Greg Stump appears at Radical Wednesdays to screen his vintage ski films

Legendary filmmaker and freestyle champion Greg Stump returns to Aspen to screen his vintage ski films, “The Good, the Rad, and the Gnarly” on Feb. 12 and “Fistful of Moguls” on Feb. 19 as part of Aspen Film’s Radical Wednesdays. He’ll introduce the films and follow them up with a Q&A session.

At age 26, Stump set out to make the “Blue Velvet” of ski movies: “The Good, the Rad, and the Gnarly.” He envisioned a visual music album, partially based on his experience as a radio DJ in the 1970s and inspired by the David Lynch movie, released the previous fall. Rather than leading audiences with his traditional ski movie narration, he narrated the story through various characters, including a poet, sportscasters, and the voice of God. He also threw in a nod to “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” well before the 2013 movie debuted, as the protagonist, who’s just a regular guy, daydreamed he was actually an athlete like Stump and his friends.

“I wanted the non-skiing segue-ways to be dark and brooding. Instead, they were seen as simply really weird,” Stump said. “It was a good idea, but it didn’t go over well with audiences.”

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In fact, he was quite surprised by the reaction of Swatch executives — big sponsors of Stump’s movies back in the day — who watched it in Hollywood before its public release.

“They will get it, I thought. Well, they got it — all wrong,” Stump said. “They were howling and laughing at the segue ways I had designed to be dark. They thought I had made the most funny ski movie. I was 26 years old and very confused.”

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He had taken great measures to secure expensive music rights from famous artists, but, needless to say, he resorted to writing, performing, and producing all original music for the ski flick.

“‘So we’ll just write all of our own music,’ he said confidently,” Stump said, referring to his younger self’s thought process.

Musical friends Tom Blackwell, a known producer, and Ted Musgrave, an “unproven” local musician, helped out, and Stump said it turned out really well.

Still, the Swatch executives’ reactions led him to hightail it to Maui, ignore the entire tour, and windsurf his troubles away, while his business partner dealt with the tour’s negative fallout.

“I was embarrassed, and I just hid,” he said. “This was not a ski movie (to the skiing general public). It was a screwed up film that somehow was paid for by Swatch and Salomon. But — and this is a big but — it was not Warren Miller. It was not Dick Barrymore. It was a Greg Stump production. Unbeknownst to me, there became a cult following that dug it.”

It morphed into a classic, in part due to its amazing skiing in Telluride and the French Alps, as well as windsurfing at the Banzai Pipeline on Oahu with Robbie Nash, snowboarding at the Breckenridge World Championships, skateboarding with a 17-year-old Tony Hawk and other greats, BMX riding in a Los Angeles half-pipe, and rollerblading on Maui’s Haleakala mountain. Skiers include his brother, Geoff Stump, and female phenom Lynne Weiland.

Still, when his brother suggested they open this year’s Stump films at Radical Wednesdays with the film, he asked, “WHY?”

“He replied that the bump skiing is off the hook — He may have had an ulterior motive as his bump skiing in the film is off the hook; it’s his best movie with me. Geoff had just retired from the U.S. Freestyle Team. His ski chops were tuned,” he said. “So, I took another look for the first time in decades. The bump skiing is, indeed, off the hook. The L.A. city skate sequence with Christian Hosoi, Lance Rocco, Tony Hawk, and Rodney Mullen slays. The BMX biking in a ramp next to the 405 in L.A. is fearless. The windsurfing with Robby Nash at Pipeline on Oahu is perhaps the best Robbie Nash footage ever filmed. The Rollerblade footage on Haleakala mountain in Maui was tight LYCRA but incredibly athletic, as Rollerblading down a mountain road is not for all but an elite few. The original soundtrack is intense and ahead of its time.”

In fact, the skiing impressed Wrigley’s Gum so much, the company licensed a bunch of footage to run in its national commercials for three years.

Since the movie’s release, Stump has “fixed” the dark bits, making them even stranger visually.

“They’re still weird but in a really funny, more psychological, way,” he said, adding that it’s a great movie now, and that he learned a lot from the experience.

“The big upside for me as a young filmmaker was that it got me incredibly motivated to get back to what most people wanted: a great ski movie. Cut the distractions,” he said. “The following season, I created ‘Blizzard of Aahhh’s’ — full stop, baby.”