I think there was this malady in skateboarding a few years ago that you needed a reality show to be successful. That you needed to be on Mtv to be important to your parent’s friends or your girlfriend’s parents or your teachers at school or the people you grew up with because they all knew Rob, Ryan, Bam and the guys from Jackass. For as much as these guys, as well as the X-Games and the Dew Tour, have done a great service for skateboarding, and I truly believe they have, they’ve never been accurate portraits of what a skateboarder’s life was really like. With their emergence and subsequent popularity there seemed to be two different universes at play here, the scripted world and the skateboarder’s world with the latter seemingly very disconnected from the former the way a beauty queen and a homeless man might be. So, earlier in the year I convinced NBC/Dew tour to let me try and offer some balance, do something different, something new, something that had nothing to do with scripted reality shows or commentators trying to condense these skater’s stories into a few lines during their runs at the Dew tour. I had no idea if it would work, only hope that it would. As you know, hope springs eternal in the human breast and as great as it is it does not replace hard work and hard work these past 9 months it has been, but what we came up with I truly believe has never been done in the way that we’ve done it. We’ve made 40 ten-minute episodes of PUSH available online before an hour long documentary aired on NBC last weekend which was just a prelude to a much fuller length (1 hour and 45 minute) documentary coming out on iTunes and Netflix next month as well as what you’re about to see beginning now and for the next few weeks; the best of each skater’s story culminating into their full-length video part filmed during the time we had with them. I don’t know how we did it and I certainly don’t know how they did it, but they did and I’m really proud. What you’re about to see here is the best of the last 7 months of what we filmed of Josh Matthews’ life and the best of what Josh Matthews filmed with us in the last 7 months. Together, they make quite an amazing experience.
-SB
