Weekend Watchin' - Buddy Nichols and Rick Charnoski

Buddy Nichols and Rick Charnoski have been making skate videos together for over a decade. Their first collaborative film, Fruit of the Vine, was a documentary of a pool skating trip from California to Washington shot in super 8 and released in 1999. Then, in 2004 they made Tent City. I'm fully aware of how lame the term "epic" is when referring to skate videos, but I'm having a hard time thinking of another way to describe it, so, fuck it, the video was EPIC. It remains in my top five all time favorite videos, and I can't see it getting bumped down anytime soon. If you've never seen it, it's an Anti-Hero camping trip through Australia shot, once again, in super 8 with John Cardiel, Tony Trujillo, Julian Stranger and Frank Gerwer, among others.

Their most recent feature-length release was Deathbowl to Downtown, a documentary chronicling the history of skateboarding in New York City. It starts in the 70s and slaloms its way through all the styles, trends, and spots that have made skating in the city what it is today. They also recently made a short film for Creature skateboards called Blood Shed about a satanic cult of smoking hot "blood sluts" who live in a house with a perfect abandoned pool in the backyard. It's awesome and it's embedded below.

I met up with Buddy and Rick at a bar, where we talked and got progressively drunker until the conversation digressed to the prospect of New York and LA seceding from the US and Buddy and Rick starting some sort of sexy airline connecting the two cities.

Vice: Hello Buddy. Hello Rick. Where are you guys from?
Rick: I'm originally from Pennsylvania, then I moved to New York, and now I live in LA.
Buddy: I did North Carolina, Boston, Portland, Oregon, New York from '94 to '03, and then LA. We moved to LA at about the same time. How'd you guys meet?
Rick: In Texas in 1990. Buddy was traveling from Seattle to Florida on a random skate trip. Back in the early 90s skateboarding was pretty dead. You couldn't have imagined that skateboarding would turn into what it is today, like skateboarders everywhere, places to skate everywhere, skateboard films, magazines, a whole culture, shows, none of that, not even a fucking inkling of that type of thing was going on at that time. So we traveled a lot. We'd go halfway across the country to ride a really good ramp with a few good skaters. For instance, you always knew there was a good scene in Texas. Jeff Phillips' park was there, and you knew there would to be a bunch of rad dudes there, and it was indoor so we'd just go there to skate, that's all we wanted to do. And then you guys just happened to be living in New York at the same time? Well, I wasn't living here yet. We met again in '96 or '97 just skating around the city. Buddy was on his way to Amsterdam to do a Cannabis Cup article for High Times with a friend of ours and he was talking about how everyone was doing things in New York and I thought, "Fuck, I've got to get up here!" It was just the next place to be. How did you guys get into making films?
When I moved up here Buddy and I just sort of fell into it. It was really seamless and natural, just like, "Hey, you wanna make a film?" and "Yeah, man." And Buddy had this idea for a film about pool skating, and I was super hyped on learning how to make videos. So he had ideas and I had ideas and we just sort of helped each other into making this film about pool skating called Fruit of the Vine. And then we lived here for years together making skateboard videos mostly about pool skating and California, then, as soon as we moved to California we made a movie about New York.
Buddy: Yep, the main idea behind that film is traveling. I know that was a big part of what we were both into when we met. When we first started, none of us had any money, so initially one of the main benefits of working together was being able to split the cost of the film. Also, there's a lot of grunt work involved in film, you've got to bring it to the lab, you've got to get it transferred, there's a lot of stuff to do so being able to split that up between us helped too.  Did either of you guys go to school for this stuff?
I got into making films, well, both of us, in the early 90s. We were doing stuff independently in the early 90s, just sort of dabbling around, then I went to grad school at the New School for media theory.  What's that?
Yeah, exactly. I realized that Marxist theory in media wasn't my kind of thing, it was more for people who wanted to go on to teach, and I was into practical application, I wanted to make stuff, you know? But I got to take a couple of cool documentary classes and make a couple of cool things, so at least it opened my mind to the idea that anybody can do it. Because you're looking at these idiots who are making films in the program I realized that they didn't have a fucking clue. And then meeting Rick, and knowing that he had no formal training was an inspiration to me, and you know in skateboarding everyone's running around and it's not that abnormal to have a video camera. It sounds kind of silly, but skateboarding is good training for a lot of things. 
Rick: Skateboarding has always come from that school of DIY, always. From the beginning, skaters have had to find their own spots and make shit happen for yourself. Yeah, it definitely inspires a sort of DIY attitude, it makes you realize that you can actually make something happen if you just want to do it. Why did you guys decide to make Deathbowl to Downtown? Why New York instead of somewhere else?
Buddy: The genesis was an article in New York Magazine called "Dogtown East," or something like that, and it was about Andy Kessler and his buddies, the original Zoo York crew. The first ten minutes of Deathbowl to Downtown was that article in a sense. It was an old article, from 2003 or 2004.
Rick: Yeah, Kessler always had this stone in his shoe or whatever, a thorn in his side about what was happening to skateboarding and how nobody ever recorded the roots of skating in New York. So when that article finally came out that was like boom! OK, Kessler's story is real, it's legit, he has photos, it started to bring a little awareness to that whole thing for the first time.
Buddy: Anyway, it started out as a 15 or 20-minute thing. We got some funding, the funding was there because Kessler knew some people, like Steve Rodriguez from 5Boro, you know, so the funding was there. Then it just started snowballing and we couldn't find a good cutoff point.
Rick: We couldn't end it on a downer when skating dies in 1980! We were trying to get to the point where we could have a clean ending, and then that ending kept going a few more years until it was like, "Fuck it, we'll take it up to present day."

