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lyouna · 5 years

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The story of Josh Dun

Joshua William “Josh” Dun is an American musician. Best known for being the drummer for the band Twenty One Pilots. He was born in Columbus, Ohio, on June 18, 1988. His star sign is Gemini. He has two sisters named Ashley and Abigail and a brother named Jordan.

Since his childhood, he was always terrified by talking in front of people even if it was a small group of it. However, when he is playing drums he does not feel that way, he is not as vulnerable as that when it comes to talking.

He self-taught when he was around 12 how to play drums, and worked at the Guitar Center for 3 years. He also worked with former Twenty One Pilots drummer Chris Salih, through whom he would eventually meet Tyler Joseph.

Dun's first foray into the music industry was with an alternative/Christian rock band House of Heroes. He joined the band through their drummer, Colin Rigsby, who was taking a break to spend time with his family. Dun played alongside the band on tour from March to October 2010 when Rigsby returned to his role.

"I would lay in my bed every night with sticks and hit my knees trying to figure out what they were doing, like, 'Okay, now they're hitting the ride cymbal, and now it's the snare and now the crash.' I would dissect everything that I watched or listened to. Every day I would walk to the local music store and play their electronic drums until one of the workers would be like, 'Hey, we have people in here that actually want to buy stuff so you've gotta go.' I did that for about a year and that's essentially how I learned to play some basic beats."

Throughout both middle school and high school, he didn't have a lot of money and it helps him to be more creative. He even thought about finding pieces of wood and figure it out how to make them in a drum. Figure out how they would sound with different holes in it, with different types of wood... Nevertheless, at this end, he said that the best drum set he had was one of SJC Drums.

He likes nothing more to do than to play drums; in fact, he plays the exact same way when he is in a dark room by himself and when he is in front of thousands of people. He said that he wants to be creative and just to get outside of the box even if that sounds weird.

He said that although his inspiration comes from some drummers, his greatest inspiration is his parents. Indeed, he starts playing drums in a sort of rebellious state again them and that turns into them being more than supportive.

In 2011, upon the invite of co-worker and the band's drummer Chris Salih, Dun attended a Twenty One Pilots show after listening to their original demo CD. Josh first saw Twenty One Pilots at a club on the Ohio State campus. “I loved everything about the show except for one thing: I wasn’t onstage playing also,” he says. After the show, he met lead singer and future bandmate Tyler Joseph, and a couple of days later began to build a friendship with him. It would be another year before Joseph’s original drummer quit and Dun got the job, but they had become best friends in the meantime.

By 2012, Joseph had grown into a ferocious performer, climbing the scaffolding and diving into audiences. The duo became the biggest band in central Ohio, putting every spare penny into the band and focusing intensely on their local fans. They filmed much of the “Stressed Out” video at Dun’s childhood home, so it has become a destination for Twenty One Pilots fans.

The highest point of his sort of musical journey was (according to his words) when he played for a college show at Ohio University. It was full of drunken kids, one of them even tried to pee on his drums and then on their merch. They eventually played one song and after it, the police shut them down. However, he said that it was the first show that he played with Tyler Joseph. He realized during this one song that he was playing with his best friend and he will never forget that.

The duo then released the band’s second studio album, Regional at Best. It was self-released on July 8, 2011. Regional at Best is a discontinued album. It is the last album released by the band prior to signing a record deal with Fueled by Ramen, and it is the first album to feature the talents of Josh Dun.

Josh Dun was raised in conservative, religious households. Video games and most rocks or hip-hop albums were banned. "I’d hide albums like Green Day’s Dookie under my bed," Dun says. "Sometimes they’d find them and get real mad. They’d find a Christian alternative, like Relient K, and make me listen to that."

For a while, the only movies allowed in the house came from CleanFlicks, a Christian company that took Hollywood movies and edited out all the profanity, sexuality and violence. For a young Dun, it made watching movies like The Terminator quite confusing. "Some scenes they’d remove entirely," he says. "Watching those movies was an absolutely awful experience."

By the time he was a teenager, Josh was rebelling hard. "I just had this aggression," he says, noting that his parents nearly kicked him out when he was 14. "They almost sent me to a military school. They did not know what to do with me, and I was always in detention. I never got into drugs or alcohol, but I would yell at my parents and just treat them terribly. Everything was an argument. Looking back, they were trying their best."

When his parents fell asleep, he would break out his punk-pop CDs; eventually, they softened up on rock music, allowing him to assemble a drum kit in his basement piece by piece with his own money. After he said this to some interviewers, he called his parents to explain himself.

"I actually called my parents after some articles came out – I never wanted for them to be painted in a bad light.

‘I’m so thankful for the way that I was raised. Ultimately, the idea of parents being strict or having rules, looking back, I did have a really rebellious phase and did whatever I could to do the opposite of what they wanted.

‘That’s all on me. For them, I think they were trying to do their best to raise me as best they could. They were trying to make the best decisions for me, and looking back, I can see they were the right decisions.

‘As I look at the rules I had, I wasn’t allowed to play video games or watch TV, so I went outside and made up games with my neighbourhood friends or built dirt ramps and rode our bikes over them.

‘I would be out from morning to night. I look at that, and I can’t imagine it if my parents had let me sit in and watch TV all day – I’d be a different person to who I am today, it’s thanks to them saying ‘‘get out and go do something"

He did not go to college, moving in with a bunch of buddies instead and playing in local bands while scraping by working in the drum department of Guitar Center. "I was going nowhere," he says. "One day I said to my dad, ‘Are you disappointed that I’m working a minimum-wage job and I didn’t go to college?’ I’ll never forget his response. He said, ‘It’s not about how much money you make or what your job is, but it’s more about your character. For that, I’m proud of you.’ It gave me motivation."

During an interview, Josh said “We’re always questioning things,” he says, “but I guess it’s safe to say that we’re both Christians.”

Although Columbus is still very much the Pilots’ base, Josh actually moved out to L.A a couple of years ago in pursuit of more sunshine while Tyler remained there. However, he says it has not made them working together any more difficult. “I’m equally in Columbus as much as I am there. We discussed this a lot before I moved out there. I always feared talking about us being in different places because I think that can be confusing to people from an outside standpoint - like are you guys still friends? Are you still in the band? We had so many conversations about logistics, but first of all, we’re together more than we’re not together over the course of a year. We’re on the phone every day and with technology, it’s so easy to get things done.”

On January 8, 2013, Vessel was born, it was their first album after signing with Fueled By Ramen and it received mainstream exposure. On May 17, 2015, Blurryface was released and the band received international success.

In July 2017, Twenty One Pilots went on hiatus for a year whilst they worked on their next album. On October 5, 2018, Trench was released, it was also a commercial success, reaching number one in six countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Spain, and the Netherlands and number two in several countries, notably the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as selling more than a million copies worldwide.

Therefore, he needed to learn how to deals with notoriety, he had the help of Tyler Joseph (of course), his family, and Debby Ryan. Indeed, from May 2013 to September 2014, he had a relationship with her. They got back together a few years later and in December 2018, Josh posted on Instagram his engagement to Debby in New Zealand during the second leg of The Bandito Tour. He wrote, «I found a tree house in the woods in New Zealand and proposed to my girl. She my dude for life. I love you Debby".

She also posts about it «My dude asked me on a date. I said yeah because I always want to go on dates with him. Then he asked me to be his forever dude. He does things well, and right. His timing has pressed us and never failed us. He's sincere and fun and disciplined and strong as heck and a nerd and a rockstar and a good midwestern man and a silly shirtless boy, and his family is endlessly warm and delightful and are such champions. I have two parents and a brother; they're superheroes and they're my home. They've been the only thing that moves my needle with the fierceness of deep empathy. I have never that out in the world. I guess I figured it wasn't a connection you could stumble upon, only something you could only be born into. Falling in love with joshua was discovering it in the wild. Building it with him, building in certainty, infinite in wonder. Our own lil family. Feels like growing up and moving through life is just evolving through different types of complicated. He is where all the voices narrow into one sound. My only simplicity, where the important things are clear and the other things aren't that important. He's my heart outside my body. He's a cold water awakening a warm bed; he's the place I can rest. Dudes for life. It was a really good date."

Josh has many tattoos and every single one have a strong signification. Firstly, John Graefe tattooed his right arm and then tell the story of it. “I was tattooing in Hollywood and he came in with bandmate, Tyler. They weren’t half as big as they are today and I had no idea at first. I just asked him the whole meaning behind his tattoo and he asked me to come up with the vision.”

The tattoo on his right arm had a blue geometric-like image or something that looks like a galaxy. Below is the image of nature. The musician mentioned that he would share this if it’s personally asked, but he did not want it spreading all over the Internet.

Both he and Tyler have an "X" tattoo on their body symbolizing their dedication to their hometown fans in Columbus, Ohio. They received it on stage during their hometown show at the Lifestyle Communities Pavilion on April 26, 2013. Dun's is located on his neck behind his right ear.

In October 2015, Tyler and Josh asked their fans to choose one of them among themselves via a vote on Twitter. The winner should have his name on the loser on stage. For 24 hours, the two boys shot several videos parodying the presidential debates on topics such as Christmas music or their favorite drink, the Red bull. The results of the vote were equal. Therefore, Dun sports the name "Tyler" above his left knee.

Josh has a tattoo on the inside of his left arm dedicated to his mom. A heart with "mom" written inside of it. Which she answers on Instagram by “These past few months have been exciting seeing how far Josh and Tyler have gone. But it’s been a little hard for me as a mother to feel like I have to share my son with the world. Josh, you getting this tattoo means so much to me. I love you and now your stuck with Mom forever! <3”

He has a drum tattoo on his left arm.

Chantelle Thong made his last tattoo during the Bandito Tour, on December 2018. It represents an astronaut/spaceman flipping, while simultaneously being abducted or levitating into a spaceship. It might be a reference to March to the sea. Fans assumed that the spaceman is Josh Dun.

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zachvillasource · 5 years

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interview | zach villa - schonmagazine.com

As the infamous Night Stalker, Iowa-born actor Zach Villa is a chaotic evil in the latest series of American Horror Story. Entitled AHS: 1984, the show plays off the hopes and tropes of the 1980s, incorporating elements from films like Friday the 13th and Halloween into a spine-tingling thrill ride. The chief villain of the series is Villa’s Richard Ramirez, a reality-based serial killer set on making the lead characters’ lives a living hell — quite literally.

In real life, however, Villa is an obvious contrast. A multihyphenate with a strong career across a range of disciplines, he first caught the attention of the mainstream from his collaboration with Evan Rachel Wood in the project Rebel and a Basketcase. Now, as AHS: 1984 keeps audiences around the world thoroughly spooked, Villa opens up to Schön! about growing up in Iowa, his willingness to collaborate with Taylor Swift, and the unexpected call that announced his role on American Horror Story.

How did you get your start in acting?

Well, I’ve been on stage since I was two, so the whole shebang started quite early. Acting, oddly, was an afterthought when I first started. I had been dancing and singing on stage for years, idolising great song-and-dance performers like Gene Kelly, Donald O’ Connor, and Sammy Davis Jr. when it occurred to me that I should probably focus on learning the craft of acting if I wanted to continue pursuing that particular path in the entertainment industry. I had focused intensely on two out of the three “triple threat” disciplines, so I guessed it was time that I figured out the third part. It was an accessory to being able to perform musical theatre roles more effectively, and I guess that backfired in a sense and became a more central focus as I developed.

Iowa isn’t the most common birthplace for a big-time actor. What does your family — and presumably other Midwestern relatives — think of your journey into Hollywood?

They are both thrilled and confused. Don’t get me wrong — my family is very happy for me, and while we have had our spats over the years about whether or not I should be pursuing a highly volatile, financial unstable career, they have ultimately come through and rooted for me and my success.

That being said, I think pursuing a career in the mainstream entertainment industry is a very singular experience. Unless you’ve lived it and hit the pavement in NYC, L.A., etc., it’s very hard to understand the day-to-day struggles of a performing artist. I think that certain regions of the country are — generally — a majority of media consumers as opposed to creators, and there is a disconnect between the public and those of us pursuing an arts career that propagates the fallacy of things being easy and breezy, since you don’t have to get up every day at 6 AM, go to the office, and then come home and make dinner. People see that lack of structure as undisciplined and fancy-free. Let me tell you, it’s anything but. Artists have to hit the pavement in a very different way that is highly varied from day to day, and that uncertainty introduces a unique kind of stress, in addition, to actually trying to be good at your job. I always say that booking work is my “job” as an actor, and when I actually book a gig, that’s where the job ends and the craft and career begins. Translating that to someone without firsthand experience can be infuriatingly difficult.

Where were you when you found out about landing AHS: 1984 and the scope of your role? What did you do?Who did you call first?

I was in the studio recording an audiobook — one of the many ways that this particular actor has been able to supplement their income, and it has been such a gift. I was waiting on the call, and I stopped narrating mid-sentence — much to the puzzlement of my audio engineer — and picked up. I got the news, opened the door of the vocal booth and leaned against the front wall, sliding down to a sitting fetal position, and started to tear up. I called a few close friends and family and walked around for the better part of an hour mildly freaking out. The studio staff secretly went and bought a bottle of champagne down the street, and after I finished my page quota for the day they surprised me with a toast. Then everything in my life became a blur.

Of course, without spoiling anything, what can you tell us about your role as Richard Ramirez in AHS: 1984?

Oh, that’s a very difficult question. Richard Ramirez was a real person. I am playing a character that shares his name and is informed by him and his history. Beyond that, you’ll just have to wait and see.

What was the most memorable moment from shooting the series?

I can’t say my absolute favourite without revealing secrets! But I’ll say that the encounter with the hiker in episode two was quite “fun” — if you can call pretending to murder someone “fun.” The makeup and FX team on the show is the best in the biz, and the blood rig that was used in that scene was just wild. It was messy and crazy, and [there was] high pressure to get it right in one take, and I loved it.

What’s your method for getting into character, both in the weeks and moments leading up to a shoot or performance?

I have to play these cards close to the chest. Some of it is instinct. I just feel as though I am inside the character’s head at some point after spending enough time with the material, but it’s different with each role.

Sometimes I need to know how they sound, sometimes it’s historical research. It’s ALWAYS spending an exorbitant amount of time with the script — that’s the golden rule for me. Whether its Shakespeare or the 200th episode of Friends, you have to start with the text as an actor, and the most minute differences in phrasing, punctuation, word choice, etc. are clues to how this person operates as a human being and in the world. I always come back to the text. Any other secret sauce that I do I’ll keep secret for now.

What’s been the most challenging part of playing a character like this?

I’ll modify the question to ask what’s the most important part of playing a character like this… and that, I think, is being able to let it go at the end of the day — which I don’t always succeed in doing. Sometimes after an intense shoot it takes me a minute to let go of the energy I was carrying around on set. I pride myself on being able to flip in and out, but that is challenging from time to time for me on this particular project.

If you could only watch one film and one television series for the rest of your life, which would you choose?

The Back to the Future Trilogy for movies and Battlestar Galactica for TV. Nerd alert.

Apart from acting (and dance) you’re also well-versed in music. How did you begin as a musician?

The same time that I started hearing it, so very, very early. Growing up with a dance studio attached to your house, you hear a lot of very diverse music over the years. That all seeped into my subconscious, and I was writing full-on symphonies in my head walking through the woods in Iowa when I was seven or eight years old. Mind you, I didn’t have the skills to put that into writing or notation — and still don’t, not for the symphonies anyway.

I learned how to read music by playing the violin in elementary school. I didn’t pick up a guitar or actually start producing original music in any tangible way until my junior year at Interlochen Arts Academy. There, my roommate Filip — a wildly talented self-taught metal guitarist and visual arts student from Macedonia — taught me things here and there, and I also taught myself by ear. The Internet, man.

Who are some other musicians with whom you’d like to collaborate?

St. Vincent. Top of the list. Blink 182 — a childhood dream. Jimmy Eat World. John Mayer but only if he lets me be in his next ridiculous green screen music video. Mac Ayers, Tears For Fears, Snail Mail, and oh, I dunno… Taylor Swift. Come at me.

Who are your biggest musical inspirations? And what have you been listening to lately?

