During my research some of the subjects told me that there were already several other filmmakers doing the same type of project. That information just strengthened my resolve. I knew these other filmmakers couldn't have the same connection to the area and people of Marin.
My folks still lived in Marin, so I had a place to call base camp. I was committed to spending a lot of time there getting to know the subjects before I stuck a camera in their face. We rode, we had a few beers, talked about cycling, and got to know one another.
I hit some serious rough patches along the way, personally, and they all helped me out. During the production both of my parents passed away and I almost gave up on the whole thing. I drew upon my new friends’ strengths, and their belief in me, to finish the project. I'll be forever grateful to them for that.
Oh, and skating. Ray Flores from Dogtown hooked me up with a board when I licensed the archival footage from him. I hadn't really skated since I busted myself up in 1978 skating pools, but he got me into it again, much to my wife's chagrin. Out on the festival tour I met so many surfers, cyclists and skaters that we kept in touch. At every festival I usually had an opportunity to get out in the water, in the woods, or on the concrete with these other filmmakers. This film really got me back in touch with some of my passions in life. It's been a total gas.
5) What do you think it was about Northern California that fostered the whole mountain bike culture?
As the guys say in the film, there was this group of committed cyclists that really pushed the thing. They told their friends, who told more people, and it just blew up. They would race their road bikes during the season then cross-train on the Klunkerz in the winter. When Charlie Kelly started the Repack race series, that was the catalyst. Those competitions really got people fired up about this new sport and where it might go. Before Repack, it was a fun excuse to go cruise in the woods with your friends, but once those races started, it was on.
6) When you started mountain biking in the 80s, how had the scene changed since the early days you capture in this film?
The idea was the same: going out in the woods with your friends. But by the early 1980s you could actually go to a store and buy a mountain bike. Then, by the mid-1980s you could get a mountain bike just about anywhere. There were sanctioning bodies and serious races taking place all over the world. The whole thing just exploded in the 1980s.
By 1986 the mountain bike was outselling the road bike in America. That's a very big deal. In the formative years it took weeks, if not months, to get someone to put one of these bikes together for you. You could ask Alan [Bonds] or Gary [Fisher] or whomever to build you one, but it took forever. They had to find you a frame somewhere, hunt down all the parts, and then wrestle the thing together.
It wasn't cheap, either. One of these bikes cost several hundred dollars...that's in 1976 dollars. You also have to consider that the frames were 40 years old at that point. Catastrophic mechanical failure was a way of life. There was no guarantee that your bike would survive a single run down Repack. Those old frames rusted from the inside, so you only found out about it when it split in half at the most inopportune moment. That's really why I wanted to make KLUNKERZ, to show that you couldn't always walk into a bike shop and say, "I want that!"
7) You mention spending hours in hospital waiting rooms. What's the worst injury you've sustained on a bike or a skateboard?
I always liked these sports -- but I guess I wasn't really good at them because I was constantly getting hurt. I was pretty lucky on the bike. Never anything more than a few stitches here and there ... road rash and some nasty bruises, that kind of thing.
Skateboarding was another story. I think I left patches of skin on all kinds of asphalt between L.A. and Marin. Besides the road rash, I dislocated both elbows, sprained both wrists and ankles, got a couple of concussions and broken fingers, skating in pools. My last crash in an empty pool was pretty brutal. My elbow would dislocate, due to calcium deposits from previous injuries, so the socket just sort of exploded. A piece of the bone broke free and shot right through a section of my triceps, severing it. I had some nerve damage and I lost feeling in my ring and small fingers on the left hand. I broke ribs and got a concussion on that one, too. I had another surgery on that elbow two years ago and they were able to decompress some of the nerve, so I can, mostly, feel those fingers now. That was it for me for skating, until KLUNKERZ.
I don't know if this counts, but I messed myself up pretty bad on my first surf trip to the North Shore of Oahu. A section bowled up on me at Chun's and I got bounced off the reef, head first. I suffered a serious compression injury in my neck between C-5 and C-6. I had to get surgery to free the nerves coming out of my spinal cord. That was pretty sketchy.
On my first shooting trip to Marin on KLUNKERZ some guy rear-ended me on the 5 Freeway, blowing out a disc in my Thoracic spine. They gave me a series of spinal injections -- “nerve blocks” I think they call them. I know that one doesn't really count -- but I did have a bicycle on the back of the car.
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