Spike Jonze

The Freestylin' Photographer Who Became an Oscar-Winning Filmmaker

A Legend Bike Co. industry page · sources: Wikipedia's sourced biography, ESPN's BMX retrospective, DIG BMX, Legend Bike Co.'s Freestylin' Magazine and Andy Jenkins pages

At a glance

Real name Adam Spiegel
Role BMX shop employee, then Freestylin' magazine photographer, then filmmaker
Scene Rockville BMX, Rockville, Maryland (early-to-mid 1980s); Freestylin' magazine, Torrance, California (mid-to-late 1980s); film and music video direction, 1990s to today
Magazines Freestylin' (photographer), Homeboy and Dirt (co-founder, with Andy Jenkins and Mark Lewman)
Known for Photographing Freestylin' alongside Andy Jenkins and Mark Lewman, fronting Club Homeboy, then directing Being John Malkovich, Where the Wild Things Are, and Her (Academy Award, Best Original Screenplay)

Before he was winning an Oscar for a movie about a man who falls in love with his computer, Spike Jonze was a teenager sweeping up at a BMX shop in Maryland. His path into Hollywood didn't run through film school. It ran through a bike shop counter, a Freestylin' magazine internship of sorts, and a satirical fan club run out of a Torrance, California office. This is the BMX chapter of that story.

A Bethesda Kid Who Got a Nickname and a Bike Habit

He was born Adam Spiegel on October 22, 1969, in New York City, and raised in Bethesda, Maryland, by his mother after his parents divorced. While he was a student at Walt Whitman High School, the owner of a local community store, Mike Henderson, hung the nickname "Spike Jonze" on him — a reference to Spike Jones, the satirical 1940s bandleader. It stuck for good. Around the same time, Jonze became close friends with a fellow BMX kid named Jeff Tremaine, a friendship built entirely on riding, and one that would later reshape both of their careers together on Jackass.

Jonze started working at the Rockville BMX shop in nearby Rockville, Maryland, at age 16. Rockville BMX was a serious mail-order operation and a regular stop for touring pro BMX teams passing through the D.C. area — which put a teenage shop employee with a camera in the right place at the right time.

From Shop Photos to a Job at Freestylin'

Jonze started photographing the demos and pro riders who came through Rockville BMX, and the photos built him a reputation with Freestylin' editors Mark Lewman and Andy Jenkins, who were running the magazine out of Wizard Publications' Torrance offices. Jenkins had hired Lewman about a year into his own tenure as editor; roughly a year after that, impressed by Jonze's photography and the buzz around him, Jenkins and Lewman brought him on as a photographer. Jonze left Maryland for California to take the job, joining a masthead that already carried Jenkins as editor and Lewman as assistant editor.

Within the magazine, Jonze's photography became a defining part of Freestylin's look during its best-remembered years — loud layouts, real riders, real personality. Andy Jenkins later described the Wizard offices as a playground with a darkroom, and Jonze fit right into that chaos: former colleagues remember him meeting visiting pro riders at the airport in a chauffeur's uniform, spinning tall tales about his fictional sick father to unsuspecting out-of-towners just to see how far the joke would go.

Club Homeboy

Jonze, Jenkins and Lewman ran a running joke out of the Freestylin' offices called Club Homeboy — a satirical, mail-order "BMX club" that started almost as a throwaway bit and snowballed into a cult phenomenon with roughly 15,000 card-carrying members. It grew big enough to spin off into its own magazine, Homeboy, and the same trio later created a second youth-culture title, Dirt, spun off from the girls' magazine Sassy and aimed at teenage boys.

The Road to Filmmaking

As the BMX magazine business contracted in the late 1980s, Jonze's camera moved with him into skateboarding — shooting for Transworld Skateboarding, then for Steve Rocco's World Industries, where he made his first video, Rubbish Heap, in 1989. His 1991 Blind Skateboards video Video Days became one of the most influential skate videos ever made, and a chance screening of it in front of Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon led to his first music video job. From there Jonze became one of the defining music video directors of the 1990s, making Weezer's "Buddy Holly" and the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" and "Sure Shot" in 1994 alone. He co-created MTV's Jackass with his old BMX friend Jeff Tremaine and Johnny Knoxville in 2000, and directed the feature films Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), Where the Wild Things Are (2009) and Her (2013) — the last of which won him the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He remains active as a director and is creative director of Vice Media's television arm.

Generation F

In 2008, Jonze reunited with Jenkins and Lewman for Freestylin': Generation F, 1984-1989, a Nike-sponsored hardback retrospective of the magazine's full run. Jonze served as photo director, Jenkins as design director, and Lewman as word director — the same three names that had run the magazine's voice more than two decades earlier, pulling the archive back together one more time.

Where the public record runs thin

Accounts of exactly how Jonze's Freestylin' hire came together vary in the retelling — some emphasize his BMX demo photography, others point to a run of funny postcards and stories about him reaching the Torrance office before he ever submitted a photo. Both threads point the same direction and aren't necessarily in conflict, but we can't pin down which came first. The precise date he left Freestylin' for the skateboard world is not documented in the sources checked for this page.

Where Spike Jonze fits in the bigger story

Magazines: Freestylin' Magazine, which later merged into GO: The Rider's Manual after Jonze, Jenkins and Lewman had already moved on to skate and youth-culture media. People: Andy Jenkins. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.

Sources

Wikipedia, "Spike Jonze," en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike_Jonze — sourced biography covering the Rockville BMX years, nickname origin, Freestylin' hire, Club Homeboy, Homeboy and Dirt magazines, and full filmography. ESPN Action Sports, "Spike Jonze was a BMXer," espn.com/action/bmx — Rockville BMX and Freestylin' background. DIG BMX, "A Rockville BMX Pilgrimage," digbmx.com — Rockville BMX shop history and Jonze's time there. BMXmuseum.com forums, "anyone have any Spike Jonze stories?" — period recollections from Freestylin' staff, including Andy Jenkins. Legend Bike Co., "Freestylin' Magazine — The Wizard Publications Title That Made Freestyle a Culture" and "Andy Jenkins — The Freestylin' Editor Who Became a Skateboard Art Director," legendbikeco.com — corroborating detail on the Freestylin' masthead and hiring order. Freestylin': Generation F, 1984-1989 (Nike SB retrospective book, 2008) — credits page naming Jonze as photo director.