Biggest? That’s tough because it changes with each project. Tower of Power is a huge influence for me. My first band was funk-based, and man, they are so groovy. If you don’t know, now you know go listen to them. St. Vincent. Jimmy Eat World. And, regardless of the drama surrounding this artist from time to time, John Mayer. He really is one of the great guitarists of our generation, and more importantly, the songwriting that he produces is top-notch. I’ve learned a lot from diving deep into his material over the years. Miles Davis, and jazz in general, is huge for me. Brain fuel. Listening lately to Sleater-Kinney’s new record, Knuckle Puck, and a lot of 2000s pop-punk.

What else can we look forward to from Zach Villa — be in 2019, 2020 or later?

World domination.

The track on the video content [for this shoot] is the first single — a tease if you will — of my new solo project. Go check it out. My band Sorry Kyle will be dropping a ton of music over the next few months if you’re into punk and emo.

And that’s just music. Acting-wise, post-AHS I’m waiting to see what comes down the pipe. I’m always creating. I want to be fluid in music, movement, film and TV, directing, etc. There’s no time like the present and the present is, well, now. So hang on tight.

#zach villa #ahs cast #american horror story #ahs 1984 #interview #photoshoots #*

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doomedandstoned · 6 years

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Portland’s Eight Bells Ready for Psycho Las Vegas

~Interview by Jamie LaRose~

If you haven’t caught Oregon’s EIGHT BELLS yet, your chance is coming up at the Psycho Las Vegas, where they play on Sunday, August 19th. Some of the bands playing Psycho this year are Dimmu Borgir, Danzig, Red Fang and Wolves in the Throne Room. Eight Bells has long been held together by the very talented Melynda Jackson, who has given life and beauty to this emotional masterpiece of sound. We had the chance to speak with Melynda Jackson as well as Melynda Amann, Brian Burke, and Alyssa Maucere and get some insight on how the band has progressed as well as their plans for the future. While they have been working on new material for you to get your emotional heavy groove on, they have made great strides as a group and have plans to record once they have completed their current writing process. Don’t miss them at Psycho '18, and look forward to the delicate doom that will enrapture your soul.

Landless by Eight Bells

You have a very unique and particular style about Eight Bells. What was the original inspiration for the project?

MELYNDA: I had started out playing in SubArachnoid Space for years, kind of a hard psych/noise what have you instrumental project. That project started as improvised noise, and over 15 years morphed into more of a songwriting collaboration. When I decided to let that project go, I knew I wanted to continue on into more distinct and concise songwriting but keep a little bit of the feel of SubArachnoid Space. Over the years the drummer was becoming more and more interested in some metal techniques like blast beats etc. We decided that we wanted to continue that trajectory after we dissolved SubArachnoid Space, so we named the new band Eight Bells, after the final SAS album. We never really wanted to fit anywhere perfectly, and I think we have accomplished that goal. I feel like turmoil and sadness are expressed frequently in this project. We would like to make something emotionally vivid and not have all the songs sound the same.

What is the driving force that carries you on over the last few years?

MELYNDA: It has been a tough couple of years for sure, with many points where I considered giving up. Playing music teaches me lots of things. I would say those things go beyond learning to play the music itself, but interpersonal stuff, connectedness, commitment, self-examination, and emotional expression. I have a lot to learn so I keep trying because it is interesting. Getting older reminds me that I have a finite amount of time to create, so I really have no choice-it is an itch that can’t be scratched. Also, I am stubborn as fuck so when signs all seem to be pointing to giving up, I try harder.

Can you talk about the lineup changes and how that has affected the sound this year?

MELYNDA: Oh, we have about 20 minutes of new music that has been difficult in its creation because of how many people Lindy and I have gone through in the rhythm section. (laughs) She has been with me for a couple of years now, but we are on our 3rd drummer (Brian), as well as our 3rd Bassist, (Alyssa). It felt like a struggle to really practice with regularity and treat it as a discipline until Brian and Alyssa joined. The songs Lindy and I were working on as a duo sort of finished themselves with their input and the ideas were made better for sure. I am not sure yet how the sound has changed to an outside listener, but I can say for me, the music is more defined. We have three-part harmonies now and we had a great time at our last two shows, so we can have fun together and connect onstage and that means everything to me -- and I do mean everything.

Do you have any upcoming plans for a new release with the new lineup?

MELYNDA: We totally want to record when we have another couple of songs. We will be focused on writing and making demos when get back from Psycho Las Vegas.

Describe your favorite way to enter the writing process.

ALYSSA: When someone comes in with a riff and we play it over and over, and it grabs us, that's when it's the best. We can see where else it could be taken, or it can push us in a completely different direction as our minds/ears begin to churn. It's important for me to carry the foundation for the harmonic layering to give space and clarity to my bandmates. It's a lot of refinement and experimentation, and that gives birth to truly abstract and complex song structures that give that feel really satisfying once they're played to our standards. Witnessing my bandmates get lost and found within a composition is how I know we all found something that works for us.

LINDY: Before I even present anything to my bandmates I am often inspired in random and unexpected ways. My voice recorder on my phone usually gets a lot of action for spur of moment inspirations out of nowhere. If I hear a riff in my head I often sing it into my recorder, so I don’t forget it. Sometimes this spontaneous idea could translate into a vocal melody or a keyboard riff. This riff usually doesn’t make it to the band practice room for others to listen to until the pot smoke has dissipated, and some serious rumination has occurred. If my riffing inspires others. I get excited and a possible jam may elicit more awesomeness that I didn’t hear the first go around in my head.

MELYNDA: I kind of feel like I don’t really have a choice in the matter in terms of how I process, meaning I don’t consciously choose to sit down and write a song. I hear riffs in my head and enjoy working with the group in real time to flesh out songs and arrangement. Recording riff ideas, like lindy says, helps. Sometimes I will work off a keyboard part of Melynda’s, or whatever. I like jamming a riff until it leads to the next part. We don’t really have a formula that we follow and we are still developing a language that we all can understand. Seems like learning to play the parts together is the first pass like a rough draft, then more arranging and tweaking.

What do you most look forward to while participating in the upcoming Psycho Las Vegas 2018?

ALYSSA: It's a family reunion for many of us. We have friends from all over the country convening all in one place, seeing bands that we all look up to, together, or never have seen, confined to a ridiculously fun environment that encourages all forms of debauchery. I'm honored that we get to play the Vinyl Stage with of such an amazing line up, I mean, c'mon we play after Necrot and Mutoid Man, two of my favorite bands out right now! It will be great to have this moment to give people the ability to see the reincarnation of Eight Bells. Plus, there's that killer pool and legal marijuana.

LINDY: I look forward to the camaraderie and friendships with my contemporaries and fans and also the bangovers and ringing ears caused from my own band’s crushing performance and from the performances of my friends and heroes on all of the stages.

MELYNDA: Playing the set honestly. I am not a fan of the desert in August. I look forward though, to air conditioning and seeing folks I don’t get to see very often.

Where did you start on the path of playing music?

ALYSSA: It started when I was a little kid. I used to play this game with my family where they would turn on a song for one second on the radio/CD player, and I'd have to identify what band it was, and most of the time I was dead-on. I was obsessed with tone and recording quality, all the unique sounds individual to a specific band, and it fascinated me how different everyone was. That's how I was able to remember who was who by their tone! Before I was even 10, I was hooked to MTV, especially 120 min and Beavis and Butthead (which I used to sneak at night and watch). It was there I heard PJ Harvey, Bjork, Soundgarden, Helmet, Unsane, Hum, The Beastie Boys, etc. I really liked playing on one of those children's pianos and would do it all the time for hours. Eventually my family broke down and found me a cheap upright piano when I turn 8 and it changed my life. I got my first electric guitar when I was 13, and I’ve played one almost every day for 20 years now. It was when I was 23 that I got asked to play bass in a band, and I never looked back.

LINDY: It started from the days of infancy when my mom would place my playpen by the record player, plug my headphones and spin an LP for me to keep me occupied. Later, that path continued on long car rides from Massachusetts to Maine when my Dad would blast Pat Benatar, Black Sabbath, Tina Turner and the Motels all the way to his place. It started with singing in church every Sunday, and friends picking me up in the morning for school blasting Iron Maiden and Metallica. Music has always been a central part of my life.

MELYNDA: I played clarinet and bass clarinet in band, but was kicked out for being unruly even though I could play well. I suppose that was my first lesson – you are never so good or talented that you get to be an asshole to everyone and keep playing. I failed at guitar lessons soon after. As a kid I liked to listen to music and count the beats- oh here are 4s, but halved they are 2, oh this is 6… that sort of thing.

What are some of the most influential artists to you?

ALYSSA: Al Cisneros is a wizard. He creates a sonic vortex by meditating on very few potent riffs for lengths at a time. There's a mathematics going on there, a pattern that undulates in and out of consciousness. I know how to play most of those riffs, but if you ever see the man live, you're blown away by his delivery. Kim Thayil and Chris Cornell were probably the first musicians to show me what "heavy" meant, between the depth of the content in the lyrics and the eclectic richness of their influences. Soundgarden was a perfect storm of catchiness and brutality. It was also because of Kim Thayil that I ended up loving bands like Master Musicians of Bukakke and Sunn O))). Last but not least, metal bands like Blut Aus Nord and Deathspell Omega have a profound influence over my writing. It's chaotic and unsettling, and somehow, it's incredibly emotive and beautiful.

LINDY: In terms of vocalist heroes, I would say: Pat Benatar, Bruce Dickinson, Joni Mitchell and Aretha Franklin. Musicians that I am influenced by would be Nick Cave, Prince and Diamanda Galas.

MELYNDA: Old and new: Steve Reich, Sonic Youth, hildur guðnadóttir, Death, Enslaved, Popol Vuh, Butthole Surfers, Oranssi Pazuzu, Vaura, Earth Wind and Fire, Bauhaus, Faust, Amon Düül II -- so many. Basically, everything music influences me in some way, even if I don’t like it. I try not to wear my influences on my sleeve, but I also try not to overthink things.

Do any shows stand out above the rest, so far, as your favorite experience with the band and why?

ALYSSA: I'm so new to this band that every show so far stands out. Psycho Las Vegas will be the largest crowd I've played to in 5 years, and I'm really looking forward to performing.

BRIAN: The first two and the last two stand out most in my mind.

LINDY: Considering that I have been a member of Eight Bells for 2 years, I have only played 6 live shows with them. One that stands out for me is playing in Canada, opening for SubRosa. The energy and our playing were great and the excitement of the show was palatable.

MELYNDA: Brian we have only played two shows together. (laughs) Honestly, I would say our first show with this lineup eclipses any other that I have played with Eight Bells so far.

Is there a central message that you would like to convey?

ALYSSA: Eight Bells will crush your soul.

LINDY: Our time is finite. Our time is up. Crush my enemies, see them driven before me and hear the lamentations of everyone.

MELYNDA: For the love of Satan, please when driving on the highway, use the left lane for passing only.

Catch Portland, Oregon’s Eight Bells on the Vinyl Stage of the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino on Sunday night, August 19th, at Psycho Las Vegas. Get tickets here

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#D&S Interviews #Eight Bells #Portland #Oregon #Doom #Blackened Doom #Progressive Metal #Metal #Psycho Las Vegas #Jamie LaRose #Doomed & Stoned

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dreamofawonderfullife · 6 years

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Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir: "You don't get through an Olympic season without tension"

The Canadian couple started their Olympic season with the Autumn Classic International and won. Then they danced at their first grand prix assignment, Skate Canada and not only won again, but also set a record score. At the post event press conference Scott explained that they had been a bit nervous, because the choice they made for their free program [set to the Moulin Rouge soundtrack] has a personal connection for them and they really wanted it to translate to the audience and judges. It turns out it did and that promises well for the upcoming NHK Trophy, as well as the rest of the season.

Taking a break after the last Olympics the couple is back on the scene since the last competitive season. Just one day after gaining their third World title, they attended a group interview. They are punctual, polite (when they noticed there were less chairs than journalists, they immediately offered their own chairs for the journalists until their press manager found more chairs in the Helsinki mixed zone) and extremely professional. Some athletes mistake professionalism for saying long but empty sentences with a committed facial expression, however, this is not the case with Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir. They think about their answers, they don't avoid the unpleasant questions, but they don't miss any chance to say something funny.

You changed your coaching team before your competitive comeback. What has it brought to your skating?

Tessa : I think it was certainly time for a fresh environment, a new energy. We have had, sort of, three phases in our career. One was the inception, the first seven years of our career, and then ten years in Michigan was the next chapter. So I think it was a natural evolution for us to make a change. The dynamic Marie-France [Dubreuil], Patrice [Lauzon] and Romain [Hageenauer] have developed is incredibly unique. Technically they are so strong, so they helped us to raise our level technically and keep up with the top teams, which we needed in this comeback. There is also a vision of melding the artistic part with that, and making sure that we are also telling a story with those elements and transitions.

Did it add something specific to your skating, something that you didn't have before?

Scott: It's hard to say. We've always tried to improve our skating, throughout our career. They just have the whole package, so they helped our skating in many ways. They are so supportive, they are coaching with their hearts, so we feel very connected to them.

Previously you trained together with your biggest rivals Meryl [Davis] and Charlie [White], now you train with your biggest rivals again, this time Gabriella [Papadakis] and Guillaume [Cizeron]. What are the advantages and disadvantages of such a situation?

Scott: We see very little disadvantage, to be honest. We love training in places where there is a high energy, we find it motivating every day. The trickiest part is the competition, because often you are back to back to back [in starting order], and I think it's harder on our coaches than it is on us. The biggest advantage of training with Gabriella and Guillaume is getting to see them everyday - they are pushing and inspiring us. While we really try to focus on ourselves, it's nice to have this motivation we found with Meryl and Charlie and now we find with Gaby and Guillaume.

Do you remember the first day you met each other?

Scott: Not really.

Tessa: I don't remember it specifically. I guess it was at the first summer skating school that we did together. He played a lot of pranks on the girls.

Scott: That was the best part!

Tessa: And we had really intense ping pong tournaments.

Scott: I think lot of skating fans would laugh if they saw us in the first five or six years. It's funny to see young kids coming to the sport now, they are so serious. We never really had that, we always loved skating, we always wanted to be the best, but we were not so serious.

How has your relationship changed through the years?

Scott (laughing): Which chapter do you want to hear?

Tessa: It's changing even week by week. Not unlike many other teams we have to work very hard and we are grateful that we have such a solid foundation. We appreciate one another in a great sense of respect, but we are continually working on our communication, making sure that we are always working effectively together and we are supporting each other appropriately. We just try to raise that level. Because the stronger we are as a unit, the stronger our skating is.

At the Worlds we saw some mistakes in the ice dance competition. How hard is ice dancing compared to single and pairs skating?

Scott: A lot of the pressure in the ice dance comes with the moment you want to create. We try not to let it affect us, but mistakes do happen. It also shows how demanding the elements are. It was a odd night for a world championships, but we relied on our training and we earned enough points to become world champions. We are proud of the year we had. And we like that now there are lot of changes in the order, it doesn't stay the same from the short dance to the free dance, it just shows that the competition is so thick and so competitive. Everyone is going for it and there comes lots of risk with this. I think it is great for the sport. We think it's going in the right direction; that is one of the reasons why we are back. A sport always has to evolve and to change. It's tough to look back when you are in it, but from our point of view as athletes we are pretty pleased.

New world records are set often. What do you think about this?

Scott: I used to hate that, but I really feel that if you are a fan and you see the men really pushing it, the ladies doing crazy things, the pairs with all those twists and stuff… It is amazing.

Tessa: [In Helsinki at the Worlds] I was really tuned to see the results from the all the other disciplines, it was extraordinary, with so many great performances.

Scott: For us a world record is fun, but we are always looking for a season's best performance, and we know that in the ending position we are not going to see the points. It is about the moment and feelings.

How much has ice dance changed since you were last competing?

Tessa: We knew what we are stepping into because we watched the world championships in Boston from a broadcasting standpoint. We knew that the level of talent is quite deep and strong. Technically the skaters are executing the turns much clearer. But also the tech panel is observing things differently. They know exactly what they are looking for and they are extremely critical. That means everyone has to step up and raise the level to match up. As for skating, I feel that there is a little bit more freedom, from the creative point of view. I think it is evident when you watch the free dances.

What was the hardest to get used to again?

