September was planned to be a hard month for me and so it was. Much more than I could ever have imagined. The three weekends in a row of slalom competitions (Swedish, European and World championships) started out bad by a fall in my first warm up run in Stockholm on wet surface. Never skate on wet surface, I know. This stopped me from competing as much as I had planned. The good thing was that I could turn it into something not so bad. I could then film a lot more instead. Now it's only a question of finding time editing all the stuff.
On my trip to the Worlds in Morro Bay California I also had plans for LA. The article for Juice Magazine was ready and I had a CD full of pictures from the camp years, 1979 to 1985. The plan was to give Terri Craft and Dan Levy a visit at the Venice Beach office. Funny was that when we drove down from the Worlds in Morro Bay on the Monday to get Dan Gesmer off for his visit with Laura Thornhill and get Claude Reigner (Canada) and Luca Giammarco (Italy) on their flights back home, Luca and I got some hours to spend alone before his flight. Instead of hanging around the airport I suggested we take a short sightseeing at Marina Del Ray just north of the LAX airport. Once there I realized after a while that it was just beside Venice Beach so we took a walk there too. That's when I realized again that, hey, this is where the Juice Magazine office is. So I said: "Let's see if we can find it". Once we had found it I thought it would be cool just to say hello. Especially with Luca on my side as the new World Champion in tight slalom. Just before we went in a woman and a man with a familiar face came out of the port. We asked very nice if this was the Juice Magazine office. They looked on us with a suspicious air but finally said that we had come to the right place. I later realized it must have been Jeff Ho. We where in the heart of the skate land all right. That wasn't bad for a first talk in LA. We later met and said hello to Terri and Dan and Dan took some shots of Luca. The day after I came back with my article and pictures from the Swedish summer camps and Dan and I looked through the photos. He was amazed of many of them. We will see how it all turns out in the magazine later on. Keep your eyes open for that.
Had a talk with Ants Neo also about maybe doing a Swedish version of the article in the Swedish action magazine Transition. Lots of things going on.
Another mission was to try and show the early cut of the summer camp film to Tony Hawk, Lance Mountain, Rodney Mullen and Per Welinder. I got contact early on with Per when he showed up on Saturday in Morro Bay to check out the skateboard slalom scene. He met a lot of familiar faces as in Barret "Chicken" Deck (a local from his home town), Jack Smith (the organizer) and Steve Olson (the one and only). David Hacket and Duane Peters was some of the other well-known legends showing up at this occasion. All good slalom skaters still going for it. Except for Hacket who had twisted his foot badly and walked with a crutch.
Finally I met up with Welinder in LA to show the early summer camp film version. Unluckily we got problems right away. Their TV couldn't take PAL signals, only NTSC. After a while Lance showed up and we had to sit down and look in the small window of a video camera. I realized it wouldn't be possible to see the whole film like that but luckily the 40 minutes we saw was enough to get them both excited about the film. There where lot's of laughs and funny comments about the good old camp days. And they said both ok to do some live comments for the film. Per now tried getting in touch with Rodney and Tony. Rodney was apparently a little bit sceptic and told us to send some footage he could have a look at. Tony seemed more positive and said he would love to see the film but couldn't come since he was in Vancouver preparing for his big Boom Boom Huck Jam tour.
We have also got contact with Stacy Peralta this time thanks to Dan Gesmer. He also wanted a look before promising anything. So now I'm sitting here preparing a new trailer and a short version of the film for Tony, Rodney and Stacy. Hopefully this will be done during October. And maybe in late November we could have response from them if they interested for some comments. Hmm, maybe my girlfriend and I should plan for a Christmas holiday in LA this year. Wouldn't that be cool?
