scratch-off lotto ticket. One night, after Sal had lost $3,500 to our cameraman Trent Kamerman (his real name, I swear), we gave Sal one of those fake $10,000 lotto tickets. He got flat-out punked, and we all had a good laugh. It’s on film here: facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1194898751291 .
Another time Shaun White secretly poured a weird potion into Sal’s cocktail. It was supposed to turn liquid to Jell-O but didn’t quite work. Sal took a sip and decided that Kris had spit in his drink, so he spewed it down Kris’s back. That triggered a full-on brawl.
One of my favorite memories came during a demo in Pensacola, Florida, where there were a bunch of hecklers in the crowd. After a few failed attempts, I pulled a 720 on the vert ramp—a maneuver I’ve made hundreds of times—and Sal convinced the crowd that I’d just made a rare 900. They went wild. From then on, anytime I made a 720, we called it a Pensacola Nine.
Meanwhile, back at the 900 Films headquarters, the editors and loggers were working 24-hour shifts to meet ESPN’s delivery deadlines. People slept on couches, under desks, in their chairs, and the trashcans overflowed with fast-food remnants and Red Bull cans.
That TV series turned out to be a terrific start-up experience for an action sports production company. Fortunately, the show was something of a success, and everyone learned how to create quality episodes on deadline. It also enabled the people with real talent to rise to the top. One of our interns, Matt Haring, was a shy 16-year-old when he started at 900 Films doing odd jobs and logging footage after school. He’d taken video production in high school and was a skater, but had no work experience whatsoever. Ten years later, he’s our top editor.
Dear Tony,
I’m really in a hole. I’m the only skater in my school, and I don’t get any appreciation for the two tricks I can do: an ollie and a shove-it. I try my balls off to learn new tricks, but I can’t get my ollies high enough. Can you send me some tips? I’m tired of being an outcast with no talents.
“Can You Teach Me How to Ollie?”
Our second big project at 900 Films was the creation of Tony Hawk’s Trick Tips . A lot of very young kids were starting to skate, and kids from around the world were sending me mail asking how to do basic tricks. So I recruited a couple of my favorite street skaters, Kris Markovich and Brian Sumner, to help me make a movie to teach the basics. We opened as if talking to someone who’d never stepped on a board, showing how to balance, push, and turn. Then we moved on to more advanced tricks like ollies, kickflips, shove-its, and heelflips.
Turns out the vacuum in that particular market was bigger than we’d realized, and our timing was good. We initially sold straight to skate shops and small sporting goods stores through Blitz Distribution, the parent company of Birdhouse. We eventually cut a deal with the head of entertainment at Best Buy and gave the electronics chain exclusive distribution rights for the first year. That turned out to be a good move.
Trick Tips climbed to Number 1 on the Billboard Sports charts and stayed there for over a year. It remains 900 Films’ best-selling product ever—the gift that keeps on giving. We recently edited it into bite-size, two-minute interstitials that we licensed to Fuel TV. We’ve used different iterations as a gift-with-purchase for other products, and even refilmed the basics to create a separate iPhone app that was Apple’s bestselling sports app for several weeks. It may be the most evergreen product of my entire career; there’s always a fresh generation of kids who want to learn how to skate.
The cover of the hugely successful Tony Hawk’s Trick Tips Volume 1 . The success of this video led to two more videos in the series, and were later turned into television interstitials, an iPhone app, product giveaways, and more.
The success of Trick Tips taught me two lessons: to stick with
Another time Shaun White secretly poured a weird potion into Sal’s cocktail. It was supposed to turn liquid to Jell-O but didn’t quite work. Sal took a sip and decided that Kris had spit in his drink, so he spewed it down Kris’s back. That triggered a full-on brawl.
One of my favorite memories came during a demo in Pensacola, Florida, where there were a bunch of hecklers in the crowd. After a few failed attempts, I pulled a 720 on the vert ramp—a maneuver I’ve made hundreds of times—and Sal convinced the crowd that I’d just made a rare 900. They went wild. From then on, anytime I made a 720, we called it a Pensacola Nine.
Meanwhile, back at the 900 Films headquarters, the editors and loggers were working 24-hour shifts to meet ESPN’s delivery deadlines. People slept on couches, under desks, in their chairs, and the trashcans overflowed with fast-food remnants and Red Bull cans.
That TV series turned out to be a terrific start-up experience for an action sports production company. Fortunately, the show was something of a success, and everyone learned how to create quality episodes on deadline. It also enabled the people with real talent to rise to the top. One of our interns, Matt Haring, was a shy 16-year-old when he started at 900 Films doing odd jobs and logging footage after school. He’d taken video production in high school and was a skater, but had no work experience whatsoever. Ten years later, he’s our top editor.
Dear Tony,
I’m really in a hole. I’m the only skater in my school, and I don’t get any appreciation for the two tricks I can do: an ollie and a shove-it. I try my balls off to learn new tricks, but I can’t get my ollies high enough. Can you send me some tips? I’m tired of being an outcast with no talents.
“Can You Teach Me How to Ollie?”
Our second big project at 900 Films was the creation of Tony Hawk’s Trick Tips . A lot of very young kids were starting to skate, and kids from around the world were sending me mail asking how to do basic tricks. So I recruited a couple of my favorite street skaters, Kris Markovich and Brian Sumner, to help me make a movie to teach the basics. We opened as if talking to someone who’d never stepped on a board, showing how to balance, push, and turn. Then we moved on to more advanced tricks like ollies, kickflips, shove-its, and heelflips.
Turns out the vacuum in that particular market was bigger than we’d realized, and our timing was good. We initially sold straight to skate shops and small sporting goods stores through Blitz Distribution, the parent company of Birdhouse. We eventually cut a deal with the head of entertainment at Best Buy and gave the electronics chain exclusive distribution rights for the first year. That turned out to be a good move.
Trick Tips climbed to Number 1 on the Billboard Sports charts and stayed there for over a year. It remains 900 Films’ best-selling product ever—the gift that keeps on giving. We recently edited it into bite-size, two-minute interstitials that we licensed to Fuel TV. We’ve used different iterations as a gift-with-purchase for other products, and even refilmed the basics to create a separate iPhone app that was Apple’s bestselling sports app for several weeks. It may be the most evergreen product of my entire career; there’s always a fresh generation of kids who want to learn how to skate.
The cover of the hugely successful Tony Hawk’s Trick Tips Volume 1 . The success of this video led to two more videos in the series, and were later turned into television interstitials, an iPhone app, product giveaways, and more.
The success of Trick Tips taught me two lessons: to stick with
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