Tessa: We were so well-prepared and our training was fantastic, very consistent from the beginning to the end. But when you take to the ice for a competition, there come different expectations. For us this season was to learn to compete again, to simulate what next season will feel like. Everything is to set up ourselves to that moment at the Olympic Games. The most challenging thing was probably just channeling that fresh energy, the nerves, the pressure and reminding ourselves why we wanted to come back in first place, that we wanted to enjoy skating.

Could you describe each other? What kind of a partner is Tessa and what kind of a partner is Scott?

Scott: Oh, we don't have enough time for that! There is one thing about Tessa that people might not see, and this is how funny she is. She has a great sense of humor. It's something that takes people by surprise. Because I'm so hilarious… (laughing) But it was such a cool moment, when I almost fell in the free dance at Worlds, and I got back up and Tessa said a really funny joke to me, it automatically put me back on track and I just kept going. But I also can talk about her determination. She is really motivating me, I want to just keep up with her. But she is so fun, she can say jokes that could save a life.

Tessa: It's undeniable what kind of an athlete Scott is. People see that determination and that drive. I've never seen someone so committed to excellence and pushing to be better. But more than that, he is the most generous person on earth. And that passion you see on the ice exactly translates how he is off the ice.

What did you discover about yourselves during your two years out of the competitive world?

Scott: A lot! During this journey since our last Games we learnt a lot being out of the sport and then we learnt a lot being back in the sport. Being away has given us a fresh perspective, just to realize we've been very fortunate to have this ride and to have this together. We realized how much we still enjoy working together.

After the Olympics in Sochi, where you earned the silver medal behind Davis and White, you said at the press conference that you sometimes felt like your coach Marina Zueva wasn't in your corner. Do you regret that you hadn't changed coaches earlier?

Scott: All we look back on now is how thankful we are. We still use so many lessons that Marina [Zueva] and Igor [Shpilband] taught us. When you get into a special situation, you remember those things. We've always been honest with the media. We just said how we felt [after the free dance in Sochi]. Not that we are taking that back, we are just really thinking about positive things they gave us. As Tessa said earlier, after ten years we needed a fresh change but there is no regret. If we could go back and play it again, would we do it differently? I don't know. We were very proud of our Sochi moment and I don't think we would want to trade that for anything. We had two great skates and we had our moment. That's all we can ask for as athletes.

Do you think the tension that you felt cost you the gold?

Scott: We've played it in our minds what cost us the gold, for a long time!

Tessa: The decision that made us come back and compete was knowing that we can do better. We watched the video and analyzed how we can change our speed and power, or the way we move our bodies, or the way we interpret music, or the music we choose… There were probably a couple of reasons why we didn't win.

Scott: I don't think tension was one of them, to be honest.

Tessa: You don't get through an Olympic season without tension. That's just part of the competition.

Scott: So get prepared for it!

You are one of the favourites of the Games in Pyeongchang and if you medal there, you could be the most decorated ice dancers in the Olympic history.

Scott: Wait, be careful with that!

Tessa: Don't jinx us!

Scott: To be there is an honour. We feel happy to be part of the ice dancing family and we are still surprised to be mentioned in the same sentence as Torvill and Dean or Shae-Lynn [Bourne] and Viktor [Kraatz]. But we are not chasing that, we are chasing our moment.

Tessa: This world title means a lot to us and we are very excited about it. But there is a journey leading to moments like this and it's a good reminder that we have to enjoy the process, every single day, every training. That moment fades away so quickly. We can't set ourselves to be happy based on the outcome of Pyeongchang. There has to be something deeper, something personally satisfying.

Titanilla Bőd, Absolute Skating, November 9th, 2017

credit photo : @danielleearlphotography, Askar Ibragimov and MG

#tessa virtue #scott moir #article #long article #but so fun

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junker-town · 4 years

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See you soon, Hannah Roberts

How one of Team USA’s potential breakout Olympic stars is handling the wait.

Luscious green trees surround the outdoor skatepark and grandstands at the UCI Urban Cycling World Championships in Chengdu, China. Freestyle BMX star Hannah Roberts — atop her pink bike, rocking a black full-face helmet — drops in and pedals hard toward a spine ramp. As she launches off the ramp, Roberts begins a 360-degree spin. In the middle of her rotation, she uses the handlebars to whip the bike around separate from her body, becoming the first woman to land a 360 tailwhip in competition.

The historic trick, thrown down on her sport’s biggest stage, epitomized Roberts’ young career. She has never stopped building to bigger and better things.

Rather than give the crowd a fist pump, or take a breather to soak in the momentous occasion, Roberts immediately hits a vert ramp and busts a flair — a backflip with a simultaneous 180-degree turn.

The year before, she took a disappointing third in the event, behind fellow Americans Perris Benegas and Angie Marino. On Nov. 10, 2019, Roberts avenged the loss, winning her second world championship at just 18 years old with a score of 90.0 out of 100.

After wiping away tears, she stood above the rest on the podium, smiling as she accepted a gold medal and a stuffed panda with a leaf in its mouth. She wore UCI’s iconic rainbow jersey, bestowed upon world champions of every cycling discipline since the 1920s.

Just one week earlier, she had won her fourth straight FISE World Cups Series, which also held its final event in Chengdu. Roberts left no question whether she was the best women’s freestyle BMXer in the world.

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“I wanted to have the rainbow jersey going into the Olympic year,” Roberts says. “It was more for myself. I put so much work in, and I was so focused on showing that I wasn’t going to take second or third again. I wanted that year to be all about me, so I threw down some of my bigger tricks.”

Her mother Betty made the trip to Chengdu to watch, after she and Roberts had spent half a year apart. In order to train for the world championships, Roberts effectively emancipated herself from her mother and father in June 2019 while she was still 17.

She moved in with long-time medical trainer Trish Bare Grounds and Trish’s 18-year-old daughter, Olivia, 750 miles away in Holly Springs, North Carolina. As she moved, she changed her diet. More importantly, she strictly budgeted her modest income. Being a teenage action sports prodigy with international acclaim isn’t as lucrative as one might think.

There was no giant check waiting at the podium in Chengdu to signify the €10,000 in prize money she earned, but the win was huge for Roberts. Just four months prior, she wasn’t sure she could sustain her freestyle BMX career into her mid-twenties unless the sport became more financially stable.

The World Championships are one of the few annual competitions to award equal prizes to men and women. By comparison, when she won the final contest of the world series, the Men’s Elite winner took home €8,000 while Roberts received €1,500.

And though Roberts’ accomplishments show how far women’s freestyle BMX has come in recent years in terms of talent and viability, they are also a reminder of the wage and sponsorship gap that persists between male and female athletes. As impressive as Roberts and her peers have been, the most famous annual extreme sports event, the X Games, still won’t let them compete.

The now-postponed summer Olympics were supposed to be a launch pad for the sport and for Roberts. The games drew an estimated 3.6 billion viewers for the Rio Games in 2016. Freestyle BMX will be an event for the first time ever in Tokyo, and Roberts is the clear favorite to take home gold.

“Women are the future of our sport,” says Nina Buitrago, a pioneer of women’s BMX who continues to be one of the sports biggest advocates. “They’re very marketable, and it’s a big thing that BMX has needed for a long time. It’s just incredible that with something like the Olympics, it’s catapulted all of us in to try to progress more and just own our journey.”

Roberts is ready to lead the charge; unfortunately, there’s only so much she can control. She did everything right heading into the 2020 games — kept herself afloat financially, trained relentlessly, won everything she needed to and then some.

But she couldn’t predict the coronavirus pandemic that has put her Olympic dreams, and those of countless others, on hold until 2021 at the earliest. Roberts is used to addressing her problems through sheer willpower. Being forced to wait, a budding star without a showcase, has been an entirely different challenge.

In South Bend, Indiana, around the back of an old brick chocolate factory, past a chain-link gate and barbed-wire fence, and at the other end of a parking lot with cracked concrete, sits an old mattress factory-turned-world-class skatepark. The indoor park known as “The Kitchen” is closed most weekdays, but on an unusually warm Monday afternoon in February, the front door is unlocked. Roberts is home for the first time in more than six months to enjoy her formative skatepark.

That evening, she will ride with three boys between the ages of 11 and 14 who she has mentored for years. Roberts was invited to the park for a private session for them and their parents. She practically had no choice — she happened to be in town, and they were blowing up her phone all day begging to celebrate.

The official Team USA Instagram account posted a photo of Roberts earlier that afternoon announcing she was the first American to ever qualify for the Olympics in freestyle BMX.

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WATCH OUT, 18-year-old @hannah_roberts_bmx is the first American to qualify for the Olympics in BMX freestyle ‼️

A post shared by Team USA (@teamusa) on Feb 3, 2020 at 9:33am PST

“They’re supposed to be in school,” Roberts says, “but they were on their phones during the day and took screenshots, sent it to me and asked, ‘Did you see this?’ The first three times I told them ‘no,’ but finally, I just responded, ‘Do you want to ride tonight?’”

For hours, Roberts and her young pupils film each other on their phones while they attempt high-flying tricks into a large yellow foam pit and eat slices of greasy pizza. She’s proud of how they have improved under her tutelage. Their parents comment on how much she has inspired them. Roberts also expects this will be one of her last carefree runs before she transitions to a training regimen suitable for an Olympic athlete. She sits and soaks in nostalgia from her surroundings instead of sending her own tricks into the foam pit.

“The last four years of me living here, I rode with every one of these kids almost every day,” Roberts says. “I’d pick them up from their house if they needed a ride or I’d take them to a skatepark. If I wanted to make a day trip to Ohio just to ride something different, they were always in my car going with me.”

According to her mother, Roberts is at her happiest when she’s working with kids, though she still fits within a broad definition of “adolescent” herself.

“[Hannah] was the first girl I saw do a tailwhip. Once she has a trick, she can just do it. It’s not like it’s luck.” - Nina Buitrago, freestyle BMX pioneer

Roberts grew up in the 4,000-person town of Buchanan, Michigan, a few miles north of the Indiana state border and a 20-minute drive from South Bend. Decades ago, Buchanan’s rolling terrain gave birth to RedBud MX, one of America’s signature motocross tracks and now an annual stop for the Lucas Oil Pro Motocross Championship. In the fall of 2018, the track even hosted Motocross of Nations, which is billed as the “Olympics of motocross,” drawing riders from all over the world.

The fact Buchanan produced a world-renowned extreme sports athlete like Roberts isn’t a surprise. But Roberts is unique because her success never came on a dirt bike. If not for her father’s disapproval, Roberts might have given motocross a real shot, but the closest she ever came was working a taco stand at RedBud MX during her summers.

Her passion for BMX was passed on from her older cousin, Brett “Mad Dog” Banasiewicz, once an up-and-comer on the Dew Tour. In 2012, as a shaggy black-haired 17-year-old, he won his first Dew Tour park event in Ocean City, Maryland. The following week, his professional career came to a devastating end. During a practice session, he landed on his head while attempting a 720° and wearing an uncertified helmet. He temporarily lost the use of his left arm, and his motor and speech skills will never fully recover.

“It was horrible. To me, he was gonna be the next Dave Mirra,” says Daniel Dhers, one of the most decorated BMX riders of all-time. “He just learned how to compete. He had all these tricks that he’d worked on for years. He had the looks, and he could talk, and was funny. If he were riding today? He’d be the guy in the Olympics, for sure. That would be crazy because then it would be him and Hannah.”

Via Hannah Roberts

Roberts herself has suffered numerous broken bones, but fear of suffering an injury like Banasiewicz doesn’t hold her back.

“You can take all the safety precautions in the world, but it still could happen,” Roberts says. “Brett fell on a trick that he’d mastered, that he’d been doing forever. It was five seconds and everything changed.”

Before the injury, a 16-year-old Banasiewicz self-funded and, with the help of his friend Glenn Salyers, designed The Kitchen. They equipped it with enormous ramps, foam pits, and “resi” ramps, which are covered in foam and a thick sheet of black rubber. By the time she was riding at nine years old, Roberts had access to one of the nation’s premier skateparks.

Swiss-American freestyle rider Nikita Ducarroz, five years Roberts’ senior and a likely qualifier for the 2020 Olympics for Switzerland, remembers trekking to The Kitchen from her Southern California home for a competition as a teenager. She almost froze at the magnitude of its jumps.

“The ramps at The Kitchen are huge,” Ducarroz says. “I remember going there, and I couldn’t even cruise the boxes and [Hannah’s] doing tricks over them.”

By middle school, Roberts was already performing tricks that seasoned veterans with sponsorships had never seen.

“She was the first girl I saw do a tailwhip,” Buitrago says. “Once she has a trick, she can just do it. It’s not like it’s luck.”

But as much as The Kitchen spurred Roberts’ BMX education, she eventually realized she had to leave it behind.

For years, Roberts believed members of her inner circle credited The Kitchen for too much of her success, disregarding her work ethic and determination. And she could only spend so much time mentoring other young BMXers without sacrificing her own progress.

“I love riding with the locals,” Roberts says. “I love helping them, but it comes to a point where, in every session, if you’re focusing on other people riding, which I love to do, your riding starts to fall.”

Roberts gave up her passion for mentoring, at least temporarily, to better her career. She had felt the pain of losing the 2018 World Championships and the rainbow jersey. She never wants to let that happen again.

Holly Springs — a pine tree- and strip mall-filled landscape similar to every other suburb in the Raleigh, N.C., metropolitan area — has quickly become the new mecca of freestyle BMX. That’s largely thanks to Dhers, who owns the massive indoor-outdoor skatepark known as the Daniel Dhers Action Sports Complex. Dhers, 35, is a five-time X Games gold medalist originally from Venezuela.

From the front, the DDASC looks like an office building or outlet store, industrial gray brick and dark windows covering the outside. The inside doesn’t look like what a typical sports fan might expect from an Olympic training facility. Plywood and two-by-fours are the predominant decor. But the 37,000-square-foot complex is considered one of the largest and best family-oriented, year-round skating and biking facilities in the world.

After spending her entire life in the Midwest, Roberts moved to Holly Springs to train at the DDASC because, unlike most other Olympic athletes, the best BMX riders like to train side-by-side, pushing each other.

The park officially opens to the public every weekday from 3 to 8 p.m. Dhers and the other pros do most of their riding in the morning to avoid crowds of young kids on scooters, but they often make exceptions on Tuesday evenings.

Recently, Roberts was joined by two other women riders: Ducarroz and Benegas, the winner of the 2018 World Championships. Roberts and Benegas are teammates and rivals. Their tug-of-war relationship only intensified after both became near-locks to qualify for the Olympics.

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“It’s very competitive now,” Roberts says. “We call it winning practice, which makes no sense because it’s practice, but everybody wants to win.”

The male riders include Dhers, Marin Ranteš of Croatia, American Justin Dowell and Australian Brand Loupos. All have finished on the podium at major UCI and FISE BMX events over the last two years.

During training sessions at the DDASC, each rider takes turns dropping in from the deck and riding for 30 to 40 seconds at a time, watching each other and offering criticism and encouragement. On one run, Roberts lands a tailwhip onto resi with relative ease. She then rides around the skatepark to pick up speed and hits the same ramp, performing a 360° tuck no-hander in which, while letting go of the bike, she leans her stomach against the handlebars before grabbing them again and landing.

Much of her competition would be thrilled with this short run, but Roberts is just getting started.

“Backflip bar spins over spines is her warm-up trick in sessions,” Ducarroz says.

Unfortunately, the sport of freestyle BMX hasn’t progressed as quickly as its athletes.

Freestyle BMX has been around since the mid-1970s, but didn’t achieve international prominence until the late 90s and early 2000s, after the X Games were started. Yet, to this day, women BMXers aren’t allowed to vie for a medal in the competition.

Instead, the most that X Games organizers have been willing to give them is an unpaid demonstration, the first of which occurred in 2014. For 10 years before that, X Games offered a girls BMX clinic. The riders hope that, one day, women’s freestyle BMX will have its own competition, similar to what women’s skateboarding and snowboarding have enjoyed for years.

It’s a big risk, especially the year before the Olympics, to ride at an event where you won’t make money ... [The X Games] are just a big slap in the face” - Hannah Roberts

“We’ve been working on this relationship with X Games for so long,” Buitrago says. “I feel like we’re so close, but they just were like, ‘Well, we’re just going to offer you another demo again.’ The deal that we made was [that] women are down to do the demo, so long as every year we’re working towards having an actual contest.”

