Extreme Reality

Adrenaline X Online Photo Gallery

From X Games to Primetime?

Teton Gravity Research brings extreme sports to prime time with Adrenaline X, a new reality show slated for NBC that creates over-the-top stunts for the show’s athletic competitors.

There's an action sequence at the beginning of XXX —
the improbable 2002 extreme sports thriller — in which Vin
Diesel's character poses as a valet to steal a red Corvette from a
California state senator who wants to ban videogames and rap music.
With a parade of police cars following him, Diesel looks right into the
camera and, as if speaking for a generation of disenfranchised youth
raised on PlayStation and MTV, chastises the gray-haired senator for
his rigid views about their culture. At the end of his sermon, Diesel
jumps the car from a bridge above a deep canyon and parachutes to
safety in what would be the most incredible BASE jump in history if it
weren't so unbelievable.

While the whole sequence reeks of Hollywood, it actually goes a long
way in establishing the movie's credibility with its core audience of
teenage and twentysomething males who can identify with the
antiestablishment messages and adrenaline-pumping soundtrack. It
doesn't hurt that the getaway car is driven by Tony Hawk, the iconic
skateboarder who helped make extreme sports more palatable to a
mainstream audience.

“XXX worked because you saw a lot of athletes in there
from our sports,” claims Corey Gavitt, a founding partner of
Teton Gravity Research (TGR), a Teton Village, Wyo.-based company that
makes hard-core ski and snowboard films with many of the athletes
featured in XXX. “The fact that they hired Tony Hawk and
Jeremy Jones, who has been in every one of our films, and Tommy Clowers
and Ronnie Renner for the motocross stunts; those guys gave the movie
that core element that Hollywood can't duplicate. That's why it did so
well [at the box office].”

Tom Gilles (top) and Jana Meyen (bottom) perform stunts for the first episode of Adrenaline X, currently in post at Scott Messick’s Mess Media, Santa Monica.

If Gavitt seems confident in his assessment of the film, which
grossed a reported $141.9 million in the United States ($267.2 million
worldwide), it's because after seven years of making extreme-sports
films at TGR he knows what plays well to fans. Now he's getting his own
chance at mainstream commercial success, with TGR's new NBC-bound
series, Adrenaline X, the latest contestant in the reality show
sweepstakes.

Gavitt and his three partners formed TGR in 1995 because as
competitive skiers they didn't feel that film companies were doing a
good job of portraying the lifestyles they were living or the sports
they loved.

“We all joined forces as ski bums in the early '90s,”
says Gavitt, describing how he met TGR's three other founders, Dirk
Collins, and brothers Steve and Todd Jones. “We felt the riding
was going so much further than what the people shooting in the industry
were showing to the public. So we felt by virtue of us being able to go
a lot of places [on skis] with the cameras, we could bring the extreme
adrenaline side of the sports more into [the films].”

With 14 feature-length films to its credit, TGR has become one of
the most visible and reputable filmmakers in the adventure sports
production industry. With that success comes opportunity — and
responsibility. Last summer, TGR teamed up with Reveille Studios and
struck a deal with NBC to produce Adrenaline X, a reality series
that's part Fear Factor, part Survivor, and part
insanity. In each episode, a group of world-class extreme athletes
battle one another in a series of one-of-a-kind contests, many of which
will scare even the most daring athletes. After each day's competition,
the audience will get a glimpse into the personalities of the athletes
as they socialize in a Real World-esque shared living space.

Sony Betacams captured the action during the obstacle course component for the reality show Adrenaline X.

With the first episode currently in post, Adrenaline X will
mark the primetime network debut for many of the extreme sports and
their athletes. TGR, which used its reputation to enlist the show's
athletes, is feeling the pressure of its industry to make sure the
reality series doesn't sell out the sports — always a concern for
the antiestablishment. If TGR is successful at balancing the interests
of Hollywood and their core group of athletes and fans, Adrenaline
X could be the most exciting and talked-about TV show of the
summer. That is, if it actually makes it to air.

The whole reason we started the company was to prolong the lifestyle
we were living — traveling around and skiing with our
friends,” Collins says. But to do that, TGR's four founding
partners, all of who were about 24 in 1995 when they started the
company, knew they needed to find jobs to subsidize their celluloid
dreams. That's when Collins introduced the group to Alaska's commercial
fishing industry. He had worked on boats in his native Alaska beginning
at the age of 15, so he knew the money was good.

“We worked a couple months a year and made pretty good
money,” Collins recalls. “Eventually we made enough money
to buy an Arri 16 camera package for about three grand. When we first
got the camera none of us even knew how to load it.”

A year and a half later, in late 1996, TGR made its first ski movie.
The Continuum is a soulful 60-minute film that many of TGR's
fans consider to be their best work because of its innocence. In the
film, which was made for $120,000, each one of the founders spends time
in front of the camera as well as behind it.

Adrenaline X executive producer Ben Silverman prepares for an interview segment with the athletes at the obstacle course finish line.

On the strength of that first film, TGR began producing a film a
year through the end of the '90s. In their seven-year history, they've
made 14 action-sports films, all of which are about an hour in length.
Most of them are ski films, but they've also released snowboarding,
surfing, and kayaking films, and plan to cover BASE jumping, motocross,
and mountain biking in the future. Over the years, they've also lent
their extreme sports expertise to several commercials, including two
Nissan spots and two Energizer spots.