So the initial plan wasn't to have it cover a few decades?
No, not originally. But you can't tell Zoo York's story without telling where skateboarding is today. You've got to talk about how it all came full circle and how much influence the original scene of soul artists and the skaters that hung out with them who called themselves Zoo York, had on everything that was going on in the late seventies. We tried to tell a short story but we couldn't tell their story without telling what it turned into, which is basically the story of the whole fucking thing. The whole thing is about how skateboarding came from surfing and how these kids in the 70s adapted it to the city rather than the beach. Skateboarding went from the beach to the city. That was the message of our film.

How long did it take to make this thing?
Three-and-a-half years.
Buddy: It's funny, in retrospect the film doesn't seem complicated at all, but we would spend two weeks on three lines of narration. Trying to condense some big idea into a couple lines. We got our buddy Jocko Weyland to help us out with the script, because he had just written a book about the history of skateboarding in general. He came up with like a 60, 70 page thing--basically everything he could tell about skateboarding from 1975 to 2005. So we took that and tried to fit New York into it and tell the story of skateboarding from the most unlikely place--New York, rather than California. We wanted to tell the evolution of skating, not the history necessarily, but the evolutionary track, using Zoo York.

But it was meant to mirror skateboarding as a whole.
Exactly. What we thought was the history of skateboarding, in a way, followed New York history. Maybe not for a lot of years, it took a while for the rest of skateboarding to catch up, until the late 80s, but the path that New York was on was the path that skateboarding in general would take. I don't know. Whatever

I know what you're saying. Kids skating in New York ONLY skated the city.
Yeah, the kids in New York realized the potential of skating cities, whereas everyone else, Rick and myself included, was skating on ramps and backyards. We were confined to these teeny little postage stamp places in the middle of nowhere. We'd travel halfway across the country to skate in an indoor warehouse in the fucking crappiest neighborhood in Dallas. Whereas the kids in New York were skating around, hitting the Brooklyn Banks or whatever, having a great time, having just as much fun as we were but utilizing the stuff that was just outside of their door. And that's what skateboarding turned into. Not what Rick and I were doing. What we were doing died.

So you were telling the story as outsiders.
Rick: The whole project, the whole thing was about skateboarding that we didn't participate in at all. We were totally coming from the outside telling this thing, but with the sense of a skateboarder. It was a weird thing you know? I think people were surprised when it came out the way we told it. We were talking about freestyle and graffiti crews and all this other weird shit. I think it's almost more of a film for people who don't skate.
Buddy: Yeah, it's a little redundant for a skater, especially New York skaters. Not only redundant, but it leaves out 95 percent of the history of New York, right? Of course we catch flack from dudes from New York who are like, "Dude! You left out…" Our apologies, but there's not much we can do. I always tell those dudes, "The movie that's playing in your head of your childhood is never going to compare to anything that anyone's going to make. We're never going to capture that. Maybe you could, but we didn't grow up here. We can't do that." We can interview 100 something people and pick out the 20 stories that every one of those people told and try to show that, and that's basically what we did, we focused on the stories that everybody knew, that everybody related to. The time Mark Gonzalez came through town, that kind of shit. The highlights, you know? We showed the movie at Harvard and a bunch of 20-year-old Asian girls came in and were like, "Whoa!" and they're clapping and saying this is great, they think it's cool as shit.

You guys showed it at Harvard?
Yeah, but you show it here and it's like, "Booooo! I don't like Bobby Puleo!"
Rick: That's sort of the point. We made a skateboard film that the professor at the graduate school of design at Harvard somehow fucking came across and was like, "Dude, bring these guys up here, this is exactly what I'm talking about as far as films about architecture go." It's kind of using the city and the skaters who skated here to tell a bigger story.

Have you guys shown it at any other fancy places?
Yeah, we've shown it at Columbia, at Harvard, at fucking crazy art centers…it's a whole range of places.