But everyone has their limits. In 2018, when she was16, Roberts became the first prominent female rider to bail on the X Games, deciding her skills were worth more than a free hotel room and limited exposure. Some of the other professional riders protested her decision, saying it wasn’t best for the sport, but her mind was made up.

The following year, the entire women’s class agreed to boycott the event.

“It’s a big risk, especially the year before the Olympics, to ride at an event where you won’t make money,” Roberts says. “We barely get a crowd. They have it at like 9 or 10 a.m., so nobody’s really there. No events are going on. It’s just a big slap in the face.

“People should really open their eyes and realize that the class [of women] is growing. That people are getting better and it will take time for us to be on the same level as the men just because of the support. It’s hard to make [BMX] a career.”

Roberts learned from a young age that practice, more than exposure, would propel her career.

At the DDASC, Dhers is the unofficial coach of the group. He periodically pulls riders aside for extra one-on-one attention while they train. When Roberts first moved to Holly Springs, her day-to-day riding was inconsistent. One day, she might push herself beyond her limits, risking injury and wearing herself out. The next, she’d spend too much time on her phone or drinking an energy drink. Dhers and the other pros helped her change her mentality by pushing her to take a more mindful, calculated approach to practicing new tricks.

Now she’s deliberate about how much time she spends sending a trick to the foam pit, only moving to resi once she feels she’s ready, then moving to a wooden ramp when the trick is nearly perfect.

“I used to just send things [on a wooden ramp] and then go back on resi and then go back in the foam and work on them, which was a terrible idea,” Roberts says.

Her new mentality has paid real dividends. For instance, on a six-week training trip she took to Australia after her victory at the World Championships, Roberts learned more than two dozen new tricks, including what she called five or six “big tricks.” During that time, she traveled throughout the country, staying with Australian rider Natalya Diehm.

Roberts knew she had to evolve. She noticed other women catching up to her, and the number of competitors increasing exponentially. She’s stubborn according to those who know her well. She got to the top of her profession as a teenager, after all, even before she got to Holly Springs.

According to Dhers, Roberts’ persistent ‘send-it mentality’ came from her Kitchen days, riding massive ramps with no one to tell her she shouldn’t. On ramps that size, riders must possess a certain degree of fearlessness to commit to a trick. It was there she learned a fundamental lesson of the sport.

“If you baby it, you die,” Dhers says. “You don’t make it.”

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The Covid-19 pandemic first hit the freestyle BMX world Feb. 22 when FISE and the UCI canceled the World Cup event scheduled for May in Pu Yang, China. A few weeks later, a second World Cup event in Hiroshima was postponed indefinitely. After a period of insisting the games would be held as scheduled, the International Olympic Committee finally announced on March 24 the postponement of the Tokyo Games until 2021.

In the days following the news, Roberts spent more time in her bedroom than at the DDASC, moving back and forth from her bed, to playing video games, to her desk to email Team USA and other sponsors.

Focusing on a few companies at a time, she figured out which of her sponsorships were most impacted. The Milk Processor Education Program, the group behind the “Got Milk?” campaign, adjusted their contract with Roberts, but her contracted sponsorships within the BMX industry — Tioga, Alienation, Hyper Bike and Snafu — were still intact.

“It’s still just a little frustrating going through all the emails and making sure that we’re all on the same page and we all know what’s happening, who’s getting paid when and what is expected of me,” Roberts says.

Perhaps the biggest frustration was the notion that all the hard work she’d been putting in towards the Olympics — the stringent riding schedule, changes to her diet, dedication to the gym — wouldn’t pay off like she had planned.

“I was happy that the committee put in the consideration for athletes’ health,” Roberts says, “but it’s also disappointing and nerve-wracking because you have to keep the Olympic mindset for the next year and deal with all the same stuff over again.”

Thankfully, Roberts will not have to requalify. She will represent Team USA at the Olympics in 2021. And she’s still training.

Because of the pandemic, skateparks all across the country are closed to the public, including the DDASC. But all the pros agreed that if they only saw each other, and had all groceries and food delivered, that they could continue to practice together. Dhers turned the upper deck of the skatepark into a mini gym, equipped with dumbbells, a pull-up bar and two plastic trash cans attached at opposite ends of a workout bar.

Roberts still rides for three to four hours a day with the group, but she works out at home in the afternoons using exercise bands. She also tries to get up at 6 a.m. every morning for cardio and stretching. The UCI rainbow jersey hanging in her bedroom closet helps keep her focused.

“When I don’t feel like riding in the morning or when I don’t feel like getting up and going to the session or the workout, I look at it and it gives me that extra motivation,” Roberts says. “It’s like, ‘I don’t want to lose this again.’”

This should have been the year when Roberts’ profile skyrocketed. Through no fault of her own, 2020 feels like a step back, a disheartening tumble after a redemptive 2019. Still, it’s difficult to know how much an Olympic gold medal would elevate her career.

“CNN could pick it up and then boom, she’s a famous superstar, or no one could pick it up and then nothing ever happens,” Dhers says. “How many Olympic gold medalists are there for the women in other sports and no one knows they exist?”

Roberts doesn’t seem to be banking on superstardom, at least. For now, she’s being frugal, saving almost every dime from her contest winnings.

Certainly, the more visible Roberts is, the more popular she and the sport can become. For years, Roberts has been considered a leader in freestyle BMX because of her strong example. That ‘send-it mentality,’ again.

“One thing I’ve learned is that when you see a woman do something, you’re like, ‘oh, my gosh, it’s possible,’” Buitrago says. “For whatever reason, you see guys do the same trick but when you see a woman do [a trick] that you haven’t ever seen them do before, you’re like, ‘Oh, my God. Yes.’”

But Roberts doesn’t focus much on the stakes, only on how she’s pushing herself at any point in time. Others may see unlimited potential, and an opportunity for fame and possibly fortune, but her goals are intrinsic.

“I don’t necessarily want to be the best woman BMX rider,” Roberts says. “I would rather just be a good or great BMX rider, in general, rather than having the woman or the man label on it.

“I just do whatever I think is possible and if it works out, it works out. And if not, try it again.”

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thewidowstanton · 4 years

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Wes Peden, juggler: Zebra, London International Mime Festival

Recognised as one of the most innovative jugglers ever, American Wes Peden – who comes from Rochester, New York – has been voted the world’s most popular juggler nine times. His father, Jeff Peden, taught him to juggle when he was five, and they started performing together when Wes was eleven. At 14, he won the gold medal in the International Juggling Association Juniors Championship. He went on to study at the Dance and Circus University in Stockholm from 2007-2010. Wes holds countless juggling world records, won a bronze medal at the 33rd Cirque de Demain festival in Paris, and has appeared internationally from Tokyo to Broadway, including before the King and Queen of Sweden, and at Perlan glacier museum in Iceland.

Based in Stockholm, Wes tours his solo shows and gives masterclasses. UK audiences may have seen him in Water on Mars by Plastic Boom – the company he formed with Tony Pezzo and Patrik Elmnert – and his sizzling guest spot in Gandini Juggling and Alexander Whitley’s Spring. He now returns to the UK, bringing his solo show, Zebra, to the 44th London International Mime Festival. It runs at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room from 24-26 January 2020. Wes chats to Liz Arratoon from Helsinki, while rehearsing for an opera.

The Widow Stanton: What is the opera you’re working on? Wes Peden: It’s a circus opera, CircOpera. They’ve written a story that uses some classic opera songs and lots of different circus disciplines to try to have, like, a fun way to introduce kids and families and people that might not necessarily go to see a traditional opera to the art form.

Do you find that your juggling work is combining more with other art forms now? Well, I definitely get inspired by other art forms and it’s very often when I’m in group shows it’s not just other jugglers, you know. Gandini has worked with many other types of dance, and I’ve been in shows that have theatre in them or other circus disciplines, and I definitely get inspired by the type of music in the show. For example, opera music, I’m performing to a soloist playing Flight of the Bumblebee on a tuba. That kind of inspires a different sort of juggling than I would ever do on my own. So, definitely.

Let’s go back to the beginning; is or was your dad a professional juggler? Yeah, he still does perform quite a bit. Before we were juggling together he was already doing about 100 shows a year. When I started getting more and more into juggling we created a duet show, and were performing that for a few years, with many shows around the east coast of the States.

Did it come naturally to you as a kid or was it just a lot of hard work? Kind of both. I felt like I had a natural talent for it in one way and it made it not feel like work. When you’re young and you learn some things, it doesn’t seem so surprising that you can’t… you don’t get embarrassed that you can’t do anything at all. You can’t juggle, but you can’t ride a bike either. It’s all normal. There are many things you can’t do at that age. Also I was dyslexic and asthmatic, so school was very difficult because of my dyslexia and sport was hard because of my asthma, but then juggling, I was like, ‘Oh, here I am at least on an equal playing field as everybody else’. Having limitations in those other areas kind of pushed me to follow my skill in the juggling world.

How would you describe your juggling style? The main thing that defines me is that the reason I juggle is to create new tricks, new forms of juggling and to try to make something that someone has never seen before within the juggling world. I want people to come out of my show thinking: “I’ve never seen anything like that. I didn’t know juggling could be like that. Those were some tricks I didn’t imagine would ever be possible.” Because I was lucky enough to juggle for many, many years – 24 years I’ve been practising – I had a lot of time to build a lot of technique. I had a lot of skill with many different props so I try to make these new ideas as technically advanced as I can, to use my full energy and my full skill to make as high-quality new ideas as possible. But what defines my style is creative and new shapes but still a really high skill level.

Were you inspired by any of the great jugglers from the past? Absolutely. I watch juggling constantly to get inspired by things that have happened already and by what elements I can see, like, ‘Oh, what made that trick so special? What’s important about this juggler’. There are a few jugglers of more recent years, because juggling is still quite young, so lots of the important jugglers are really not that old, they’re still alive. There’s Kris Kremo, who does incredible stuff with balls and hats that really inspires me, and another is Sean McKinney.

I saw him when I was nine years old at this competition where everyone was performing with, like, jazz music, in a vest [waistcoat], kind of in this Kris Kremo-type old-school way but at this time everything was a little stricter for no real reason, and then this guy comes skateboarding on to the stage in jeans and a T-shirt and does incredible new beautiful kind of punk juggling. I was like, ‘What is this guy?’ and he inspired me that juggling didn’t have to be done in just one way. It didn’t have to have a certain aesthetic, that it was broader than I’d ever imagined. So when I saw him at that young age I was like, ‘OK, juggling isn’t this, juggling is whatever you want it to be’.

When you’re creating intricate patterns and sequences how do you plan them? There are certain aspects of juggling that you can do best on paper, for me anyway, and certain aspects that you have to be literally trying it to see what works, where the momentum is and how fast you can move or what makes sense with the flow of where the catches are. So it’s a combination of both. It will often be that I’m working on a trick and then I realise something about it, ‘Oh, the momentum of this part makes me want to throw the ball round there’. I film it on my phone and next time I’m on a plane or a train I look at the videos and ‘OK, now I realise that new aspect of the trick’. I will write down many ideas of how to twist that or expand a new idea. Then next time I’m in training I’ll look at my notebook and try all those new things, film them, so it kind of bounces back and forth between literally work in the studio to see how you body and objects work best together and then more, like, academic work back in the office or while I’m travelling.

You have so many records; it’s not about numbers but how many of each prop do you juggle? [Laughs] I have some, but to tell you the truth, it gets a little bit tiring, like, trying to add just one more ball or one more club. I might have invented the most five-club tricks that have ever existed but I don’t juggle the greatest number of clubs that has ever been done. I perform seven clubs and seven balls but I try to… yeah… OK, to be able to juggle seven, eight, nine balls you need speed and accuracy and dedication, and how many hours would I need to put in to add one more ball? That would give one image and it would be amazing, but if I took all of those hours and that dedication and then added my creativity to it and instead used that time to try to make something that no one has ever gone for before.

Up until I was, like, 16 or 17, I was going after just the hardest trick, the biggest trick, the most clubs and after I went to circus university and had more classes in dance and composition I started banging my time and my skill more into composing things that are a little bit harder to put your finger on, because when someone says: “How many of this can you juggle,” it’s easier to compute than, ‘Well, I’ve developed this new technique where rings spiral around my arms in hundreds of different ways. By the time you see the end of the piece you’ll have a whole new vision of how things work. It’s a bit harder to envision, but you have to come to see the show’. [Laughs]

Do you prefer one prop to another? It depends. When I was young I absolutely preferred clubs, like, clubs are the way to be, they can flip this way, the other, rotate, roll… there are many options with them. Then when I started to learn a bit more about how to move my body, I got more interested with balls because you can use them to go around your body, they’re easier going down to the floor and back up. And now I can kind see every prop for what they are good at and if I have an idea of one way of using juggling, like, ‘Oh, this new cross-armed behind-the-neck idea’, what prop will work in that idea best? So now my juggling is more about concepts and then I pull whichever object works with that concept the best. I see them all now like different colours for a painter, whatever is most suitable for this next painting.

What is the best tip you could give to a kid just starting to juggle? I would say to remember that you don’t need three balls to juggle, you can start with one, or any object and try to invent a trick that is fun; something that you think is cool to do. Maybe take your shoe and throw it up and clap behind your back and you catch it again. Or maybe you can set up some spoons on the table and flip one with the other… not to think that juggling is just getting three balls in the air. Juggling is just a relationship between you and objects and making fun tricks that express yourself. I’d say, make sure you’re having fun and, you know, keep going. You will teach yourself as you invent things and gradually build skill. But always make sure you’re having fun.

You mentioned circus university, why did you choose DOCH? I was watching lots of juggling videos and different jugglers from around the world and trying to figure out where they all came from and who taught them and where their different styles were developed, and I realised a lot of my favourite jugglers were from Sweden, or Denmark, or Finland. And then I found out that a bunch of them were going to this school, DOCH. The head teacher at the time was Jay Gilligan, who is a very great juggler; a very clever guy in the modern world of juggling. That was it, ‘I already know his work, I want to juggle like the other guys, so let’s go there and study’.

What did it add to your already considerable skills? When I got to the school Jay explained to me: “OK, we have three years to juggle. We're going to be spending the first year developing your technique and making sure you understand everything you can about literal juggling; the tossing, the throwing, making sure everything is clean. The second year we're gonna teach you how to compose, which will not necessarily have anything to do with throwing and catching.” There were certain things when I was supposed to make an interesting routine while holding a watering can, which I wasn't allowed to throw or catch. You have to forget about your skill as a juggler and just use your creativity to make something good without skill. So for a year I did many different composition exercises, like, 'OK, make 100 tricks in 15 minutes'. You’re like, ‘Uhh!’. It really works your brain in the same way that juggling in previous years had worked my muscles and my muscle memory.

And then in the third year you use your skills developed in the first two, you combine your juggling skill, your composition, you figure out what you want to express and put those skills to work in something from yourself. I think that is the main difference between juggling just on your own and going to a school and having someone make you do composition exercises that really got out the creative side of me and let me develop something that was unique to me.

What happened to Plastic Boom? The trio performed quite a bit together and then had a contract working in Vegas on a show. The others have stayed there but I got a replacement for my part so I could continue to do my own full shows and live a more artistic career, so we've kind of split ways a little bit.

Are you affiliated with Gandini Juggling? When they first started to make Spring, me and the two other jugglers from Plastic Boom, all three of us were going to be in the show, but then when we got the offer for the show in Vegas, it kind of was hard to organise with the creation time period of Spring so we jumped out of the project. But then when I wanted to leave Vegas I was partially in the Spring show. I’m good friends with Sean [Gandini], we really share similar visions of why we like juggling, where it can go. We both have energy to develop the art form constantly and now they are my producers.

Did winning a medal in Paris help you? Yes, it did. In a way, my life is kind of a balance of performing in other group shows, like what I’m in now in Helsinki, and doing my own solo work. And after doing Cirque de Demain I got offers doing some varieté theatre in Germany, where I worked two months a year for a few years. Always while I was just doing an act in another show it gave me an opportunity to be in the same place for a couple of months and really work on the stuff that would be in my next show. In happenstance, after Paris, I got booked for one show in Germany, and I had a huge apartment for that show in the theatre, with a high ceiling, so every day I would spend six or seven hours working on all this new juggling that is now in Zebra. So everything kind of connects… win that, get a good space to juggle, make the juggling for the next show that starts to tour.

