One of the things I often forget about as I sit in the edit bay with an editor, or worry about whether or not something is funny out in the field, or deal with the jillionth MTV conference call of the day, is how good Rob Dyrdek is on a skateboard. I know that seems impossible to forget, but when your sole mission is to build a funny show about two unlikely best friends, skating isn’t always the first thing on your mind. I’m usually thinking about the whole episode and the story beats and all of the other things that help to make this my favorite show I’ve ever worked on. But every now and then, I’m reminded that I’m working with one of the best skaters in the sport. Recently, we took a trip to Las Vegas for an episode about Drama’s birthday. If you’ve ever made the drive from LA to Vegas, you might recognize the abandoned water park that we stopped at to skate along the way. As if seeing Rob shred the dusty old water tubes wasn’t enough, we brought Danny Way along with us to raise the bar even further…
Holy. Crap.
Dude is crazy. It’s almost like the threat of death fuels him. I’ve met a couple of people like that in my life. When I worked on a show called Trippin’, we brought Mat Hoffman along with us, and he has a similar mentality: If something scares normal people into shitting their pants and bailing, people like Mat and Danny are in. Rob has always been adamant about keeping legit skating as a big part of our show. In this case, it might be the best skating we’ve ever had in an episode.
Looking at some of the pictures I grabbed that day, it was definitely the scariest from an observer’s point of view. I wish I could upload all of them here, but there are about 250. You’ll have to watch the episode to get a real sense of how crazy they got. It was insane.