit! Really? I thought all this footage was lost for good." So I was stoked to see they had somehow come across a copy, and added to their website. Huge thanks for that BMX Movie Database people! So that's the story of my 11th BMX video, Animals.
Oh yeah, the tag line. One time in the 1990's, Pete Augustin told Keith Treanor, "The first time I saw you was in the video that fat guy made," meaning The Ultimate Weekend. I wasn't really fat then, but I wasn't skinny either. I laughed when Keith told me that, so that was an inside joke, so I added it to the labels.
We lost three great riders since this video came out. Ride In Peace Dave Mirra, Colin Winkleman, and Jason Davies.
Me (Steve Emig), front flip over the handlebars at speed, into high jump crash pads. I learned to do this while working on the American Gladiators set in 1993. I used to it at lunch, since we had big dollies with crash pads parked all over outside our stage. This shot was in 2001, I think, at Huntington Beach High School. I completely cleared the first ten foot crash pad, with my shoulders landing on the beginning of the second pad. When I was in better shape, and did this on the American Gladiators set in '92-95, I could fly about 16-17 feet off the bike, and would do a full flip, landing on my knees in the pads.