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Tell us about Zebra. Zebra was kind of a balance based on a show I’d done previously called Volcano VS Palm Tree, which was very explosive and kind of chaotic, and I wanted something more precise where every place my arm was put, every step, every throw was perfectly organised and a bit more, yeah, very, very precise. So this show is about that, and composing juggling with normal juggling objects but in such a way that it doesn’t look like traditional juggling. Let me explain that a bit. For example, there’s a part where I juggle balls where the rule of the whole piece is that it has to be ball juggling where everything is bouncing off my arms. I’ve composed that and developed it over a few years so that by the time you’re a few minutes into the piece it stops to look like ball juggling and starts to look just like elbow bouncing and kind of this new family, this new language of ways of working… to keep it really specific like that.

There’s a piece with five clubs where I’m facing away from the audience and the light is just above my head, so I’ve made the juggling where the only part of it that matters is what’s in the air and you start to forget that I’m throwing and catching and there’s any skill involved because it’s made around watching these waves, or these triangles or these shapes transform into different constellations. So trying to remove the idea of you’re watching it to be impressed and more that you’re watching an idea unfold and evolve and focus more on the content of the ideas within the juggling. In the way you watch a dancer, you’re not, like, ‘Wow, look how high they jump’, but you’re following the idea of what the choreographer is making onstage.

It sounds fantastic! You’ve performed in London before, but how do you feel about being in the Mime Festival? I’m very excited to be there. Whenever I’m in a festival and can look at all the other shows in the programme and think, ‘I want to go to every single one of these’, I feel at home, and think, ‘Great! I’m in a like-minded space. I’m really happy that my juggling is fitting into a world that I made it for, and I know that the type of audience that goes to these types of shows will see the juggling in the same way that I do’. And I really think that’s it’s a good home for the show. I’m very happy to be part of it.

Can pick out, from your lengthy career, any particular highlights? I really remember the first time I performed Zebra was in Paris. I’d been working on it for a few years and I really wasn’t sure how it would go, because I was like, ‘Are the people going to respond to this? I’m trying to make something quite different. Is it going to work the same way for them as I see it?’, because sometimes when you’re in your own work for too long, you can’t see it anymore from someone’s eye that’s never seen it before and yeah, when I came offstage and everything had gone so well…

I was also very nervous because the show was all run on vinyl records; there are times when I’m like, throwing them, and bouncing them and if I break one, that’s it. That’s my little twist on the idea of jugging being dangerous, because it’s often dangerous for the juggler, juggling chainsaws or whatever, and now I try to work very closely with the objects and I want to do juggling that a ball would want to do. Or if I was a record, how would I like to be juggled? And now there is danger for the object [laughs]… it could break, and danger for the entire show. But it went OK, I didn’t get so nervous that I broke a record. It went great. That was one of the best feelings I’ve had.

I also make juggling films. I often work for a few years at a time making juggling films that are kind of like skate films, where I collect the coolest tricks and find themes to edit them around and I release those every couple of years for the juggling community. My most recent one is called Gumball, which people can see pieces of on YouTube. When I released that it had been in the works for almost three years and that was one of my highlights that I could make film-specific juggling and had a lot of tricks that I’d never seen done ever before. Yeah, it was like a big expression of who I am and this is how I believe it can be and, here we go, I hope you like it. Sending something like that out to the world feels great.

youtube

Wes appears in Zebra at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room from 24-26 January 2020 during the London International Mime Festival

Picture credits: Headshot, Pierre Feniello. Zebra in order, Avi Pryntz-Nadworny; Brend Van Kerckhove; Florence Huet; Luke Burrage; Sonia Sleurs

Wes’ website

For tickets to Zebra, click here

London International Mime Festival, what’s on

Twitter: @WesPeden; @MimeLondon; @southbankcentre

Follow @TheWidowStanton on Twitter

#wes peden #juggler #circus interview #doch stockholm #London International Mime Festival #southbank centre #Gandini juggling #zebra

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bettsfic · 7 years

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stuff i’ve learned about writing after 1 year in an MFA program

my post “stuff i’ve learned about writing after 10 weeks in an MFA program” was a big hit, so i thought i’d write an updated one after two full semesters in my program, which is halfway through. one more year to go!

find what you’re afraid of and let it hurt you. this is a tall order and it’s one of the most important things i’ve learned. if you’re hesitant, if you’re blocked, if something is keeping you from moving forward, recognize that thing is always fear, and the sooner you put a name to it, the sooner you face it, the sooner you embrace it and let it do its damage to you. you don’t have to be immune to fear, and you don’t have to be stronger than it or better than it. you can let it knock you down and kick you a few times, but you’ve got to stand back up. you don’t need to be impenetrable -- fuck having a thicker skin. you can let shit hurt you. you can drown in how afraid you are. but you have to be tenacious. if your writing is important to you, you’ve got to fight for it.

you can do whatever the hell you want, for whatever reason you want, and you don’t owe anybody anything. in workshop we talk a lot about who can get away with what in writing (and by that we mean, white men can get away with everything). sometimes i read faulkner and i think, i hate this. this is everything i can’t stand about writing. but i respect that he got away with all his weird quirks -- useless repetition of words, minimal revision, overwrought exposition, atrocious pacing. all the rules we give ourselves, all these constraints are useless. like. fine, tell don’t show. use hanging participles and run-on sentences. invert freytag’s pyramid. ramble. lean into your purple prose. it doesn’t matter, none of it matters. if you like it, keep it. you don’t have to justify your own taste. and if someone calls you out? shrug and say, “stylistic choice, buddy. i do what i want.” it’s important to know the rules exist but it’s more important to break them. it’s your writing, nobody else’s. your words answer to no one.

be vulnerable. i’m a little biased since this was also my new year’s resolution, but it’s been a wild ride. i told myself in january that my focus this year was going to be on allowing myself to be vulnerable all the time, take opportunities and communicate with people how i feel about them, and it’s had a huge impact not only on my life and relationships, but on my writing too. opening myself up to non-judgmental introspection and setting down the drive to be tough has made my work way more emotionally nuanced -- i no longer write to tell a good story, but to explore some facet of living i hadn’t previously understood. i’ve found a level of self-acceptance i didn’t think i could ever achieve. reading has become easier, because i no longer get petty or jealous of writing that is better than mine. receiving rejections has become easier, because it’s a reflection on my work, but i still appreciate the work for what it is. it’s kind of amazing living life like this, and some days it’s hard but some days it’s thrilling. but vulnerability, like everything else, takes practice. you know when you confront it because it’s about leaning into discomfort and testing the limits of your own boundaries. being able to write it all down and see how all sorts of interactions affect me now where previously i wouldn’t have let them in is kind of staggering -- the difference is so obvious. i’m a kinder and gentler and more open person because of it, and i think my writing shows that.

become a good literary citizen. being a good literary citizen means watching out for your fellow writers. i subscribe to so many daily newsletters and do so much research every day, and i’m always looking out for my friends, for opportunities for them or resources that might help them. when i read things i like, i try to share them with people who will get something out of them, and i’ve been working harder to get in touch with the author to let them know their work inspired me. i reply to all emails and offer my feedback to writers who want an additional eye on their work. i didn’t realize i guess how much of writing was networking and being a good bro, but i feel like my time is split solidly between reading, writing, and building partnerships with other writers. don’t be afraid to reach out to people you admire and offer whatever you have to give, be it your appreciation for their work or a story or article you think they might like. the writing life is often a lonely one, but being a good literary citizen makes it a much better place for all of us.

talent is meaningless. everyone can learn to write. “you’re so talented!” is a compliment i hear thrown around a lot, and it makes me cringe, because i don’t really believe in talent. i believe that some people might have genetic inclinations or predispositions to creativity, they might fundamentally see the world in a way that would lend itself to beautiful strings of words, but writing, brass-tacks, is a discipline. it is a learned skill, and that means when you start out, you are going to be bad at it. you wouldn’t expect yourself to grab a log and a saw and be able to make a coffee table out of sheer talent, but you might be able to build the table if you experimented a little with it, thought about it, researched it, and maybe took it to someone who had already built a few tables before to give you their input on the project. and then once you’ve built your table, maybe it’s not great, but it’s something, and the next one you build will be sturdier and fancier and maybe have a little drawer for your keys or something. i say this because there are some authors, really famous ones, who believe that you can’t teach writing, and you can’t learn writing. you’re either a writer or you’re not. it’s just not true. you are going to be bad and that’s okay. you’re going to get better and that’s okay too. you’re never going to get better at the pace you want to improve, but the point is as long as you keep writing, keep asking for feedback, keep implementing that feedback, keep thinking about writing, you are going to get better, and you can be just as great as all the famous authors who think otherwise.

battle familiarity. this is more or less the usual “avoid cliches” advice you hear all the time, but on a bigger-picture level. avoiding cliches doesn’t just mean rewording things like “she let go of the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding,” but constantly subverting expected language by pointing to whatever is weird about the scene you’re writing. if you have two characters in a diner, we can see the booths and the coffee and the sassy middle-aged waitress. readers don’t need any of that pointed out. what they need is details they wouldn’t expect. maybe the booths are covered in peeling electrical tape, and the one closest to the door has a spring jutting out, but normally that’s rasheed’s booth anyway, but he isn’t here today for some reason. maybe the coffee has chicory in it. maybe the waitress wears air jordans and has a gold front tooth and a sleeve tattoo, and she’s the mom of a guy you went to high school with and you’re pretty sure he’s a sheepherder in nova scotia now. whenever you’re establishing place or character, the task isn’t fitting them in a box we’re already comfortable with, but constantly asking yourself, “what makes this weird?” then point out all the weird things until you can close your eyes and see every strange inch of this otherworldly diner that doesn’t really exist anywhere but your imagination, filled with people who have full, rounded, fucked-up lives. write in a way that every word defies expectation, and reflects the strangeness of the experiences you want to convey.

TAKE RISKS. this is a repeat from the 10 week article, but good god, it’s so important. take a risk every single day. risks nearly always pay off, especially in writing. if you’ve faced your fears, if you’re vulnerable, then writing becomes more than a discipline. stories get bigger and deeper and more meaningful even if you’re focusing on the microscopic. you can write a 200-word story about a dying houseplant or a 200k novel about a gay Civil War romance, but if you’ve put everything you’ve got into it, it’ll show. you should put so much of yourself into your writing that you’re trembling holding the pages in your hand as you pass them off to someone else to read. you should feel exposed. you should be afraid. you should feel like you’ve just jumped out of an airplane without a parachute. and if you’re not feeling those things, you’ve got some exploring to do. what does the story look like that makes you afraid? that makes you want to take risks? if you stare these questions down and commit to finding their answers, your writing will always improve, and your risks will pay off.

i have a whole writing advice tag if you want to check out my other stuff, and a collection of my writing advice posts from 2016. and always feel free to shoot me an ask if you have any writing-related questions.

#writing advice #dow17

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starfriday · 7 years

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CHIPS, directed by Dax Shepard is releasing across cinemas in India on March 24th, 2017.

Dax Shepard (“Hit & Run,” TV’s “Parenthood”) and Michael Peña (“Ant-Man”) star in the action comedy “CHIPS,” directed by Shepard from his own script.

Jon Baker (Shepard) and Frank “Ponch” Poncherello (Peña) have just joined the California Highway Patrol (CHP) in Los Angeles, but for very different reasons. Baker is a beaten-up former pro motorbiker trying to put his life and marriage back together. Poncherello is a cocky undercover Federal agent investigating a multi-million dollar heist that may be an inside job—inside the CHP.

The inexperienced rookie and the hardened pro are teamed together, but clash more than click, so kick-starting a real partnership is easier said than done. But with Baker’s unique bike skills and Ponch’s street savvy it might just work…if they don’t drive each other crazy first.

“CHIPS” also stars Rosa Salazar (“Insurgent”), Adam Brody (“Think Like a Man Too”), Kristen Bell (“Bad Moms”), and Vincent D’Onofrio (“Jurassic World”).

The film was produced by Andrew Panay (“Earth to Echo,” “Wedding Crashers”), who previously produced Shepard’s “Hit & Run,” and Ravi Mehta (“Get Hard”), and is based on the popular television series created by Rick Rosner. Robert J. Dohrmann, Nate Tuck, Rick Rosner, Michael Peña and Dax Shepard served as executive producers.

Collaborating behind the scenes were director of photography Mitchell Amundsen (“Ride Along 2”), production designer Maher Ahmad (“Hangover 3”), editor Dan Lebental (“Ant-Man”), costume designer Diane Crooke (TV’s “Parenthood”) and composer Fil Eisler (“Empire”).

Warner Bros. Pictures presents, an Andrew Panay Production, “CHIPS” is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment company.

ABOUT THE MOVIE

SEX, DRUGS & HIGHWAY PATROL

What happens when you team up a former X-Games star with a busted-up body and a painkiller habit, and an over-sexed undercover Fed with too much confidence, give them each a badge and a bike and set them loose on the sun-baked highways of Southern California?

CHIP happens.

More to the point, if you’re writer/director Dax Shepard, you deliver a buddy cop comedy loaded with enough action, stunts and hard-R humor to push it to the legal limit.

Shepard also stars as Jon, opposite Michael Peña as his partner, Ponch. “This is about two very different guys with vastly different agendas and skill sets, who have to learn how to ride together, pick up the slack for each other and ultimately trust each other with their lives,” Shepard says. And if that sounds a little high-minded, “It also has nudity—though granted, mostly of me—and epic chases, destruction, and explosions. I don’t think we went more than three days on this movie without blowing something up. The action is real, the jumps are real and the fights are almost real.”

In other words, this ain’t your parents’ “CHIPS.”

Jon Baker is a newly minted officer of the California Highway Patrol, CHP for short. Jon’s a mess. But, fueled by optimism, prescription meds and a single-minded desire to make good and win back his ex-wife, he’s ready to face any challenge or humiliation with everything he’s got. For now, that means playing it by the book, keeping his nose clean and writing lots of tickets. Just one problem: he’s stuck on day one with a take-charge partner who doesn’t give a damn about any of that.

Francis Llewellyn Poncherello, aka Ponch, is actually Miami FBI agent Castillo, a guy with a big success rate and the swagger to match. He also has a pathological weakness for women, especially women in yoga pants, which is a much bigger problem now that has to straddle a bike every day. Perpetually cocked and locked, he’s in L.A. undercover to smoke out a dirty-cop robbery ring inside the CHP.

Of course Jon doesn’t know this up front, including the fact that he was picked as Ponch’s partner only because they figured he was too green to ask questions. Or get in the way.

But when things get real out there, these two newest members of the force have to find a way to get past each other’s bulls**t and get on with it, because they have only each other to rely on.

Producer Andrew Panay, who collaborated with Shepard on the 2012 romantic action comedy “Hit & Run,” signed up for the ride as soon as he read the script. “It’s incredibly funny, and wall-to-wall action,” he says. “The comedy is edgy and the action is a little throwback because it’s not a lot of visual effects. We did most of the stunts in-camera, and Dax does a lot of his own stunts, so it feels authentic.”

“I can think of a lot of movies that are funny but I don’t remember the action, or it was just background,” says Peña. “This is obviously a comedy, but Dax wanted the jokes and the stunts to work together so when we transition into the action sequences there’s validity to it. He really gets the setups and the payoffs and how to break down the characters so people can relate.”

It helped that Shepard was writing about something he loves—motorcycles—and that he knew the players. “I started this project knowing Michael and I were Ponch and Jon, so I could play to our strengths. A lot of times you’re writing in a vacuum because you don’t know the cast, but I could be more specific here. My passion is motorcycles and cars, so I knew we’d be doing a lot of riding, and that gave me the freedom to write scenes where we’re talking trash over a chase. All of that definitely informed the kind of story I was going to tell.”

Shepard was committed to showcase a range of stunts with high-performance machines. “I wanted great motorcycle action from a variety of disciplines, so we have motocross-style stunts, road race stunts, drifting, a lot of different things,” he lays out. “We needed bikes that could jump and corner tight with amazing speed and braking, bikes that could handle stairs. But I couldn’t do those things on stock CHP bikes because the logic wouldn’t hold up. The bad guys could have whatever they wanted, and that was a completely different vibe, but I had to figure out how to get Jon and Ponch onto cool motorcycles to catch up with them. That introduced the premise of Ponch being undercover FBI.”

