Much to my surprise, I found some footage of the T.O.L. Ramp, the Tower of Love, named after the Huey Lewis song, "Power of Love." It played on the ghetto blaster one day while R.L. Osborn and Ron Wilton (or was it Mke Buff?) were building the ramp in the Wizard Publications parking lot. This is Eddie Fiola, Josh White, and Dino Deluca shredding the TOL a couple of years later, for the G-TV video, put out by GT Bikes.
One morning, in the fall of 1986, I think it was on a coffee break, FREESTYLIN' magazine editor Andy Jenikins told Mark "Lew" Lewman, Gork, and myself, that we were going to have a little meeting in the parking lot, after work. He told us he was thinking about pitching the idea of making a second Wizard Publications video, a FREESTYLIN' video, to our boss, Bob Osborn. Oz, as we called him then, was the publisher of two magazines, BMX Action, then ten years old, and FREESTYLIN', about a year and a half old. Andy told us to come up with some ideas for a video, and to keep it quiet, and we'd talk it over that night.
The reason why Andy wanted us to be low key, is because BMX Action magazine, and R.L.'s BMX Action Trick Team made a video about a year earlier, this video:
In those days, in 1985, only pro video production companies had the equipment to make high quality videos. Consumer VHS and Betamax videos were sketchy quality, and "pro-sumer" equipment didn't exist yet. So to make a video, you hired a production company, usually one that spent most of its time making industrial videos, TV commercials for local businesses, and stuff like that. A pro quality video camera then could cost $50,000, and an editing system, easily $250,000 to $500,000. Because of that, making videos, of any kind, was really expensive. I don't know how much the BMX Action video, Rippin', cost, but we suspected it was around $40,000. That is what we heard BMX Plus spent making their freestyle videos. That's like $100,000 or more in today's money. Anyhow, when you hire people who know nothing about the brand new sport of BMX freestyle to make a freestyle video, they make a high quality, well shot, well edited video... that isn't very watchable by 15-year-olds. So the BMX Action video lost a lot of money, and Oz didn't like the subject of videos being brought up. He, like all good businessmen, did not like to lose money.
But a few weeks before our meeting in the parking lot, someone loaned Gork an 8mm video camera, the pre-cursor to Hi-8 video. He started shooting stuff, and since Gork, Lew, and I were roommates, and Andy lived nearby, we experimented with the video camera, did some goofy, funny skits, and shot a little footage of ourselves riding. Then Gork got super motivated for a few days, and edited our best stuff into a little video, we called it the Gork Video. After watching this pretty funny video we made, for no money, Andy had an idea. A good idea. He thought he might be able to sell Oz on the idea of making a FREESTYLIN' video, but doing most of it ourselves, for almost no money. That would make it much more likely to make some money, or at least break even, while promoting the magazine.
So that evening, after Oz and most of the staff had left, Andy, Gork, Lew, and me sat down on the curb, in the shade of the TOL Ramp, and tossed out our ideas for a video. I forget what the other ideas were. My idea was pretty simple, it was pretty much how we lived. We'd leave work on a Friday evening, and just go ride as many different places, with as many different riders as we could, all weekend. It would be the ultimate weekend. Then we'd drag in to the office Monday morning, and go back to work.
Lew and I rode flatland at The Spot in Redondo Beach almost every night, with Craig Grasso and Chris Day. Gork came down to ride 3-4 nights a week. As the editor of BMX Action, he had more responsibility, and more work, then Lew and I. But he got his freestyle on often, anyhow. R.L. Osborn came down there often, and McGoo, then CW freestyle team manager, swung by once in a while, often with Ceppie Maes and John "Dizz" Hicks. Right there were some sessions any freestyler in the country would love to attend... or watch on video.
If there was a contest locally, we'd pack up Gork's van with our posse, and go ride with the best rider in SoCal. Sometimes we'd go session with other groups and scenes, or maybe someone's ramp. So my video idea was just to pack all those sessions we had anyhow, into one weekend, for the video. That idea was soundly rejected by the other three guys. They tossed out their ideas, which I don't remember, and the meeting ended. Andy said he'd do some thinking, and decide whether we should hit up Oz with the idea.
I got laid off a couple of months later, and as far as I know, they never hit up Oz to do another video. This other idea of Lew's, a little thing called Club Homeboy, came along instead. But the thought of doing a video of what seemed like the ultimate weekend, stayed in the back of my mind as I went on to work at the AFA for a year, and then Unreel Productions/Vision, for 2 1/2 more years. In 1990, I self-produced The Ultimate Weekend myself. Now, in 2020, it's the 30 year anniversary of that video, and I'm getting going on the 30th anniversary sequel, The Ultimate Weekend II. Stay tuned...
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