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How did the opportunity to do the show come together?
My son-in-law is in advertising in New York City and he knew a couple of people who were promoting or producing cooking shows. It was about three or four years ago and we were sitting down having dinner, he said “You should have a reality show, I know a few guys that might be interested in making something like that.” I personally never thought about a reality show about me restoring motocross bikes was a great idea for a couple of reasons -- the way that reality shows are formatted, how long are you gonna hang over my head with that camera while I’m banging on a gas tank? The last thing I want to do is here the guy with the gravelly voice “Is Joe gonna make the deadline? Will he get the bike finished?” No one’s really interested in it anymore and people are tired of it if you ask me. Anyways, my son-in-law hooks me up with these guys and
I make a little fifteen minute teaser reel about what I do in the shop, I have some interesting people come in, and that was that. We show it to these producers in New York and they say “It’s not for us.” That’s alright, I didn’t like the idea anyways so I put the DVD on the shelf. Fast forward seven months, a fellow from Hang- town Motocross (Kevin Bridges) came into the shop one day and said “There’s a guy that’s been doing our advertising and filming our commercials for like fourteen years now, his name is Dave Gatti, and he’s produc- ing a vintage motocross show. Too bad we don’t have a teaser reel or something that we could show him.” I went to the shelf, blew the dust off the DVD, and said “Show him this.” He liked it but he had a better vision and I agree with him now. It’s gotta be more about the history and the sport, not just you restoring bikes. Once we had that concept and realized that was the show that we really wanted to make, everything fell into place. It became something that I’m really proud of and look forward to working on more in the future, not just your regular reality show. And it’s not about guys that have disposable income and they pay Joe a bunch of money to restore bikes like many of these car shows that show people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on cars and people can’t really relate to that. We’d like to do some things where we go out and help some people that can’t really get their project off the ground and American Motocross Restoration comes in and helps them out, so that’s another thing we’re working on for the show.
You guys had a Kickstarter put together for the show and were able to meet the funding goal. What’s next?
We’ll get the plans finished up now that we know the cost of every episode and we’ll get that in front of some potential investors to get the season funded for thirteen episodes. What many people may not realize, and
I get this question all the time -- “How did Discovery not buy this show? How come it’s not on Speed?” I never went to any of those networks to sell the show. That’s not the kind of programming that I really wanna do. I don’t want to give up that creative control and turn it into just another reality show. So, we want to fund the show with private investors or maybe one major sponsor would like to come onboard, and then make the show that we wanna make that represents the restoration business, vintage motocross, and the people involved in the proper light.
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