The writer/director also took a page from his own life by giving Jon the need to figure out what makes people tick. “Jon’s always trying to understand why he does what he does. I’m very much interested in what drives me, or what drives other people, so that became a part of the character,” Shepard explains. That translates into Jon trying to analyze his hug-averse partner, or, say, figure out why Ponch requires so much “alone time” in the bathroom multiple times a day…

A running joke in the film, Jon’s touchy-feely observations contrast with Ponch’s more down-and-dirty commentary, like the way he has to enlighten his out-of-circulation partner on the current sexual scene—namely certain back door maneuvers Jon had no idea had gone mainstream.

Either way, what it boils down to is them being themselves. And being guys. “Ponch and Jon come from opposite directions on so many things,” says producer Ravi Mehta. “Not only tight-lipped versus TMI, but Jon’s a stickler for the rules and Ponch likes to fly by the seat of his pants, so they start out not clicking at all. But once they’re through fighting it, and let their guards down, they actually feed off of how different they are. That’s when it becomes more of a bromance and a true partnership.”

That means owning their screw-ups as much as merging their talents.

Citing the inspiration he drew from the late ‘70s/early ‘80s TV series created by Rick Rosner, who is now one of the film’s executive producers, Shepard says, “To me, the key elements of that show were the setting, the bikes, and the fact that Jon and Ponch were heroes.” And as much as those characters were unique to the show, his Jon and Ponch are different. This is a new incarnation, with its own personality—a big-screen “CHIPS” for a new generation that takes the stunts, action, and comedy further than the small screen would allow.

It wouldn’t be the CHP without Southern California. “The CHP is emblematic of California and we worked incredibly hard to keep this production in Los Angeles,” says Mehta. “We made sure L.A. was featured in the art direction and the action, so audiences will see parts of the downtown area as well as beaches and deserts. There’s even a chase through pine trees in the Angeles National Forest.”

“Growing up in Detroit, where it was overcast a lot and freezing cold, I loved L.A.-based films,” says Shepard. “For me it was a two-hour vacation to sunny SoCal.”

But this take on California living is far from laid-back. “The story is constantly moving,” says Vincent D’Onofrio, who stars as Lieutenant Ray Kurtz, a veteran cop with the power to make a whole lot of trouble for the new recruits. “It wows you with the action and the motorcycle scenes. Then so many of these actors are also great comedians and they’re just killing it.”

The “CHIPS” main starring cast includes Adam Brody as Clay Allen, an FBI agent Castillo shoots “accidentally on purpose” in Miami before taking this West Coast gig as Ponch. His arm in a sling, the still-pissed-off Allen follows Castilo to L.A. as the bureau’s point person on the case. Rosa Salazar also stars as CHP officer Ava Perez, who shares Jon’s love of hot bikes…and possibly other things, if only he’d get with the program.

Not surprisingly, “CHIPS” bears little resemblance to the day-to-day lives of actual CHP officers, some of whom worked with the production to keep everyone safe during their location shoots on active roadways. “The officers on set with us were great sports,” says Shepard. “It goes without saying, we have nothing but respect for the job that law enforcement does every day to keep us safe in the real world. Everything we did was to the extreme and played for entertainment.”

In fact, there was a great deal of cooperation between the CHP and the filmmaking team, from informal pre-production meetings over the content and logistics of the script to a tour of the organization’s Sacramento training facility. “During the shoot, they gave us escorts on scouts, which gave us freeway access that would have otherwise been nearly impossible to secure,” Panay recounts. The filmmakers were even granted access to the CHP headquarters in downtown Los Angeles, which, he adds, “was something we had been hoping for and was the pinnacle of our working relationship.”

But in case there’s any doubt about what audiences are in for, “CHIPS” opens with this friendly disclaimer: This film is not endorsed by the California Highway Patrol. At all.

TO SERVE AND BRO-TECT

The oldest rookie to ever join the force, as his supervisor points out, Jon Baker may not seem like an obvious candidate for the job—that is, until his fellow recruits see him ride. Clearly, “The Baker” is still a force to content with on the road, but, says Shepard, “As an X-Games motocross competitor he had sponsors and fans; he had the money and the glory and the great life. That’s all over now. He’s had about 20 surgeries, broken a lot of bones, and he’s not in the best physical shape. He’s in a transition period.”

Mostly, Jon is still reeling from the breakup of his marriage. Karen, played by Shepard’s real-life wife Kristen Bell, is a trophy from his heyday that he can’t let go. He’s convinced he can get her back once he gets out of his slump, so he continues to live in the tiny guest room behind the luxury home they once shared, and that Karen still occupies, just to remain close. And, in spite of her total lack of interest, Shepard offers, “he continues to attend couples therapy. Alone.”

At the same time, the former star athlete is focusing on a new career path he hopes will make his ex take notice. The only thing he really knows how to do is ride a motorcycle, so he picks a profession for which that advantage might tip the odds in his favor.

But, whatever his motives, Shepard notes, “It turns out that once they decide to give him a badge, he takes this job very seriously.”

Not so with Ponch. In his mind, this ace fed is just passing through. He’s here to wrap up his assignment, hang up his helmet and go home. The truth is, Ponch’s high-profile cases have created some high-profile collateral damage, and sending him to California was good for the bureau in more ways than one. Sure, he’s here to break up this insider ring. But, since he was caught sexting with the wife of a drug kingpin he just busted in Miami, it would also be better for everyone if he was out of town, and out of touch, during the trial.

“Yeah, he’s a little bit of a sex addict,” Peña acknowledges.

“I actually like some of Ponch’s quirks,” the actor continues. “He’s kind of clumsy, for one. He thinks he can do anything, so, even though he can’t really ride a bike that well, he’s always pushing that limit. His ego gets in the way and sometimes he crashes. But beyond that, he’s capable at what he does and he’s really focused on the case, and I like that about him.”

Peña’s portrayal, Mehta feels, “preserves the machismo of the character while bringing a whole level of comedy to it with these very human flaws.”

For Shepard, “I couldn’t see anyone but Michael in this role. He’s a phenomenal actor and effortlessly charismatic, even when he needs to be angry or embarrassed.”

Matched up with Jon, it’s a sure bet he’s gonna be angry and embarrassed a lot.

What Ponch expects in a partner is someone who can follow orders, keep his mouth shut and not draw too much attention. Unfortunately, none of those things describe Jon. On the other hand, Jon’s ideal partner would be a generally more easygoing guy who knows how to take a bunny hill without rolling off his ride, and is open to a little meaningful conversation from time to time.

“So much of the story is about their dynamic,” says Peña. “Ponch is very logical and focused on the present, and Jon is more in tune with his feelings and about fixing his marriage, like he’s always ‘three beers too deep’ with the intimacy.”

To his credit, Ponch comes to grudgingly acknowledge Jon’s instincts as a detective, not to mention his insane skills on two wheels. As they continue to work together, with all the minute-by-minute sacrifices and real heroism that entails, they begin to understand more about each other. “Ponch starts to meet Jon in the middle and maybe even attempt a more emotional point of view, and it’s funny to watch him try out this completely unfamiliar approach,” he adds.

The bottom line is, they have a job to do. Someone in the CHP has been running a series of armored car robberies with black-and-whites and motorcycles, in broad daylight, to the tune of millions of dollars. And that’s not all. There was a suspicious suicide at one of the recent heists, which gives the guys their first promising lead. The questions are: who in the department is involved? Who knows what’s going on and who doesn’t?

Their investigation soon turns toward Ray Kurtz, played by Vincent D’Onofrio. Whether or not he proves to be one of the cops they’re after, no one denies that Kurtz is one scary dude.

As D’Onofrio sees it, “Kurtz has been around a long time and he’s a bit of a hardass, but he’s also a really good cop and I think everyone on his team respects him. He’s in a tough situation and he has to get out of it. Whenever I play characters like this, I don’t play them necessarily as good guys or bad guys but just people. I feel for his situation and the difficult things he has to do, to get what he needs done, and that’s his part of the story.

“He has a problem with Ponch right away, and goes after him,” D’Onofrio goes on to reveal, “but there are also moments of lightness where they’re talking back and forth and it’s just crazy and funny. We did different versions, from super funny to serious, because my character has issues and you don’t know what’s going to work and how far you can go.”

As Jon and Ponch dig deeper into the case and find new ways to run afoul of Kurtz, they also catch the attention of officers Ava Perez and Lindsey Taylor—played by Rosa Salazar and Jessica McNamee. Lindsey calls Ponch for herself, while Ava sets her sights on fellow bike enthusiast Jon. At least that’s what he thinks when she invites him on an off-road excursion.

Extenuating circumstances would never stand between Ponch and a hot date, but with Jon it’s more complicated. At the first hint of Ava’s interest, he launches into full disclosure. Says Salazar, “It’s touching that he wants to repair his marriage and says so. He’s like an open wound, vulnerable, but in a nice way. Ava likes that, and she’s obviously attracted to him but she’s a brass-tacks type of woman, very straightforward and real, and what she actually says is, ‘Get over yourself. I just asked you to go for a ride.’”

“It’s important that Ava have the upper hand on Jon at all times,” Shepard comments. “She’s witty and sarcastic, cool and tough. She loves motorcycles and she loves being a cop. I worked with Rosa on ‘Parenthood’ and she’s wonderful. She brings great ideas to the table.”

On reading the script, Salazar recalls, “It was the funniest thing I’d read in forever but that’s not surprising because Dax is the funniest guy you’ll ever meet.” About the action, she thought, “I’m gonna get so hurt on this movie. I’m going to be jumping over barriers and there’s fire, and fights, and helicopters. But I love action-comedy and Dax assured me it would all be safe and it really was a blast.”

Ponch, meanwhile, heats things up with Lindsey. “I get to kick ass and chase bad guys around,” McNamee says. “The relationship Lindsey strikes up with Ponch is kind of unlikely and unexpected, so it’s cool to play into all of that. Jon and Ponch certainly come in and shake things up. I think for Ava and Lindsey there’s a kind of ‘fresh meat’ instinct to it, but they also find them endearing and charming in their own odd little ways.’”

Throughout all of this, Ponch touches base with his former FBI colleague turned bureau contact Clay Allen. Supposedly calling the shots on the case, Allen mostly ends up eating Ponch’s dust after arriving five minutes late to the party every time. It’s a role based largely on “anger and indignation,” observes Adam Brody. “When Allen and Castillo—now Ponch—were working together in Miami, things went south. Ponch shot a suspect through Allen’s shoulder and he’s still mad about it. He feels that wasn’t necessary.”

Shepard credits Brody’s expressions and keen timing for elevating the role beyond his expectations. “He’s just so funny and so quick—anything you throw at him, he will say it in such a way that immediately makes it twice as entertaining.”

Adds Brody, “At first, it looked like the part was mostly playing straight man for Ponch, but when I arrived on set it was, no, what they want is for Allen to be an idiot. And I really liked that, because I love playing an idiot.”

“Dax’s dialogue is amazing, so we had all these well drawn characters on the page,” says Panay, “but what we looked for in assembling this fantastic cast were actors who could also push the comedy in their own way. Dax likes everyone to open up and swing big.”

Also suiting up for the “CHIPS” cast is Isiah Whitlock Jr. as Ponch’s FBI boss, Peterson, who runs the gamut from disgusted and ticked off to full-on apoplectic. But he still manages to find laughs in anything that puts his least-favorite employee on the hot seat. Jane Kazcmarek is Ponch’s supervisor Captain Lindel, a woman with a shockingly relaxed sense of protocol; Richard T. Jones is officer Parish, the wrong man with whom to pick a fight; David Koechner is Pat, a wrestling trainer who doesn’t appreciate Jon’s unconventional technique; and actor/environmental activist Ed Begley Jr. takes an ironic turn in the unlikeliest role his fans could imagine, for reasons that will be obvious the instant he speeds into frame … in a Ferrari.

Kristen Bell dives into the role of Jon Baker’s carefree ex, Karen, the undeserving object of his self-improvement efforts. Marking her fourth big-screen collaboration with Shepard, Bell says, “Karen needs to be the person audiences don’t want for Jon. They should be shouting, ‘No, don’t do it!’ Karen is vain and all about appearances, and she thinks she’s the ultimate prize. Things started going south in their marriage the day he stopped placing first in his events. That’s the kind of person she is.

“Dax almost didn’t cast me,” Bell contiues. “After he wrote the role, he sat me down and said, ‘I’m not positive you can be as unlikable as I need you to be for this,’ which I took both as a compliment and an insult,” she laughs. “Because I can be very unlikable.”

SETTING EACH OTHER RIGHT

WHEN THINGS GO WRONG

To boost the level of action on “CHIPS,” from bridges to bathtubs, Shepard reunited with renowned stunt performer Steve De Castro. De Castro, who first served as stunt coordinator for him on “Hit & Run,” enlisted pros as well as the best stunt riders to execute the trickiest and most spectacular maneuvers. Also on board were special effects coordinator Larz Anderson, production designer Maher Ahmad, and cinematographer Mitchell Amundsen.

“With Mitch, you get kinetic action; the camera is always moving. He’s a cowboy,” says Ravi Mehta, who had worked with Amundsen and knew he would be a good fit. “Selecting key department heads is just like casting, you have to put the right pieces together.”

“He shot a ‘Bourne,’ he shot ‘Mission Impossible’ and ‘Transformers,’” Shepard offers in short, “so this is a guy who’s been in that pursuit vehicle and operating a crane for hundreds of hours. I had a very accomplished team all around. We were in very good hands.”

Shepard kept the action as real as possible. “That was our whole approach. The most we did digitally was to swap out a bike, so generally if you see something happening on screen, it happened,” he confirms. “Everything the motorcycles do in this movie was actually done by someone. And as much as I could put myself or Michael into it, I would. For example, we got Michael to do his own burnout in a scene and it got a fantastic reaction from him.”

The film opens with a bank robbery, shootout and pursuit through the crowded streets of Long Beach, which doubled for Ponch’s home town of Miami. In the driver’s seat of the lead car, Ponch makes no distinction between the road and the sidewalk. For audiences, it’s an intro to the ride they are embarking on, and to Ponch a sign of things to come, as this chase is the prelude to a bigger and crazier one set in Los Angeles.

The L.A. sequence begins with Jon and Ponch after a suspect in a residential neighborhood that opens onto city streets, then takes them up and down a parking structure, across the beach and into the L.A. river basin before culminating on Downtown’s 4th Street Bridge. There, all hell breaks loose with cars and motorcycles, a helicopter, a SWAT Humvee, a motorhome in the wrong place at the wrong time and yes, even a bicycle cop.

De Castro outlines one of this scene’s key beats: “We had 100 stunt performers and extras on the beach, with bikes jumping into the sand, going through volleyball nets and heading up a sand dune. As Jon and the bad guy hit the berm, the bad guy is in front and spins a 180 in mid air, then shoots at Jon’s leg. That’s X-Games gold medalist Lance Coury. It’s a 75-foot jump. When you see the bike spin around it’s what they call a turndown, but he’s doing it one-handed, which he’d never done before. Then following him over the gap is Dave Castillo, an AMA pro rider who won the Motocross 500. For them to jump 75 feet and so close to each other, with Lance turning the bike 180 degrees, it’s just incredible.”

Production closed the 4th Street Bridge for the melee and mash-up between the Hummer and the bulky motorhome. “Dax wanted to do it practically so we drove a stock H1 Hummer straight through a stock RV at 45 miles an hour,” De Castro states.

Shepard attests, “It was crazy. I’ve lived in L.A. for 20 years and I’ve driven across that bridge a thousand times, and to have it as a playground for two straight days to demolish motorhomes and crash motorcycles was pretty amazing. There were many times when I thought, ‘I can’t believe we are allowed to do this.’ We owned a whole exit off the 210 Freeway to blow up a propane tank with helicopters circling and a fireball nine stories high. There are actual cops watching you peel out and do donuts and they’re giving you the thumbs up, which is not a side of law enforcement you usually get to see.”

