8/3/2023 0 Comments Freestyle dirt bike phoenix az“In the beginning it was just a bunch of guys riding in the desert trying to get one up on their buddies on film,” agrees Freeman. There were more girls, more pyrotechnic effects, and the riders went through a daft phase of leaping off their bikes mid-air and wrecking them just for the spectators. From the earlier first films with their almost exclusively outdoor locations, the filming moved more into arenas as freestyle became stadium-based. If you watch the Crusty films back-to-back you can see them evolving, becoming more slick and well-produced as the freestyle movement gained popularity and Fleshwound adapted accordingly. Three weeks later he was back on a bike and looking for the next big hit for Jon Freeman’s cameras. I’ve got nice tight skin on my face now!” They sliced me open right across the front of my skull so they could mend the break to my eye socket and put a titanium mesh into my head to cover the dent I’d made in my forehead. People like to see others fail, crash, then get up and say ‘wow, that was a close one.’ But you know what’s really funny? Not long after the surgery for that injury I found that when women get a facelift they go through the same thing! They’re going through what I went through just to look better, to have their whole faces pulled back. “Seeing the staples in my head made viewers realise that this was for real, that we were putting our lives on the line. “People thought it was nuts,” laughs Seth. The portrait photograph of his perforated skull elevated him to mythical status. Seth’s goggles filled with blood and he was air-lifted to hospital where he needed 55 staples across his forehead where they operated. In Crusty Five he leapt 220ft and snapped the whole front of the bike off on landing in front of 5,000 fans, and in Crusty Six he landed so hard off another jump that the handlebars smashed the bone around his right eye socket in his skull. In Crusty Two he topped that by landing on the parked bikes. In Crusty One he powered off a dune so high and so far that he smashed the front wheel and broke the yokes in two when he crash-landed, knocking himself out cold. At the time, I was the only one doing it.” His crashes became the stuff of folklore. That gave me more of a kick than learning the latest trick off a small jump. I preferred to go long distance, doing the jumps other people would say ‘no way!’ to. “I always liked going big,” says Mr Enslow today, now a devoted 32 year-old dad. But for Seth, it was and always has been about hitting big jumps and going further than anyone else. Freestyle didn’t have a name then, and tricks were limited to tail-whips. Seth was at the forefront of those new riders, one of the godfathers of the new freestyle motocross movement. They didn’t want to race, they just wanted to hit jumps and play in front of the camera.” At the time we’d just go out and shoot the professional racers like Jeremy McGrath, Brian Manley and Jeff Emig, but pretty soon a new breed of rider started to emerge. The response was huge, so we planned a bike film and started shooting in 1993. Dana and myself had come from doing snowboard films and we’d been dropping segments of dirtbike stuff into those. Within a year we’d sold 100,000 tapes and suddenly the whole industry was taking notice of what we were doing. “We’d go out shooting for days at a time, and by the end of it we knew we had something pretty special on our hands. “We made that first film for just £50,000 and shot it over 18 months,” says Jon Freeman today, who along with co-producer Dana Nicholson established Fleshwound Films in 1994, the name behind the Crusty movies. They called themselves a ridiculous name that nobody could remember at first, but once you’d seen that fist film you could never forget. A bunch of hooligans with tattoos and LBZ jerseys were ripping up the establishment. While Mick Doohan was boring us to death with his ruthless efficiency in GPs, here was a punk 20 year-old kid who became a legend overnight because he crashed so damn hard, got straight up laughing and did it again. I was road test editor on SuperBike magazine at the time and thought I was pretty shit-hot on a bike, but this was really something else. I simply couldn’t believe my eyes, 60 minutes of jaw-dropping riding action shot in exotic locations and set to a blasting dirt-rock soundtrack. Rumours had been going around for months about this insane new bike video out of the States, and I’d finally got my hands on a bootleg copy. The rider’s name was Seth Enslow and in that single moment he became the coolest rider in the world.
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