TGR's success has mirrored the success of the action-sports
production industry and has paralleled the popularity of extreme sports
franchises like ESPN's X Games and NBC's Gravity Games. In the last few
years, all of these properties have thrived as fans of the sports have
clamored for more footage of their favorite athletes, of whom many have
an almost cult-like following. TGR premieres its films to sold-out
audiences and also sponsors a 200-stop film tour each year. DVD and VHS
copies of its films sell for $25 to $30 at hard-core snow, surf, and
ski shops across the country. They're also sold on TGR's website, www.tetongravity.com.

What differentiates TGR's films from what Gavitt calls “ski
porn” — an endless loop of tricks and downhill runs set to
a driving soundtrack — are the lifestyle, interview, and
establishing scenes that flavor its films. TGR uses inexpensive digital
video cameras to set these scenes off from the pristine action
sequences in its movies that are always shot on 16mm.

“Film does cost more, but it's richer; it's more beautiful,
especially for sports that have so much white in them,” Gavitt
says. “Surfing is the same way. On digital everything looks
bitmapped because there's so much happening. It's getting better but we
still definitely do not believe the digital revolution is going to take
over film for a while. Not in the snow.”

As TGR's film production business continued to prosper, its founders
made two bold moves. They decided to take on investors to keep up with
the monetary demands of chasing world-class skiers and snowboarders to
the most remote mountains on earth, and they hired a CEO with Hollywood
connections. Mary Dickinson, TGR's CEO, made an immediate impact on the
business.

In late 2001 Dickinson introduced the TGR crew to Ben Silverman and
Mark Koops of Reveille Studios, an independent production company
backed by Universal. Silverman and Koops had built their reputation by
introducing American audiences to several blockbuster reality programs,
including Fear Factor, The Weakest Link, Who Wants to Be a
Millionaire, and Survivor. At the time Silverman and Koops
met the guys from TGR, they were looking to develop a reality-based
series around extreme sports. It was a perfect match: Reveille had
enjoyed unrivaled success in developing reality series and TGR had
long-standing relationships with the athletes of the extreme sports
world.

“TGR is the absolute leader in what they do,” says
Koops, Reveille's vice president of production. “They are
immersed in the extreme sports world so they understand staying true to
the sports. But they also understand telling stories in a way that an
audience can enjoy.”

Last summer, TGR and Reveille began shopping their idea to the
networks. Gavitt remembers when they showed TGR's extreme footage to
Jeff Zucker, NBC's programming president. “When we sold the show,
Zucker looked right at me and said, ‘That's the craziest shit
I've ever seen,’” Gavitt recalls. “Then he said,
‘Granted, you guys are the best at shooting this stuff, but can
you tell the story?’”

To give NBC a comfort level, Scott Messick was hired to run the
show. Best known as the supervising producer and director of the first
season of Survivor, Messick was also responsible for running
MTV Sports from 1993 to 1995. Hosted by Dan Cortez and Gabrielle
Reece, MTV Sports is credited with introducing many TV viewers
to extreme sports like bungee jumping.

“It was a chance to get back into adrenaline sports, which I
love,” says Messick, the owner and president of Santa Monica,
Calif.-based Mess Media. “The difference with this show is it's
not regular people in a reality show. It's the top athletes in these
sports. If all of those other shows took ordinary people and put them
in extraordinary circumstances, this show takes extraordinary people
and puts them in even more extraordinary circumstances.”

With the production team in place, NBC ordered two episodes of
Adrenaline X. The first one was shot in February near TGR's
studios in Jackson Hole. For the shoot, TGR gathered eight of the
world's best snowboarders — four men and four women — to
compete individually and in coed pairs, with the last-place pair being
eliminated after every competition. The episode culminates in a big-air
contest in which the snowboarders jump from a platform suspended over a
quarterpipe. After each successful landing, the platform is elevated
until the athletes either fail to land the jump or are too chicken to
attempt it.

“The challenges they devised for the snowboarders have an
intensity I have not seen on TV,” says Jayson Dinsmore, NBC's
manager of alternative programs and specials. “They are scared.
You can see it on their faces and it comes across on the audio. They
are afraid to do these stunts.”

The vast majority of the footage was shot by five Betacam crews
shooting with Sony DSR-600s. Messick chose 33x wide angle lenses for
the reality sequences and long lenses for the action shots. He also
hired DP Scott Duncan, whom he worked with during the first season of
Survivor, to shoot 16mm and 35mm beauty shots, time-lapse
sequences, and some fish-eye looks for the title sequences and
bumpers.

Messick used the same production setup for the second episode, which
followed a similar format but involved eight motocross riders doing
big-air stunts. It was shot last month in Mesquite, Nev. Both episodes
are currently in post in two of Mess Media's Avid 9000 edit suites. NBC
had originally planned to air the first two episodes over the summer,
but the reaction to the first two shoots among the production team has
been so positive that those dates could get moved up. NBC will decide
to order future episodes based on the success of the first two.

The expectations are high. “I'm confident that this will
quickly become an established franchise where we can do several
episodes and pay homage to every adrenaline sport in a one-of-a-kind
competition,” says Reveille's Koops.

But if Adrenaline X does fail, Reveille and NBC will surely
survive. The stakes are a little higher for TGR as they make their
first foray into broadcast television. “Nobody from our world has
ever brought anything to primetime,” Gavitt says. “We're
excited about it but also feel we have the weight of our industry to do
it right and to make sure it gets represented and shown in the right
light.”