Bike action being a huge component of the story, the filmmakers needed equipment to support it in style. Shepard used a range of brands and models, some stock and some custom, including what he calls “a smattering of Harleys and the big BMW snowmobiles,” like the BMW RT1200 standard police models. For D’Onofrio’s ride, he worked with Harley Davidson to design a custom Electra Glide that, Shepard says, “shoots six foot blue flames out the back and has titanium pegs that shower sparks.”

Primarily the film featured one of the director’s personal favorites: Ducati, and in particular the Ducati Hypermotard, a versatile and durable model which became Jon and Ponch’s updated “hero” bikes. “Every time we’re jumping, sliding, drifting, stoppie’ing or free endo’ing them, they were all stock Ducatis,” he says, in the parlance of the initiated. Even on the beach, the Hypermotards served, with modified knobby tires in front and paddles in back, while retaining their signature look and sound.

De Castro comments, “Michael Peña had just started riding and he did a great job, and Vincent D’Onofrio hadn’t ridden a bike for maybe 20 years but he hopped right back on and we got the shots we needed.” As for Dax, “He would have made an excellent stunt guy. He’s a high-level rider on both street and dirt, so it was a great position for me to be in. I could say, "Hey Dax, I need you to come in faster, I need you to come in hotter. I'm gonna put the camera here and we're gonna counter with you,’ and still we know everyone would be safe and it would look amazing.”

Even so, Shepard admits feeling humbled alongside the pro talent, including his double, Joe Dryden, a pioneer of the street bike freestyle. “Before I started this movie I thought I was really great at riding motorcycles, I would have given myself a 9. And now that I’ve seen some of the best riders in the world I feel a little weak,” he allows.

“There were a couple of times when Dax wanted to do a stunt but De Castro said, ‘No, you’re not doing that,’” adds Peña. “That’s Steve’s job. He makes it fun but safe. But with a film like this, you really get psyched up to be part of the action.”

Stunt riders also took cameras directly into the fray not only with Pursuit vehicles, but with Covert Camera Bikes, electric motorcycles that can reach 100mph with cameras in front and back. Perfect for tight situations and able to dolly as needed, they’re effective for bringing audiences into the moment.

The stunt team worked closely with FX supervisor Anderson and production designer Ahmad, as sets were built and destroyed. As the big chase segued into the confrontation on the bridge, Shepard gives kudos to “our special effects genius Larz for figuring out how to slide this massive 35-foot RV along the asphalt. Larz designed a pneumatic cylinder to lift the back wheels. It slides, then you flip a switch and it comes back up.”

Following the slide, Anderson picks up, “we switched it out for another motorhome that was pre-scored and loaded with a bunch of stuff, held together by nothing, so when it’s hit, it all goes flying. Dax was great to work with. He really knows what he wants and he’s open to other ideas that might embellish that—especially if it involves fire or explosions.” Anderson had plenty of opportunity for that, including the challenge of safely igniting a propane truck alongside a hillside full of brush, for which he made a tank out of foam. Later, as a truck slams into Ponch’s bike and drags it down the road, he created a literal trail of fire.

Anderson’s handiwork also appears in one of the film’s major set pieces, a warehouse compound north of Los Angeles near a popular biking site of canyons and valleys known as The Devil’s Punchbowl. It was the perfect setting for the final showdown involving a variety of vehicles, gunplay and hand-to-hand takedowns, all of which leads to a massive explosion.

The filmmakers found a property of several acres of desert land, housing a private home, barn and outbuildings that would add peripherally to the set. Says production designer Ahmad, “It had everything we needed except the main building, the warehouse, so I found a spot Dax liked and we built the whole thing from scratch. Given that the building was for the big finale and needed to be blown up, set on fire and driven through, it was a virtual certainty we would have to build it. It was about 50 by 100 feet, 25 feet tall, with dozens of windows. We poured a concrete floor. Then we dressed the inside with old cars and junk, and there was enough space outside to build the wall for the bikes to go over.”

“Maher is brilliant,” Shepard proclaims. “I’d show up to sets and they’d be five times better than I even dreamt when I was writing it. If we had a fight scene, I’d ask, ‘What can I break in this room?’ And he’d say, “That’s breakable, that’s breakable, that chair, that desk, that table, that’s fake,’ and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I can do anything in here.”

But for all the story’s high-octane action, one stunt audiences will not likely forget unfolds on a more intimate scale. After a physically taxing day, Jon wakes up unable to move his wrecked body or reach his meds. He needs a therapeutic soak and calls on a very reluctant Ponch for help getting into the tub.

Ponch trips, catapulting his naked partner in the general vicinity of the bathtub.

“I had to get into pretty good shape for that, so I could do all my nude stuff on week one and then resume eating what I wanted for the rest of the shoot,” says Shepard with typical good humor. “I had a harness and a cable, and I was on a ratchet, so, as soon as he lets go they hit the hammer and I just flew into the wall. It also spun me, so I hit the wall and then went upside down into the tub, bare naked, in front of my crew that just met me two days before.”

“I remember a fair amount of laughter that day,” Peña confirms.

The tub was made of rubber, as was the wall that absorbed Shepard’s impact. “The room had to be high enough for the stunt and FX guys to run a track up along the ceiling,” says Ahmad, who built the bedroom and bathroom comprising the guest house from an existing home’s dining and living rooms, with an eye toward allowing a straight line trajectory from the bed to the tub.

The designer modified numerous other practical locations, including the interior of a suburban home that gets trashed in a fight between Jon and Ponch and an officer who doesn’t appreciate their snooping. But the set he had the most fun creating was the drug den.

“It had to be filthy and disgusting,” he emphasizes. “The direction I got from Dax was that we couldn’t push it too far, and that’s what we did. We laid down pre-grunge-ified linoleum to protect the existing wood floors. Then we painted and did horrible things to the walls and brought awful furniture in, like stained mattresses. The kitchen was all moldy and overgrown with loathsome stuff and rotten food, and we learned a lot about making kitty poop with modeling clay. To accelerate its drying we put it into a microwave oven at the production office and one batch got away from us. It set off the smoke detectors and we had to evacuate the building. But it was the bathroom that just grossed everyone out. It was completely sanitary and smelled fine but it looked awful. I love it when a set elicits such an enthusiastic reaction from the crew.”

When Jon enters the house and is physically overcome by the stench, it’s a fair bet that members of the audience will be right there with him—their hands to their mouths.

Another “CHIPS” location included the Cal Poly Pomona College’s south campus, for scenes set in the Police Academy locker room and gym. The production also shot interiors and the parking lot of the active L.A. Central CHP Center, just south of downtown.

Finally, as a Valentine to locals, the production included a scene of Jon and Ponch at an Original Tommy’s burger stand—a Southern California institution—and not just any Tommy’s, but the one that started it all, at Rampart and Beverly Boulevards.

Overall, Panay says, “Dax went for an authentic L.A. feel. This film was shot entirely on practical, Southern California locations. We did build and augment some sets but we weren’t on soundstages and everything was right here, real and tangible. Our location team found so many great spots to showcase the action and help make L.A. itself an essential part of the story.”

“What I like best about it is the old-school action, which we put together with a lot of love and I think consequently has a really good vibe,” says Shepard, “not to mention great explosions and amazing stunts, and a lot of comedy. I hope every scene is as fun for audiences as it was for us, making it.”

# # #

ABOUT THE CAST

DAX SHEPARD (Jon Baker / Director / Writer / Executive Producer) was born in 1975 in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan. With both parents working in the automotive industry, his first love was cars. He graduated in 1993 from Walled Lake High School, and moved to California in 1995. Shepard graduated magna cum laude from UCLA with a degree in Anthropology. While attending UCLA, he trained at The Groundlings Theater for improv and sketch comedy. After eight years of auditioning, Dax booked “Punk’d,” his first paid acting role.

Shepard’s notable film credits include “Without a Paddle,” “Idiocracy,” “Employee of the Month,” “Baby Mama,” “The Freebie,” "The Judge” and "This Is Where I Leave You.” He also portrayed Crosby Braverman for six seasons on the hit NBC series "Parenthood."

Prior to “CHIPS,” Shepard wrote, directed and starred in two features films: “Hit & Run” and “Brother’s Justice.”

MICHAEL PEÑA (Ponch / Executive Producer) has distinguished himself in Hollywood as an actor with a wide range of performances and has worked with an impressive roster of award-winning directors. Peña earned notable recognition for his performance in Paul Haggis’ provocative Oscar-winning film “Crash,” alongside Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon and Terrence Howard. He garnered multiple Best Ensemble nominations for his performance as Daniel the locksmith, winning awards from the Screen Actors Guild and the Broadcast Film Critics Association for the cast’s performance. In 2013, he was seen in the David O. Russell film “American Hustle,” which won a Golden Globe, as well as ensemble awards from the Screen Actors Guild and the Broadcast Film Critics. It was also nominated for a BAFTA Award and an Academy Award. In 2015, he was seen in two films to cross the $500 million mark; the heist film “Ant Man,” starring opposite Paul Rudd and Michael Douglas, and “The Martian,” opposite Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain. “The Martian” premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and went on to win a Golden Globe, was named Top Film by the National Board of Review, and was nominated for a 2016 Academy Award.

He was most recently seen in “Collateral Beauty,” starring Will Smith, Edward Norton and Kate Winslet, and “War on Everyone,” opposite Alexander Skarsgård, which premiered at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival.

He can next be seen in “Horse Soldiers,” alongside Chris Hemsworth and Michael Shannon, and “A Wrinkle in Time,” opposite Reese Witherspoon and Chris Pine. In addition, Peña will also lend his voice to the highly anticipated “The LEGO® NINJAGO® Movie,” and “My Little Pony: The Movie.”

In 2014, Peña starred as civil rights leader and labor organizer Cesar Chavez in “Cesar Chavez,” directed by Diego Luna. He was also seen in the drama “Graceland,” and in David Ayer’s “Fury,” with Brad Pitt and Shia LaBouf. In 2012, he was seen in the critically acclaimed “End of Watch,” which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. For his performance as Officer Zavala, Peña was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and the film was recognized by the National Board of Review as one of the Top 10 Independent Films of the year.

Peña has been seen in a range of films, including the independent “Everything Must Go,” alongside Will Ferrell and Rebecca Hall; “Gangster Squad,” opposite Sean Penn, Josh Brolin and Ryan Gosling, and the animated feature “Turbo.” His credits include “The Lucky Ones,” co-starring Rachel McAdams and Tim Robbins; Jody Hill’s comedy “Observe and Report,” with Seth Rogen; Robert Redford’s political drama “Lions for Lambs,” with Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep; and Werner Herzog and David Lynch’s psychological thriller “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done,” with Michael Shannon, Willem Dafoe and Chloë Sevigny.

Peña’s other noteworthy credits consist of Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center”; Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby”; Matthew Ryan Hoge’s “The United States of Leland”; Gregor Jordan’s “Buffalo Soldiers”; Antoine Fuqua’s “Shooter”; Brett Ratner’s “Tower Heist”; and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Babel.”

On television, Peña starred in the HBO film “Walkout,” based on the true story of a young Mexican-American high school teacher who helped stage a massive student walkout in the mid-1960s. Peña received an Imagen Award for Best Actor for his performance. He recently re-teamed with Danny McBride on the second season of HBO's “Eastbound and Down.” He also appeared on the F/X drama “The Shield,” in its fourth season, as one of the central leads opposite Glenn Close and Anthony Anderson. His other television credits include Steven Spielberg’s NBC series “Semper Fi.”

Raised in Chicago, Peña began acting when he beat out hundreds of others in an open call for a role in Peter Bogdanovich’s “To Sir, With Love 2,” starring Sidney Poitier.

ROSA SALAZAR (Ava Perez) was born in Washington, DC, and raised in Greenbelt, Maryland. Salazar’s upcoming film releases include “Maze Runner: The Death Cure” and “Alita: Battle Angel.”

Her past films include “Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials,” “The Divergent Series: Insurgent,” “Search Party” and “Night Owls,” amongst others.

ADAM BRODY (Clay Allen) is a dynamic young actor, who has crafted a distinguished career in film and television.

Brody recently starred in Crackle’s original drama series, “StartUp,” alongside Martin Freeman. He also starred alongside Lily-Rose Depp and Harley Quinn Smith in “Yoga Hosers,” directed by Kevin Smith. In addition, Brody wrapped production on the comedy “Big Bear,” opposite Pablo Schreiber, and will soon begin filming the thriller “The Wanting.”

Last year, Brody starred alongside Uzo Aduba and Maggie Grace in “Showing Roots,” a television movie set in 1977 about two women who try to integrate their small town amid rising racial tension. In addition, Brody was seen in “Sleeping with Other People” from producers Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, which starred Alison Brie and Jason Sudeikis. In 2014, Brody starred in “Growing Up and Other Lies,” directed by Darren Grodsky and Danny Jacobs. He was also seen in “Life Partners,” starring Leighton Meester and Gillian Jacobs; and “Think Like A Man Too,” alongside Kevin Hart, Gabrielle Union, Taraji P. Henson, Regina Hall and Meagan Good.

His past film credits include “Revenge for Jolly!,” opposite Kristen Wiig, Elijah Wood, Oscar Isaac and Ryan Phillippe; David Talbert’s “Baggage Claim,” starring Paula Patton and Taye Diggs; “Some Girls,” adapted by Neil LaBute from his play of the same name; “Lovelace,” opposite Amanda Seyfried, Peter Sarsgaard and James Franco; “Welcome to the Jungle,” directed by Rob Meltzer; “Double or Nothing,” a short film penned by Neil LaBute; “Damsels in Distress,” by writer/director Whit Stillman, with Greta Gerwig and Analeigh Tipton; “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World”, alongside Steve Carell and Kiera Knightley; “The Oranges,” directed by Julian Farino from Ian Helfer and Jay Reiss’ screenplay also starring Hugh Laurie, Catherine Keener, Alia Shawkat, Leighton Meester, Oliver Platt and Allison Janney; Jon Kasdan’s “In the Land of Women,” opposite Meg Ryan and Kristen Stewart; Wes Craven’s “Scream 4;” Kevin Smith’s “Cop Out;” Galt Niederhoffer’s “The Romantics;” Karyn Kusama’s “Jennifer’s Body,” written by Diablo Cody; Boaz Yakin’s “Death in Love,” with Josh Lucas, Lukas Haas, and Jacqueline Bisset; Gregg Araki’s “Smiley Face,” with Anna Faris; David Wain’s “The Ten;” Jason Reitman’s “Thank You For Smoking;” Gore Verbinski’s smash “The Ring;” and Doug Liman’s blockbuster “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” alongside Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

Brody memorably starred as Seth Cohen on the popular television series “The O.C.,” directed in the pilot episode by Doug Liman. He also starred as Billy Jones in Neil LaBute’s romantic comedy series “Billy and Billie,” about two step-siblings trying to deal with their taboo romance. His television work also includes recurring roles on “The League,” “House of Lies,” “Burning Love,” “Once and Again” and “Gilmore Girls”; and standout guest turns on “Judging Amy,” “Family Law,” and “Smallville.”

VINCENT D’ONOFRIO (Ray Kurtz) can currently be seen taking on the complex role of The Wizard in NBC’s “Emerald City,” the reimagining of “The Wizard of Oz.” The 10-episode mini-series was directed by Tarsem Singh, with whom D’Onofrio worked previously on the science fiction noir film “The Cell,” opposite Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn. D’Onofrio also recently wrapped Eli Roth’s “Death Wish,” opposite Bruce Willis.

Last year, D’Onofrio starred in “The Magnificent Seven,” playing one of the seven gun slinging outlaws alongside Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt and Ethan Hawke; as well as “In Dubious Battle,” based on John Steinbeck’s novel, directed by James Franco and featuring Bryan Cranston, Ed Harris and Selena Gomez.

2015 was also a busy year for D’Onofrio with the blockbuster success of “Jurassic World” and his critically acclaimed role of Wilson Fisk aka Kingpin in the Netflix series “Daredevil,” opposite Charlie Cox. He also starred in “Run All Night,” opposite Liam Neeson. In 2014, D’Onofrio starred in “The Judge,” opposite Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall.

D’Onofrio was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Hawaii, Colorado and Florida. He eventually returned to New York to study acting at the American Stanislavsky Theatre with Sharon Chatten of the Actors Studio. While honing his craft, he appeared in several films at New York University and worked as a bouncer at dance clubs in the city.

