Here's vert legend Mike Dominguez in the Pipe Bowl at Pipeline skatepark in 1985. This was the contest he uncorked the no-footed can-can.
I've been pushing the old school BMX world to support Don Hoffman's Kickstarter campaign to make the "Badlands" documentary, which would tell the story of Baldy Pipe, Pipeline skatepark, and the influence it had. It's primarily a skate story, but BMX vert is part of the story. The campaign ended a couple days ago, and it found 115 backers pledging $16, 843 (43!) towards the $150,000 goal. Don isn't giving up. He's going to regroup and keep working on getting this done.
For me personally, Pipeline was a place I first read about in BMX Plus in 1982 or 1983, as a high school kid in Idaho. The skatepark, and its riders, instantly became legendary to our little Idaho riding crew. It seemed like a magical place a million miles away then.
As the years passed, I ended up riding Pipeline a few times right before it closed. In fact, I had my front tire crab in the pipe while oververt the last night it was open. That sent me into a Superman dive straight down 11 feet onto it's hard, hard concrete. I ended up going to the emergency room, thinking my wrist was broken. I was actually stoked that I might have the last broken bone from Pipeline. It turned out to be a really bad palm bruise, and I couldn't hang onto my grip for a month afterward.
Since I worked under Don Hoffman at Unreel Productions then, I got to go up and shoot video, and ride, several times after the park closed. The fences were getting torn down, which opened up a whole bunch of lines not possible before. I was jumping out of the four foot bowl and doing a little nose wheelie into the ditch, among other things. During those sessions, Fiola, Blyther, Steve Alba, Micke Alba, and several Vision skaters had some epic sessions. It was great being able to ride without little kids yelling "Next after after next" before rolling in. I chipped about eight blue tiles out of the shallow part of the Combi right after Malba and Salba got themselves some. I didn't bother going up the weekend in got demolished for the last session, I think there was a freestyle event that weekend.
I really hope Don manages to get this movie made, because it's a big part of the history of everyone who's ridden vert in ANY sport.
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As the Kickstarter crowdfunding clock ticks away for the Badlands (Pipeline Skatepark) documentary, I realized that a lot of the old and mid school riders out there don't realize just how big of a part Pipeline played in vert riding. Like Dogtown and Z-Boys and Joe Kid on a Stingray, this movie will tell a great story about how vert skating and BMX got off the ground. Pun intended. Some park had to be the first to actually build bowl with vertical walls, and that park was Pipeline.
In this clip we see Don Hoffman, the man behind the Badlands movie, ask early skatepark rider/contest promoter Bob Morales to explain the set-up for early vert riders, and Eddie Fiola, the original King of the Skateparks is the rider. These three guys played huge roles in making BMX/bike stunts what it is today, and what it was when we all did it. Help the Badlands Movie Kickstarter campaign to get this documentary made. 18 days to go, $7,403 and counting...
Blogger's note- 7/30/2025- The Badlands Movie (Pipeline Skatepark documentary) never happened. That's really a bummer, it needs to happen. But it hasn't yet.
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Go to 26:26 in this video. The Badlands Movie... because Agent Orange never played in a bowl at your skatepark. Badlands/Pipeline Skatepark movie Kickstarter campaign. Ante up. Home of the first vert pools in a skatepark. $6,293 and counting...
Blogger's note: 8/12/2023: The Kickstarter campaign for this documentary wasn't able to raise enough for the documentary to get made, which really sucks. This post is from 2017, and I don't know if Don is still trying to find funding for the movie.
I do most of my writing on Substack these days, a platform designed specifically for writers. Check it out:
After the success of the Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary years ago, we've seen some old school documentaries and videos come in the BMX and skateboard world. But the one I personally want to see made the most is now raising money on Kickstarter. In the clip above, we see the original BMX King of the Skateparks, Eddie Fiola. He's at the legendary Pipeline Skatepark that was in Upland, California. What many of you don't know is that the guy in this clip interviewing Eddie (in 1983? 84?) is Don Hoffman. Who's Don Hoffman? He's a surfer and skater from way back, and happens to be the son of Stan and Jean Hoffman, the people who built Pipeline Skatepark. Don's the guy behind the Badlands movie.
Don got into video in the early 1980's, making videos Wayne's World style with borrowed equipment. By the late 80's, Don had made more BMX freestyle videos, the King of the Skatepark series, than anyone. Don went on to start Unreel Productions, the video company for the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear companies. I worked for Don for about 2 1/2 years there, and among other things, I was the tape librarian at Unreel. That sounds boring, and it would be to most people. When I started at Unreel, there were hundreds of betacam raw footage tapes in boxes. Most boxes had a label like "Savannah." Usually the tapes were numbered, but that was about it. So I got the job of going through and actually watching parts of every single tape, and going to Don or one of the other guys and asking, "OK, this is the Savannah skate contest. What year?" Then I would label the case of ever single tape. By the time Unreel closed, there were about 3,000 tapes, and I had hand written the labels on nearly every single one.
Why am I telling you this nearly 30 years later? Because I know what's on those tapes. I know all the footage that was never used, which is a lot, both in skating and BMX. I also got the "job" of going up to Pipeline Skatepark after it closed, and shooting video with Don of the pool skaters who were let in for those awesome private sessions. I called up Eddie Fiola and Brian Blyther, and invited them to come ride after the park was closed. Don was the main cameraman, but I was the second camera guy for many of those epic sessions. I also got to set down the camera every once in a while and ride myself. I got down in the Pipe Bowl with Eddie and Brian dropping in and zooming past me, so I could get different angles of their classic lines in the Pipe Bowl.
Pipeline wasn't just another Southern California skatepark. Pipeline completely changed the game in skateboarding in 1977, and about five years later changed the game for BMX freestyle as well. This movie REALLY needs to get made. I'm going to throw the weight of this blog behind this project for the rest of the Kickstarter campaign. The story of Pipeline and the Badlands is primarily a skate story, but it's a skate story that changed BMX forever. It would be well worth you throwing a few bucks into this project and help this get made. Check out the Badlands Kickstarter campaign for more details. As of this post, the campaign has raised $6,038 of the $149,995 goal. I'll keep tabs on it as I continue to tell my stories about Pipeline and the locals there.
Would you be more likely to contribute to the fundraising if I drew a picture of on of the classic photos from Pipeline and offered it to Don as a prize for donating? Let me know.
Blogger's note- August 12, 2023: I wrote this post back in 2017, and the Kickstarter campaign didn't raise enough money to fully fund the documentary, to the best of my knowledge. I don't know if Don is still trying to fund the idea or not at this point.
I do most of my writing on Substack these days, a platform designed specifically for writers. Check it out:
This past Monday, Memorial Day, was also the 40th anniversary of the opening of Pipeline Skatepark in Upland, California. It opened with the namesake full pipe attached to a bowl that was amazing for BMX bikes. Pipeline wasn't far from the already legendary Baldy Pipe, which had already been skated for a while. Baldy was a 16 foot diameter pipe, Pipeline's was 20 feet.
Here's Eddie Fiola, the original King of the Skateparks, being interviewed by Don Hoffman. Don's parents, Stan and Jean, owned Pipeline, which took both skating and BMX vert to a whole different level. Eddie is rocking the MF jersey, which stood for Morales (as in Bob) and Fiola.
A Kickstarter campaign for a Pipeline/Badlands documentary is getting going. More on all that later. I'm moving this week, so I'll be adding more posts in 2 or 3 days.
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.
