Words Christian “Cheech” Sander Photos Buena Vista Pictures/Everett Collection CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT The film made $8 million at the box office and was promoted as “ Top Gun on the slopes!” Within skiing it’s a celebrated cult classic. Perhaps one of the most unsung heroes in cinematic history is Dexter Rutecki. The sequence of events in this scene play out like this: T.J. and Dexter hike a Colorado 14er to train for the Powder 8 competition, Dexter smokes a cigarette at 13,500 feet by our best guess, T.J. takes a near-death fall into a crevasse, unbelievably filled with water, and Dexter saves his life. Legend? We think so. Aspen Extreme still resonates within the skiing community as several brands use quotes from the film in their marketing. Most used is the phrase, “Skiing is the easy part.” 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 imagi-nary 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 hous-ing 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 certi-fied 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. “WE “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 ca-reer, 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, Has-burgh’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. 040 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 13, Issue 2: Page 40