In 1984, he became a full-fledged member of the American Stanislavsky Theatre, appearing in “The Petrified Forest,” “Of Mice and Men,” “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” and “The Indian Wants the Bronx.” That same year, he made his Broadway debut in “Open Admissions.” He recently starred off-Broadway in Sam Shepard’s “Tooth of Crime (Second Dance).”

D’Onofrio gained attention for his intense and compelling talent on the screen in 1987 with a haunting portrayal of an unstable Vietnam War recruit in Stanley Kubrick’s gritty “Full Metal Jacket.” His other early film appearances include “Mystic Pizza,” and “Adventures in Babysitting.” He also executive produced and portrayed 1960s counterculture icon Abbie Hoffman in the film “Steal This Movie,” opposite Janeane Garofalo.

His other film credits include “The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys,” opposite Jodie Foster; “The Salton Sea,” opposite Val Kilmer; “Imposter,” with Gary Sinise; “Chelsea Walls,” directed by Ethan Hawke; “Happy Accidents,” co-starring Marisa Tomei; Robert Altman’s “The Player”; Joel Schumacher’s “Dying Young”; Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood”; Kathryn Bigelow’s “Strange Days,” opposite Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett; Harold Ramis’ “Stuart Saves His Family”; Barry Sonnenfeld’s “Men In Black,” opposite Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones; “The Thirteenth Floor,” opposite Craig Bierko; “The Whole Wide World,” which he produced and starred in, opposite Renée Zellweger; and Oliver Stone’s “JFK.” More recently, D’Onofrio appeared in “Escape Plan,” featuring Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

D’Onofrio starred as Detective Robert Goren in over 100 episodes of the series “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.” He received an Emmy Award nomination in 1998 for his riveting guest appearance in the “Homicide: Life on the Street” episode “The Subway.” D’Onofrio directed, produced and starred in the short film “Five Minutes, Mr. Welles,” and recently appeared in the Academy Award-winning short “The New Tenants.”

KRISTEN BELL (Karen) currently stars as Eleanor Shellstrop in the NBC series “The Good Place,” with Ted Danson, which returns for a second season this fall. She was also most recently seen in “Bad Moms,” alongside Mila Kunis, Kathryn Hahn, Jada Pinkett Smith, Annie Mumolo and Christina Applegate. She will return for the sequel, “Bad Mom’s Christmas,” to be released this November. She will also appear in “How to Be a Latin Lover,” alongside Rob Lowe and Salma Hayek, set for release on April 28, 2017.

Bell starred as Anna in the blockbuster animated feature “Frozen,” which has grossed more than $1.2 billion worldwide, making it the highest grossing animated film and the 9th highest grossing film of all time. Last year, she starred opposite Melissa McCarthy in Ben Falcone’s comedy “The Boss,” and was seen as Jeannie Van Der Hooven in the Showtime series “House of Lies,” opposite Don Cheadle, which wrapped its fifth and final season. In 2014, she reprised her beloved title role in the film adaptation of “Veronica Mars," which raised $2 million on Kickstarter in less than eleven hours and broke the record at the time for the fastest project to reach $1 million and $2 million. Bell appeared in a guest-starring arc on NBC’s hit series “Parks & Recreation.” She also played the lead role in the independent film “The Lifeguard,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, as well as starring in and co-producing the comedy “Hit & Run,” written and directed by her husband, Dax Shepard.

Her other film credits include: “Movie 43,” “Some Girls,” “Writers,” “Big Miracle,” “You Again,” “Burlesque,” “When in Rome,” “Couples Retreat,” “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” “Pulse,” “Serious Moonlight” and David Mamet’s “Spartan.” Bell’s television credits include: “Veronica Mars,” “Unsupervised,” “Deadwood,” “Heroes” and “Party Down.”

Her Broadway credits include “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Crucible,” opposite Liam Neeson and Laura Linney. Her Off-Broadway credits include “Reefer Madness” and “A Little Night Music.”

JESSICA MCNAMEE (Lindsey Taylor) has become one of Hollywood’s most sought after and engaging talents. Since beginning her career in acting, she has fostered an impressive body of work that includes both film and television.

She will next be seen in the film “Battle of The Sexes,” opposite silver screen heavyweights Emma Stone and Steve Carell. The film is slated to open this year.

McNamee recently wrapped production on director Jon Turteltaub’s film “Meg.” She will star opposite Jason Statham in the action packed sci-fi film, which is currently slated for a March 2018 release.

Additionally, McNamee was previously seen as the female lead on USA’s comedy series “Sirens,” starring opposite Michael Mosley and Kevin Bigley. Prior to that, she starred alongside Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum in Michael Sucsy’s “The Vow.” She made her feature film debut in Sean Byrne’s “The Loved Ones,” opposite Xavier Samuel. The film premiered at the 2009 Toronto Film Festival and received the Midnight Madness Cadillac People’s Choice Award. The film also screened as part of the Freak Me Out Pathway at the Sydney Film Festival.

McNamee is best known for her role as Sammy Rafter in the Australian television series “Packed to the Rafters.” In total, the television series has gained 31 Australian award nominations and taken home 13 wins.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS

DAX SHEPARD (Writer/Director/Executive Producer) – SEE CAST SECTION

ANDREW PANAY (Producer) – has an entertainment career which has spanned 20 years and his films have earned over $750 million in worldwide box office. He has built a reputation as a premier feature film producer with an incredible talent for creating original ideas as well as cultivating strong talent relationships.

Panay created and produced David Dobkin’s 2005 smash hit “Wedding Crashers,” starring Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Christopher Walken and Bradley Cooper. The film was the highest grossing R‐rated comedy at the time.

In February of 2015, Panay produced “Hot Tub Time Machine 2,” the sequel to the hilarious 2010 hit “Hot Tub Time Machine.” Panay joined director Steve Pink in bringing an all-star cast to the screen, including Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Clarke Duke, Adam Scott and Chevy Chase.

While working at Relativity Media, Panay released the successful family adventure film “Earth to Echo,” based on an original story by Panay and Henry Gayden, written by Gayden and directed by Dave Green, involving a group of kids who follow a mysterious map on their phones, only to discover a tiny creature from another world.

Panay began his career as an executive, developing the highly successful teen romantic comedy “She’s All That,” starring Rachel Leigh Cook and Freddie Prinze Jr., and the inspiring drama “Pay It Forward,” starring Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt and Haley Joel Osment, based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Catherine Ryan Hyde.

Panay co-produced the beloved romantic comedy “Serendipity,” starring John Cusack, Kate Beckinsale, Jeremy Piven and Bridget Moynahan. Additionally, Panay created and produced the successful teen campus comedy “Van Wilder,” starring Ryan Reynolds and Tara Reid.

RAVI MEHTA (Executive Producer) is an Executive Vice President of Physical Production for Warner Bros. Pictures. He was the executive in charge of films such as “American Sniper,” “Live by Night,” “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and “The Accountant.” He is currently producing “A Star is Born,” starring Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga.

He most recently served as a producer on “Unforgettable,” starring Rosario Dawson and Katherine Heigl, opening April 21st, and “Grudge Match,” starring Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone. He also was an executive producer on “Get Hard” and “The Lucky One.” Mehta began his career at Warner Bros. as a production accountant on films such as “Training Day” and “Romeo Must Die.”

ROBERT J. DOHRMANN (Executive Producer) began his career in the ‘90s in live TV, reality TV, commercial and documentary production. He established commercial house Mad Molly Productions in 1996, recognized with Clio and Cine Lion awards and nominations for several public service announcement campaigns.

In the early 2000s, Dohrmann pivoted to feature production, first as a production coordinator and then production supervisor, on such successful projects as “Man On Fire” and “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” as well as the multiple award winners “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Thank You For Smoking.”

Dohrmann made the jump to line producing in 2007 for the critically acclaimed “Sunshine Cleaning,” and has produced and/or managed features ever since, including creative and popular hit projects “10 Cloverfield Lane,” “Get Hard,” “2 Guns,” “Lovelace,” “The Lucky One” and “Jeff Who Lives At Home.” Bob lives in Los Angeles with his wife Kathleen and their two wonderful children. Dohrmann is a southern California native and UCLA alumnus.

NATE TUCK (Executive Producer) is a producer who has built his career in feature films, branded content, commercials and music videos. His films have been nominated and have won awards, including two nominations at the 2012 Independent Spirit Awards for “The Dynamiter.”

The path to “CHIPS” started over a decade ago while Tuck and his long-time best friend Dax Shepard were shooting short films for the sole purpose of making each other laugh. In 2010, they released their experimental comedy with Tribeca Films, “Brother’s Justice,” which won the Comedy Vanguard Award at the Austin Film Festival.

Based on the film’s success, Tuck and Shepard, with producer Andrew Panay, went on to create and produce the action-romantic-comedy “Hit & Run.” Released in 2012, the film starred Shepard, Kristen Bell, Bradley Cooper and Tom Arnold.

Dating back to his first independent film, “Hairshirt,” which sold to Lionsgate in 2001, Tuck has built his reputation in development, writing, production, financing and distribution as the go-to guy to get it done.

RICK ROSNER (Executive Producer) is the creator and executive producer of a wide-range of projects, including “CHiPs,” the television series that inspired the film.

His other credits as a creator, executive producer and producer include the TV series “240-Robert!” and “Lottery!” as well as the game shows “Just Men!” with Betty White; “Caesar’s Challenge”; “Personals”; “Phone Tag!”; and the iconic “Hollywood Squares.” He was also the creator of “The Paul Lynde Show.”

In addition, Rosner served as producer on such talk shows as “Steve Allen,” “Dave Garroway,” “Philbin’s People,” “The Della Reese Show,” and a producer of “The Mike Douglas Show.”

He was the executive producer of the Emmy-nominated “Warner Bros. Movies – a 50 Year Salute” and the executive producer/ writer of the TV movies: “Panic In The Skies!” “Sky Heist!” and the TNT reunion movie, “CHiPS ’99.”

Rosner served as Vice President of Variety Programs at NBC in the mid 70s and in a partnership with DIRECTV, Rosner also invented the CES Award winning portable satellite system SAT-GO!, which made the front page of the New York Times business section in 2007.

Since 1971, Rosner has been a Deputy in the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department.

MICHAEL PEÑA (Executive Producer) SEE CAST SECTION

MITCHELL AMUNDSEN (Director of Photography) most recently was the cinematographer on “Ride Along 2,” starring Ice Cube and Kevin Hart. His previous films as cinematographer include “Now You See Me,” “Red Dawn,” and “Premium Rush.”

Amundsen’s early credits include being a production assistant for Michael Apted on “First Born” and technician on Francis Ford Coppola’s “Rumble Fish” and “The Outsiders.” He worked assistant camera on Joel Coen’s “Raising Arizona” and was a focus puller on “the Glass Menagerie,” directed by Paul Newman, and Michael Lehman’s “Heathers” and “Meet the Applegates.”

He then became a camera operator, working on such films as Wolfgang Petersen’s “In the Line of Fire”; John Singleton’s Higher Learning,”; Nick Castle’s “Major Payne” and “Mr. Wrong”; Betty Thomas’ “Private Parts”; Richard Donner’s “Conspiracy Theory”; Ron Howard’s “Edtv”; Barry Sonnenfeld’s “Wild Wild West”; Billy Bob Thornton’s “All the Pretty Horses”; and Michael Bay’s “Armageddon.”

He subsequently rose to second unit director for Bay’s “Pearl Harbor,” “Bad Boys II,” and “The Island”; Gore Verbinski’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl”; Frank Marshall’s “Eight Below”; Gary Ross’ “Seabiscuit”; Paul Greengrass’ “The Bourne Supremacy”; J.J. Abrams’ “Mission Impossible III”; and Brad Bird’s “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.”

MAHER AHMAD (Production Designer) was born in northeastern Pennsylvania and while in high school worked on stage crews for the local community theater, designing his first stage setting when he was 16.

He attended Northwestern University where he graduated with honors, and went on to receive a Master of Fine Arts in theater scene and lighting design from the same university. After teaching theater design in college for two years, Ahmad then worked as a professional theater set and lighting designer in the first wave of the what is termed “the Chicago theater renaissance,” designing well over 100 theater projects for Chicago theaters including the St. Nicholas, Organic, Victory Gardens, Goodman and many others. His designs were nominated six times for Chicago’s Joseph Jefferson Award.

Ahmad credits his early theater design experiences and training as contributing greatly to the craft and skills he possesses now. He was hired one day by happenstance to be the local art director in a film that was shooting in Chicago, and from then on worked exclusively in film. He has over 80 film projects to his credit.

Ahmad moved from Chicago to New York and worked there on many features including “GoodFellas” and “Married to the Mob.” Among his many film credits are the period film “Gangster Squad,” with Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Josh Brolin, and Sean Penn; “The Hangover 3”; “Zombieland”; “The Guardian”; “Miss Congeniality 2”; ”Dodgeball”; “Holes”; “Get Hard” and “US Marshals.”

On occasion, Ahmad lectures about design to film schools, and is a bibliophile with a collection of well over 20,000 books on art, architecture, film, design, technology, and other related subjects.

DAN LEBENTAL (Editor) has edited a wide variety of film and television projects. He has worked with director Jon Favreau as the editor on the hit comedy “Elf,” “Zathura: A Space Adventure,” “Cowboys & Aliens” and the blockbuster hits “Iron Man” and “Iron Man 2.”

Lebental edited Peyton Reed’s films “Ant-Man” and “The Break-Up” as well as Albert and Allen Hughes’ “From Hell” and “Dead Presidents.”

His other film editing credits include “Thor: The Dark World,” “Couples Retreat” and the Chicago International Film Festival-nominated documentary “Art of Conflict.”

Lebantal worked with director Peter Berg on the 1998 comedy “Very Bad Things,” and then went on to work with him on the pilot for the 2000 television series, “Wonderland.” Lebental has worked as an editor on the pilots for such television shows as “Dinner for Five,” “In Case of Emergency,” “Revolution” and “About a Boy.”

DIANE CROOKE (Costume Designer) is a costume designer based in Los Angeles with extensive experience designing for film, television, print, and web.

Crooke’s career took off when she got the job as costume supervisor for the first three seasons of the hit NBC series “Friends.” From there, Crooke went on to supervise several projects, including six seasons on NBC’s “Crossing Jordan.” As a designer, Crooke spent five seasons designing NBC’s “Parenthood” before designing “Scream” for MTV.

Recently, Crooke has jumped into the feature world, and her work can also be seen in the upcoming film “All Star Weekend.”

FIL EISLER (Composer) composes music that faithfully embodies both story and character. Known for his signature themes and creative execution, his work can be heard in a diverse range of films, including the 2016 hit comedy “How To Be Single,” starring Dakota Johnson and Rebel Wilson and the upcoming sci-fi/thriller feature “The Titan,” starring Sam Worthington and Taylor Schilling.

In addition, Eisler served as the primary composer for Sundance 2016’s poignant documentary, “Newtown.” He composed the main title theme and acted as music director for the documentary, organizing and leading an all-star line-up of over a dozen Hollywood composers who each donated a piece of music for the film. He was represented at this year’s Sundance Film Festival with Marti Noxon’s “To The Bone,” starring Lily Collins.

Eisler’s scores also continue to enliven the drama in some of TV’s most popular series. Most notably, he composes for Fox’s hit drama series “Empire.” Other shows featuring Eisler’s music include Showtime's Emmy-winning “Shameless,” as well as Lifetime’s critically lauded series “UnREAL.” For four seasons, Eisler served as composer and conductor on the ABC drama “Revenge.”

In 2008, Eisler was among a select group of up-and-coming composers invited to the Sundance Film Composer's Lab, and in the years since, his projects have garnered critical acclaim on the film festival circuit and beyond. As part of his ongoing commitment to independent film, he returned to Sundance in 2011 with the Inupiaq-themed thriller “On the Ice,” scored the Sundance-backed documentary “Whatever It Takes” and Jonathan van Tulleken's BAFTA nominated thriller “Off Season.” Eisler won the Best Film Score Award for his work on Robbie Pickering's “Natural Selection” at the 2011 SXSW Film Festival. The film was the most decorated of the festival, also winning the Grand Jury and Audience Awards. He continued his work with Pickering on the 2015 Sony feature “Freaks of Nature.”

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