Where did you get all that archival footage, especially the stuff with The Gonz?
Buddy: Well, that particular Gonzales footage…it's funny, with that stuff we kicked a sleeping dog and we told the guy who owned Vision Streetwear that we had this footage that he didn't know existed. Because they were all outtakes, none of it had made it into the actual Vision video.
Rick: Yeah, Vision Streetwear came out to New York in the 80s to do a fucking urban, Mark Gonzales skate-through-the-city thing, which they ended up using for a commercial. They got all this killer footage, some of it got used--and then our buddy, Jeremy, who took Gonz around, had the VHS tapes of just the raw shit.
Buddy: That's why it's got the time codes at the bottom still. The actual dubs.
Rick: We got so fucked.
Buddy: We ended up paying a grand a minute for them.

Shit!
Yeah, and he didn't even know they existed.

It says in the film that that was the first handrail ever grinded. Is that true?
Yeah that's the story
Rick: According to folklore, that's video footage of the first handrail ever.

And Vision never used it!? How could they have slept on that footage?
Buddy: It's in this little video, but no one's ever seen the video because it just went around to shops and the shops probably chucked it after 6 months.
Rick: It's just one of those things that fell through the cracks.

Speaking of random old footage, I didn't know that there was ever a time when skaters wore shinguards.
Buddy: Haha, the freestyle shit?
Rick: Yeah, the freestyle sections were pretty hot.
Buddy: That was another point we were trying to make, you know, a lot of street skating is freestyle skating. Not that that's a big revelation, but it was funny to show how the roots of something so cool could be so lame. It wasn't to make fun of anybody or whatever, it's just reality, it's just funny. That's just the facts. Freestyle invented kickflips and 360 flips and impossibles and so much shit that's just normal today.

And Mike Vallely. That guy really gets under my skin. Why is that?
Haha, I'm not gonna say anything.
Rick: He's got his schtick man. He's almost the WWF of skateboarding or something, he's just this crazy character. He's a funny cat, man, he's always been pretty intense.
Buddy: I think his heart is 100 percent in the right place. He's just gone about things differently than I would--than a lot of people would.
Rick: He's not doing anything bad.

Another thing I found interesting was the beginning of Supreme. Was Supreme ever a poor shop or was it an elitist, high-end, boutiquey kind of place from the beginning?
That was it's schtick from the beginning.
Buddy: I think so, yeah. I think the dude is a pretty genius marketing cat, you know?

Yeah, it was probably the first shop like that, huh?
Yeah, I think it's quintessentially New York. That shop and that scene catered to what was becoming the new aesthetic of skating in a sort of hyperreal way, an over the top way. I remember when I was living in Atlanta my wife had a Vogue or an Elle magazine and I opened it up because we were moving to New York in a few months and there was a split spread of--this is like '94--of the Supreme skate shop on one side and the Chanel store or something on the other side--it was a comparison of the two. You know, just like, celebrities that hang at each store and I thought, "My God, New York is so fucking weird. This is where we're moving." It was unique to New York…a lot like Harold Hunter, you know? Harold Hunter wouldn't have become a pro skater if he was from anywhere but New York. He just embodied so much of New York--the swagger, the in your face, I don't give a fuck what you think, here's my schtick, here's my thing, whatever. That's why some people love New York and some people hate it. That's what it is, for better or worse. I think it's the same with Supreme and the New York skate scene in general. It's like, "Fuck you." Dudes moving out to California from New York with a fucking gold grill and suburban white kids like "What? Guys that look like this skate?" And that's rad. That's something that New York changed quietly, through the back door, and it changed so much of skating. I think for the better in the long run. Skating used to be so fucking white and now it's not. That to me is awesome. I think one of the best things about modern skating is that it's not just white kids from the suburbs. Because fuck, then it'd be snowboarding, and skating's a fuck of a lot cooler than snowboarding.

Who the fuck snowboards anyway?
Dude, snowboarding is practically rollerblading.

I feel that the narrator of a film is a pretty important thing. March of the Penguins had Morgan Freeman and his awesome voice, and you guys had Chloe Sevigny. How did you guys go about deciding on her?
I think the first thing was to have a chick, because it was all dudes being interviewed.

Right. You needed some balance in there.
We were sick of hearing dude voices. Making skate videos you get sick of hearing dude voices in general. The decision to have a girl was one that we made together.
Rick: We wanted to have some celeb so people would go, "Oh, cool, Chloe…" what the fuck else? I'm not going to hide it. We were like, let's get Chloe. She was in that movie, people will want to see it.
Buddy: She's got a cool downtown rep.
Rick: Yeah, she's cool. You know, it worked out pretty well. I just wish we had had a little more time to write some of the stuff and reword some of the things.
Buddy: I like it. Some people like it and some don't. From what people tell us, it's about 70-30, backing it. I like that it's dry and deadpan. And I love that it's a girl.

