The Ski Journal - Volume 13, Issue 2
THE FLAWED TRUTH: Behind the Scenes of Cult Classic Aspen Extreme
Words: Christian “Cheech” Sander, Photos: Buena Vista Pictures/Everett Collection 2019-10-19 13:01:13
“We don’t need any more heroes; we just need someone to take out the recycling.”—Banksy
Patrick Hasburgh’s tattoos don’t seem to match his age. His forearm bears the phrase, NO MORE HEROES, a nod to a 2006 Banksy work that appeared on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. It’s an odd maxim for someone who creates imaginary heroes for a living. That is, until you realize how he’s scripted his own life.
Patrick is a writer—a screenwriter and novelist, specifically. His credits include The A-Team, Hardcastle and McCormick, and 21 Jump Street. Among skiers though, those shows don’t stand up to his true masterpiece: Aspen Extreme. Patrick is a skier and surfer, which is apparent from a piece of advice he gives me upon our first meeting.
“I don’t think we get any more chances at this, I don’t think there’s heaven or reincarnation, so if you’re gonna make that wave, paddle out,” Patrick tells me over coffee at a gated housing development on the seaside cliffs of Encinitas, CA. Below us are miles of perfect sandbars, providing enough waves for each surfer to have their own peak, a rarity in California. His wife, Cheri, joins us. Patrick proudly shows me pictures of his kids surfing overhead waves at his other home in Sayulita, Mexico. The guy seems to have it all. His writing has delivered him a seemingly happy ending. It started with one fateful decision to go skiing.
In the beginning of Aspen Extreme, Dexter Rutecki is welding equipment for a ski resort situated on a landfill in Detroit. His friend TJ Burke joins him and proposes they go to Aspen. TJ implores, “Every day people go out there and they do something with their lives, and every day it isn’t you and it isn’t me.”
That scene was autobiographical. Once upon a time, Hasburgh was a blue-collar kid from Buffalo, NY, working at a steel plant and skiing 500-foot hills on weekends. At 18 years old, he watched his friends move away, taking jobs in exciting cities and going off to college. The latter wasn’t an option for Hasburgh. He was a terrible student, possibly because of a hearing impairment, but a pretty good skier. So he got certified as an instructor. Then, aimless but hungry for more, just like TJ and Dexter in Aspen Extreme, he and a buddy decided to reinvent themselves by moving west to ski.
“Off we went, and it was the whole wet T-shirt contest era, Harvey Wallbanger era… Aspen was this place that was extraterrestrial. I don’t remember the skiing being bad once,” Patrick says. The decision to move from steel-mill worker to ski instructor changed everything.
“Aspen saved my life,” he continues. “In every possible way it saved my life. It allowed me to dream of being a writer.”
A ski town might seem like odd headwaters for a writing career, but it makes sense when you think of the Aspen clientele. As a ski instructor, Hasburgh taught the kind of people you’d expect to buy a lesson in Aspen: Hollywood power players like Mike Ovitz and Michael Eisner. Ovitz would go on to run talent agency CAA, while Eisner would become CEO of Disney, but they didn’t do anything to help Hasburgh’s career. If anything, they introduced him to the possibility of writing as a legitimate job. Another Hollywood client read a script Hasburgh wrote and liked it. He convinced Hasburgh to move to Los Angeles and try his luck. Hasburgh took his advice and scored a writing job on an ABC show called The Greatest American Hero.
He called home to Buffalo to tell his father.
“Dad, I got a job writing television.”
“‘Writing television,’ what does that mean?”
“I make up the shit that’s on TV.”
“That shit’s made up? How much are they paying you?”
“A thousand bucks a week!”
“You mean a thousand bucks a month.”
“No. A thousand bucks a week.”
There was a long pause. And then his father said, “Son, don’t fuck this up.”
After that first show, which was about a mild-mannered teenager who is granted superpowers by extraterrestrials and then uses those powers to fight crime with the FBI, Hasburgh’s career took off. He was hot shit in Hollywood. And his success in TV gave him leverage. Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chairman of Walt Disney Studios, was very good to Hasburgh and offered him an opportunity to make Aspen Extreme.
But there was trouble. As a TV showrunner, Patrick had creative control. Not so with movies. In fact, Agent Mulder of the X-Files was almost cast as TJ Burke.
“David Duchovny was who I wanted [to play TJ Burke], and he wanted to do it, but the studio wanted someone who looked more like Tom Cruise,” Hasburgh says. So, they cast Paul Gross as TJ. That kicked off a contentious relationship between Hasburgh and studio executives. From the start, Hasburgh had to wage a creative battle against an industry that had no idea about ski culture.
“They told me the movie couldn’t have any drugs in it,” he says. “And I’m saying, ‘Making a movie about Aspen without drugs is like making a movie about Aspen without snow! Are you shitting me?’”
