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How did Street Dreams start for you?
Rob Dyrdek: It started out when Nino told me about the fact that a Baldwin brother had sold a script about skateboarding for $700,000 about a bunch of kids who save a skate park. We both were like “A fucking Baldwin brother?? Fuck that!” and it started right there.
Nino Scalia: Yeah it was at ASR in September 2003. I had seen Steven Baldwin in the aisles and it seemed strange to me. I remember thinking, “What is dude doing here?” But I didn’t think all that much about it until a couple months later when I’m reading Scriptsales.com, this database that is updated every day on what scripts are selling and how much they’re selling for, and boom, I see that Steven Baldwin sold a script for $700,000 about skateboarders that have to win the skate park back. Even more strange, it took place in Mexico. So I called Rob that day and said, “Hey, we can’t let this happen.” Every generation in Hollywood someone gets brave and takes a crack at a skateboard movie, and they always fuck it up. Then you have to wait for another generation of executives for someone to try it again. Since this Baldwin script was sold he was already really far ahead of us. He had the script written and he had someone with some money who thought they could get the film made. I remember it was Super Bowl Sunday and I drove down to Del Mar from LA to talk to Rob and we decided to do it right then.
Chris Zam: I heard from my friend Turbo that Rob had written a script on skating and I have always felt that my deal was to do some type of more Hollywood type film that would involve action sports. So when I heard he had done that, I chased him down and said “Hey lemme read that thing,” and that’s how it started.
Jason Bergh: Sal and I have been friends with Rob for ten plus years and charting his career and knowing what’s he’s had going on and I remember that it was probably four years ago that he let us know that he had this movie that he was filming. We didn’t have Berkela at the time but we talked about somehow finding a way to work on it together in some capacity. Fast forward a year later, we had started Berkela and Rob and I and Sal started having these discussions about distributing Street Dreams somewhere down the line. We hadn’t done Bra Boys yet but we were getting more serious and basically as his project came together so did the stuff we were working on and they just naturally came together. It was about a year and a half ago that we got into the really tight discussions about doing it. Rob’s whole thing is that this whole thing was done with homies, with friends, from the director Chris Zam, to the cast to the crew so and I think he wanted to continue that momentum through distribution because at the end of the day this could get picked up by a big Hollywood studio and they wouldn’t know what to do with it. They would throw ten million dollars at it, bury it in expenses and have a cool action sports film on their slate for that quarter. That’s not what Berkela is about. So getting involved with Street Dreams was just a natural evolution of our friendship and our business relationship with Rob.
Sal Masekela: One of the beautiful things about the action sports world as opposed to others, is that the action sports world really tries to be as incestuous as possible because for the most part in our world when you do business with family you really do know what you’re getting. I’ve known Rob since my days at Transworld, I’m talking like ’93, and I think that after Bra Boys last year, we got put on notice for how things could be done. People have been putting out good action sports movies but no one has been doing it in a way that causes the rest of the world to give it any attention. These are good stories, things that have common themes and can strike a chord with the mainstream outside of the core culture and when we got Bra Boys out there I think Rob liked what we did, even apart from our friendship, and I think that’s what really cemented the deal for us.
Paul Rodriguez: It was through Rob. He told me he was doing a movie and that he had a part for me and that’s really all I needed to hear.
Terry Kennedy: The first time I heard about the street dreams project was through Rob Dyrdek and my old team manager from Ice Cream, Nino Scalia. The minute they told me they wanted to put out a skateboard film I was so excited to be a part of it. Rob’s been a pro skateboarder forever, he knows the game and he knows the history and Nino’s been in the game and knows the history so I knew that from that standpoint alone, whatever they were doing was going to come across in the manner that it needed to come across.
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