Did you guys know her before, or was it basically like you had just seen her in Kids.
We had some third party connections.
Rick: I gotta tell you, for not knowing her, and for as busy as she probably is, she just threw down, she was there. It was fucking cool. She really hooked it up for us. It was really good of her to do it. We haven't really talked to her since though.
Buddy: I saw her in a Starbucks in LA and talked to her for ten minutes like six months ago.
Rick: It's no big deal man, she just read the shit off and I don't think she's ever watched it.
Buddy: She says she's embarrassed of her voice. She was very cool though and we are very appreciative.
Rick: You can't hide that having her name and her voice attached to the film brings it more awareness. Fashion people were like, "Oh cool," whatever that means.
Buddy: It validates it a little if Chloe's backing it, know what I mean?
Rick: That was a long way of answering the reason to get her to do it.

Alright, moving on, this is a current events question. What do you guys think about what's going on with the banks right now? Do you think it's going to be the same when the city's finished?
Buddy: I think the sad thing is that they ruined the actual banks. That shit that's there now, I mean, I'm not a huge authority on it--I skated them a lot when I moved here--but 90 percent of all skating, even when you look at all the footage we collected, 90 percent of it is on the little banks, the part that's now got a grass field in front of it. They ruined that for no reason. They could open that up, you know? They could shut down those other banks, fill in that grass with bricks and restore the old banks and no one would give a shit. Those other banks are some BMX shit. Also, the banks don't hold the same significance they did in 85, 86, 92, whatever. That used to be the place to go skate and--like we say in the movie--before cell phones, that was the place you could go and you'd know your homies would be there. You couldn't just call them when you showed up into town, or when you showed up in Manhattan from Brooklyn, you would go there and find them. Now you can call kids and say, "Meet me here, meet me there, wherever." And there's ten times more fucking places to skate. Whatever happens to them, I think it would've been a much bigger deal if it was 15 or 20 years ago because now you've got a lot of places to skate.

You guys have lived here and California. You made this film about New York, but do you have a coast that you prefer, as far as skateboarding or just in gene…
Rick: California.

Yeah, that easy?
Yeah.
Buddy: For skateboarding? I moved to California for a reason, otherwise I'd still be here. I would love to live in the city, I just need a hell of a lot more money. I don't want to scrabble around out here any more. You can scrabble around out in California a hell of a lot easier. You can surf, skate, sunshine--it's nice.
Rick: The promised land.
Buddy: I would go completely fucking crazy if I didn't have New York to come back to though. We come back pretty often. It's still my second home. As far a skateboarding, it's getting pretty good here too right now. A friend of ours, Tony Farmer, lives here. He's finding all these pools around New York, there's skate parks, all this cool shit getting built--skateboarding is so different and so fun out here. If you could put New York in LA that would be the place to be, right? But it would also have like 50 million people there because that's where everyone in the world would want to be, so I guess the closest thing would be Sydney, Australia. Thank God for Jet Blue.
Rick: I can't believe there's not a New York-LA, New York-San Francisco designated airline. Like you just show up and 50 bucks, 100, 200 bucks and that's it, boom. Get on. Go. That would be so rad. Somebody would make so much money if they could figure that out.
Buddy: For about 30 million of us, the rest of the country is obsolete, you know? It doesn't really matter. You should have one country that involves New York, San Francisco, and LA…maybe Philly and Boston if you want to be generous--and say, "This is our country, you guys can have the rest." We wouldn't have to vote the same, we could run our country how we want and have legalized weed and prostitution and gambling and all the other fucking Christians or whatever can have Nebraska and Iowa.

So you're proposing a whole new country? A new system of government?
Buddy: That's what I'm proposing here. Haha, no.
Rick: I think if I was one of those Richie Rich types I would start that fucking airline company.
Buddy: Call it "The Air Bridge."
Rick: The hippie fucking green airline--who wouldn't fucking take the airline from LA to New York or New York to LA with killer food, sick-ass fucking weird movies…
Buddy: No seats, just beds.
Rick: Sex with crazy hot ass fucking and all--you could just--everything works on there. That would be amazing!
Buddy: Then you'd have to have the gay flight too.
Rick: Sure.
Buddy: A certain time period would be like, "Alright, gay dudes, you get yours."

Or you could just partition different sections.
Rick: Yeah, yeah, it would just be a fucking filth fest in there. People would be crossing over, just like, "I'm gonna be gay for a bit."

Sounds like a great idea.
Buddy: Thank you, if anybody wants to take us up on it tell them to get in touch.
Rick: I'll be willing to consult.
Buddy: I'll invest $800 or whatever my bank account says.