BMX Culture History · Legend Bike Co

RAD (1986) — The Movie That Made BMX Look Like a Sport Worth Being In

A screenwriter who barely knew what BMX was. A stuntman-director who'd never touched a bicycle. A cast of real BMX pros hired to make Hollywood actors look like they belonged on a bike. RAD lost money, got trashed by critics, and disappeared from theaters in a matter of weeks. Forty years later it's the movie every BMX kid of a certain age can quote from memory. Here's how it actually got made.

A screenwriter who noticed some kids on bikes

RAD exists because of a script that had nowhere to go. Sam Bernard was a screenwriter whose film 3:15 the Moment of Truth was sitting without a distributor when he started noticing something on the streets around him: kids on BMX bikes, doing things a bicycle wasn't supposed to do. Bernard picked up a bike magazine at a Beverly Hills bike shop and learned that seven million BMX bikes had sold the year before. He called it a "great, primal activity" and pitched the idea of a BMX-stunt film to his writing partner, Geoffrey Edwards. Edwards liked it enough to bring it to producer Sam Levy, who brought it to a director he'd worked with on Smokey and the Bandit: Hal Needham.

The most versatile stuntman in Hollywood, and a bike he'd never ridden

Needham's background was cars and airplanes, not bicycles. He'd been a tree topper and an Army paratrooper before working stunts in Hollywood starting with 1957's The Spirit of St. Louis, and he went on to perform in hundreds of TV episodes and more than 300 movies before turning to directing car-chase comedies like Smokey and the Bandit, The Cannonball Run, and Stroker Ace. His first reaction to a BMX movie was blunt: "I blow up cars, I race cars, I jump cars, I don't know anything about a bicycle." What kept him listening was the comparison to motorcycles, which he did know. Bernard, sick with the flu, took Needham to a BMX exhibition at the Equestrian Center in Griffith Park, Los Angeles. Needham was floored by what the riders could do and decided to make the film.

Nine days, one blank page, and the invention of Hell Track

Needham, Bernard, and Edwards wrote the script in nine days flat — all but the ending, which the first draft simply marked "the big race" on page 91. Needham had seen actual BMX races on television: riders down a plank, around some corners, over a few bumps, done in about 100 yards. He knew the film needed something bigger, something that had never been built. So he invented it — a course called Hell Track, with a sheer drop to start it and sponsor logos plastered everywhere the way stock-car racing does it. Writing the Hell Track sequence alone took two weeks, with Needham laying out the course and Bernard and Edwards turning it into a shootable script. Hell Track became the film's working title, too — not Balls Out, the title that's often incorrectly reported.

The memo that went out to real BMX teams

Needham knew the riding had to be as convincing as the cast. His crew sent a memo to real BMX teams asking who wanted in, and GT Bicycles, out of Huntington Beach, California, answered. When Eddie Fiola read the Hell Track script, he said it "came right out of my heart" — he wasn't sure if the story was based on his own life or if he could've based his life on the movie. Needham, knowing Fiola was the most recognizable BMX rider of the era, hired him as technical advisor and as the stunt double and rider for the film's lead character, Cru Jones.

Fiola's GT teammate Martin Aparijo, already a driving force behind flatland freestyle riding, signed on too, working as a stunt rider and double for multiple characters. R.L. Osborn was among the stunt riders as well. José Yáñez performed Cru's signature backflip on the Hell Track course. And in the film's dance-floor "bike boogie" sequence — bikes mounted on a hidden rolling platform so the tricks could be filmed as if in motion — Aparijo doubled for lead actor Bill Allen while Pat Romano, in a wig, doubled for Lori Loughlin. In total, more than 25 of the era's top BMX names were hired to work on the production.

One of them got hurt for it. Rick Moliterno, working on the Helltrack set, was injured badly enough that the production wrote him into a scene with a cast on his arm and gave him a line — "Cru, will you sign my cast?" It's the only spoken line in the film delivered by an actual BMX rider.

Casting Cru, Christian, and the villain

Bill Allen won the lead role of Cru Jones after Needham spotted him on an episode of Hill Street Blues — beating out Robert Downey Jr. for the part. Allen dyed his hair black to match Fiola's for the tight cuts between actor and stunt double. Lori Loughlin, coming off The Edge of Night and a run of teen films, was cast as Christian, the love interest riding for the rival team, after a five-minute meeting. And 1984 Olympic gymnastics gold medalist Bart Conner was cast as the villain, Bart Taylor — a role his agent pitched to him as "kind of like gymnastics on a bike." Conner had blown out his knee at a gymnastics exhibition before filming and spent much of the shoot in a leg brace, which is why a lot of his scenes are framed from the waist up.

Hell Track becomes RAD

Academy Award-nominated actress Talia Shire and her husband Jack Schwartzman ran a production company, TaliaFilm II — the outfit behind Sean Connery's final Bond film, Never Say Never Again — and came aboard after meeting with the filmmakers over bread pudding. They liked the project but wanted changes: instead of Cru blowing off his SATs entirely, he'd merely delay them; instead of getting away with skipping college, there'd be a real push toward it. Shire herself was cast as Cru's mother, the parent holding that line. And the title changed. Hell Track was out. From here on, the film was RAD.

