When the 15 minutes promo from New Deal skateboards came out in the 90’s, everything changed. It was the beginning of street skating as we know it today and it was such a rad era. So when I found out Paul, Steve and Andy were re-launching the brand, I was really stoked and I love reading about all the behind the scenes from when they were starting the brand so here is the latest note from Steve Douglas:
Making of the 15 Minute Promo video, getting busted, and some little known ND facts. – By Steve Douglas
It was a fun and exciting time hiding out at Paul Schmitt’s house in Costa Mesa, California in early Spring 1990. Andy and Gorm were making the art, and I was working with the team, on the 15 minute promo video, and setting up the international distribution. We had to keep all this quiet from Vision as we needed to keep getting our board royalties from Schmitt Stix. Unfortunately our cover was almost instantly blown…
When we were ready to launch and wanted to let the distributors know, we still wanted to keep Paul’s involvement quiet for as long as possible. What we didn’t realize though, was that Paul’s fax machine added his name and number to the top of every fax sent from it! Paul Schmitt and his fax number right there for everyone to see.. BUSTED! The word was definitely out and it was another push for skater owed and run companies, ND was a big part of that change that we are really proud of to this day.
Videos were one of the main focuses for New Deal so back to the 15 minute video… After all these years it’s still hard to believe that I made the first 3 videos (before I passed the torch to New Deal team rider Josh Friedberg). I had studied skate videos for years and I was eager to learn and be involved in what I felt was a key part of skating – video… Thank goodness for Paul being there to help me and show me what to do.
We had years of footage for Schmitt – 100s of Hi8 tapes and S-VHS tapes, and as this was way before we had started 411VM we were sitting on piles of footage with no plan of how to use it. What is funny Is that some of the footage I used in the promo video was almost 4 years old at the start of 1990!