There were more than a few hiccups in during filming as well. At one point, Gross got sick, and they had to halt production for six weeks. That basically meant a crazy party in the middle of winter in Aspen, but no progress on the movie. One member of the crew broke his leg skiing. Another issue was that a cover of Powder magazine figures heavily in the plot, and the producers had no communication with the magazine’s publisher.
“Powder was a big deal back then, so I put it in the script,” Patrick says. I honestly think that the people at Hollywood studios were so unaware of the subject matter that they didn’t know that Powder magazine was real. They thought it was an invention of the writer. So I think when it became clear to someone that that wasn’t the case, the movie was already out. And it was like, holy fuck!”
Trying to explain ski-bum culture to Hollywood types was like speaking an alien language. At the end of the day, the executives had the upper hand. For better or worse, the movie was largely out of Hasburgh’s control and it ended up wildly different than the film he’d set out to make. He was convinced he could have made a better movie. But in retrospect, he isn’t sure his movie would have the same staying power it enjoys as a must-watch, ski-bum cult classic.
“I wanted to make a much more serious movie,” he says. “Maybe a much more pretentious and self-important movie. But I think the flawed nature of Aspen Extreme allows it to be appreciated in a way that wouldn’t have happened if it was a more serious treatment of that experience. The movie is kind of fucked up in the same way the Aspen experience is. It’s kind of a metaphor for the way that bullshit life in Aspen unfolds. There’s a tongue-in-cheek quality about it that makes it accidentally brilliant.”
One aspect that went relatively smoothly was the skiing. E.J. Foerster shot the ski scenes with legendary skiers like Doug Coombs and Scot Schmidt skiing in the roles of TJ and Dexter. A still from the shoot would grace the Photo Annual cover of Powder.
“We knew all these really good skiers at the time,” E.J. says. “I reached out to them and they wanted to do it. Obviously Schmidty was the extreme skier at the time. It was a really good culmination of guys. We just enlisted these eight guys and traveled around, and in some sequences, four or five of them are the same character. TJ Burke is one of the top skiers of all time, because all the best skiers are him—all these pros wrapped into one character.”
E.J. says the pros were happy for the opportunity as it was likely the biggest payday of their life.
Peter Berg’s performance as Dexter was another bright spot. For Hasburgh, the most memorable part of production was Berg’s nervous breakdown scene. But when Aspen Extreme was released, it took a beating from critics.
One review in The New York Times read, ”Patrick Hasburgh, who makes his feature-film debut as the writer and director of Aspen Extreme is a ski enthusiast and former instructor who still knows more about skiing than about movies. Even though it runs close to two hours Aspen Extreme remains sort of stretched out and dramatically undeveloped.”
Hasburgh’s TV career was at a zenith, but he was feeling the heat. He was burnt out. While Aspen Extreme would ultimately go on to achieve cult-classic status, in 1993 it wasn’t exactly breaking box-office records.
“Because it wasn’t a giant financial success,” Hasburgh says, “I got a lot of blame. But in fact the movie was only as good as it was because I fought so hard.”
On top of the film’s box-office failure, Hasburgh’s hearing had taken a turn for the worse. He signed on for one more big-budget TV show, seaQuest DSV, with Steven Spielberg, which paid him what he considered to be “fuck you” money, or enough money for him to push through any project at the time. But it wasn’t. He walked away from Hollywood.
Nowadays, Patrick writes novels, enjoys coastal living with his wife and surfing with his kids. If there’s one thing that is apparent, it’s that Hasburgh and his work are absolutely without pretense. His characters in Aspen Extreme and many of his other works are deeply flawed but remarkably resilient.
“The point I wanted to make in the movie was that your dreams can come true,” he says. “And we can pull shit off that makes our lives have real value and meaning to others.”
Dreams did come true. Peter Berg went on to become a most prolific actor/director/producers of all time, with hits like Friday Night Lights, Lone Survivor, and HBO’s Ballers. He still skis to this day. E.J. Foerster still lives in Aspen but works as a commercial producer. He was the second-unit director for such movies as Tropic Thunder and Twilight. Paul Gross’ biggest role was as TJ Burke. He lives in Canada.
On the phone with E.J., he tells me how it typically goes for outdoor sports enthusiasts in Hollywood. “Everybody’s gone on to have their careers,” he says, “but in the back of our hearts, surfing, skiing—it’s that lifestyle that keeps us going.”
After the film, Hasburgh published a novel, Aspen Pulp in 2004. The rumor mill began to buzz. Would they ever make a sequel?
”Don’t hold your breath,” E.J. says. “Our goal is to make Aspen Extreme 2 one day, but even if it’s just a one-off, it’s been such an incredible ride.”
If there’s a takeaway from how this beloved classic came to be, it can be found in the movie.
“Dream big or don’t dream at all, baby,”
TJ Burke says.
Photo Caption: Actors Peter Berg and Paul Gross played Dexter Rutecki (left) and T.J. Burke (right) in the 1993 film Aspen Extreme. The film celebrates the American tradition of road-tripping west in search of adventure. The two blue-collar Michigan skiers decide on Aspen after reading a resort review in a ski magazine.
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