Cochrane, Alberta, and the building of Hell Track

Filming ran from August into early October 1985 in Cochrane and Calgary, Alberta — standing in for the fictional town of "Cochrane, USA." Shooting two American dollars' worth of production value for less money was the point of going to Canada; Needham already knew the area from working on Little Big Man there in 1969. Two days before the Hell Track sequence was set to shoot, Alberta weather turned the course into what Needham called "a mud hole." His fix: bring in helicopters and hover them over the track to blow it dry, then paint the changing autumn leaves green to match the film's summer setting.

The race sequence was shot one section at a time, each one filmed at least five times to cover enough angles for the edit. Nobody wanted to be first down Hell Track's steep opening drop. According to Needham and Allen, it was Beatle Rosecrans, the youngest rider on set, who finally went first — climbing partway up the wall and riding down in stages until he'd worked up to the full drop from the top. Once the youngest rider on set had done it, the older riders had no excuse left.

The bike boogie

The film's best-remembered and strangest scene has Cru and Christian take their bikes onto the school dance floor and perform a synchronized routine in slow motion — a genuine BMX/gymnasium dance number. On set, the crew filmed it to Billy Idol's "White Wedding"; in the finished film it plays under John Farnham's "Send Me an Angel." Built on a hidden rolling platform so the stunt doubles could perform tricks that read as motion, the sequence used Martin Aparijo standing in for Bill Allen and Pat Romano, wig and all, standing in for Lori Loughlin.

Released, reviewed, and buried — then not

RAD opened March 21, 1986, to bad reviews and a marketing push that leaned family-friendly rather than BMX-specific — two vans rigged with televisions crisscrossed the country playing clips, but the trailer undersold the riding. The film made less than half a million dollars its opening weekend and topped out around $2 million against a roughly $3 million budget. By that October it had debuted at only #28 on the home-video rental charts and fallen out of the top 40 within six weeks. For Talia Shire and Jack Schwartzman, who'd backed the film personally, the numbers were a genuine gut punch.

Then bike shops started selling it. RAD found the exact audience the marketing had missed, one word of mouth sale at a time, and built a steady life on home video that theaters never gave it. Decades on, the split says it all: a 2013 snapshot of Rotten Tomatoes showed a 91% audience score against a 0% critic score. The gap between what critics thought and what BMX kids felt is the whole story of this movie.

From flop to cult classic

RAD built a devoted fan community — the self-styled Rad Army — and became a fixture of cast reunions and revival screenings. Jack Schwartzman's death in 1994 tangled the film's rights up in estate and legal complications for over two decades, keeping it off DVD. It wasn't until 2020 that a 4K restoration finally arrived, released by Vinegar Syndrome and overseen by Talia and Jack's son, Robert Schwartzman, through his company Utopia Distribution; Mondo followed with a Blu-ray in 2021. Lori Loughlin went on to Aunt Becky fame on Full House; Bill Allen wrote a 2014 autobiography, My Rad Career; Eddie Fiola built a long career as a Hollywood stunt rider off the back of it, joking, "I used to get paid to ride my bike, now I get paid to fall off my bike."

What RAD left behind

Hell Track's steep starting ramp wasn't just a movie prop. The image of BMX racers launching off a towering hill start stuck around in the sport's own imagination, and the starting hills used in modern BMX supercross racing — including the format that debuted at the Beijing 2008 Olympics — echo the same idea Needham dreamed up for a movie he made without ever having ridden a bike.

What we don't know

No complete, official roster of the more than 25 BMX riders hired for RAD has ever been published in one place — the names on this page are the ones we can confirm against period accounts or on-record interviews, and we've left the rest out rather than guess. The exact final production budget isn't independently confirmed beyond the widely cited range used here. And nothing in the record connects Bob Morales to this production; we haven't linked him to this page for that reason.

Timeline

• Early 1985 Sam Bernard and Geoffrey Edwards write the Hell Track script in nine days; Hal Needham signs on to direct.
• 1985 GT Bicycles answers the call for real BMX riders; Eddie Fiola and Martin Aparijo come aboard as stunt riders and doubles.
• Aug–Oct 1985 Filming in Cochrane and Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
• 1985 TaliaFilm II (Talia Shire and Jack Schwartzman) comes aboard; Hell Track is retitled RAD.
• March 21, 1986 RAD opens in theaters to poor reviews and weak box office.
• Mid-1986 RAD's home-video release finds a slow, steady audience through BMX shops.
• 1994 Jack Schwartzman dies; rights issues delay a DVD release for over two decades.
• 2020 4K restoration released by Vinegar Syndrome, overseen by Robert Schwartzman's Utopia Distribution.
• 2021 Mondo releases a Blu-ray edition.