JOHNNY KNOXVILLE (co-creator, cast member, writer): Hello, my name is Johnny Knoxville, and this is the oral history of Jackass. As opposed to an anal history – which would be much longer.
Aspiring actor and writer PJ Clapp moved to Los Angeles from Tennessee after graduating high school in the late ’80s. After a decade of struggle, Clapp, nicknamed Johnny Knoxville, was married and the father of a young daughter.
JOHNNY KNOXVILLE: I was making my living doing commercials for things like ESPN, Mountain Dew, and Bud Light. I was a complete whore because I had a young baby and I needed to make money. I had an idea for an article where I would test different types of self-defence equipment on myself. A few magazines wanted the story, but nobody wanted the liability. Everyone was fine with the pepper spray and the stun gun and the Taser gun. Where it got shady was where I was testing a bulletproof vest – with a .38. The only magazine that would do it was [skateboarding publication] Big Brother.
TONY HAWK (über-skater, guest star): Big Brother was the rawest and funniest magazine out there, beyond just skateboarding. The articles were dense with sarcasm, shock, and vulgarities. Skaters ate it up.
JEFF TREMAINE (co-creator, director of every Jackass film; editor, Big Brother): One of our first articles was a guide called “How to Kill Yourself”. We had a tiny little staff. Slowly we were collecting people who “got it”. They might not have had the most talent, but they definitely had the larger personalities. Chris Pontius came through that. And I hired “Wee Man” because he worked at the local skate shop and would just come by all the time. He was very unmotivated and a terrible employee.
CHRIS PONTIUS (cast member, writer): In the eighth or ninth issue, I was interviewed in Big Brother, and it was pretty wild. I was nude, and I think I wasn’t even 18, so that was naughty. It was obvious I should write for the magazine. It took in the misfits of the skateboard world.
STEVE-O (cast member, writer): I made it my mission to track those guys down. My attitude was: Nobody needed to like me. They just needed to put me in the magazine.
SPIKE JONZE (co-creator, producer, writer, guest star): In the late ’80s and early ’90s, no one cared about skateboarders. There was no Internet, no other way to communicate, so everyone just made their own videos, and that’s how skateboarding communicated with itself.
JEFF TREMAINE: Our first video was called Shit. Wee Man was on the cover, painted blue, with orange-dyed hair. Shit was pretty well-received, so we decided to make the second video, called Number Two, and that’s when we met Knoxville. He was not a skateboarder, so he had to be even more outrageous to survive.
JOHNNY KNOXVILLE: Jeff persuaded me to film the self-defence piece. I wasn’t an aspiring video guy. The article was my evil attempt at imitating my hero, Hunter S. Thompson.
JEFF TREMAINE: The guys we had been working with, none of them could really talk to the camera. But Knoxville came back with this footage, and he’s just walking you through, step-by-step, and you can’t stop watching. Starting with the pepper spray, to the stun gun, and then the Taser gun, and then the bulletproof vest. It was like a snuff video. The cameraman didn’t even want to be there.
GIDEON YAGO (former MTV News correspondent): I remember seeing that video for the first time in 1999 wasted at a friend’s party, which is the way all skate videos are meant to be screened. I think Brian Graden found it the same way.
BRIAN GRADEN (former president of entertainment, MTV Networks): Johnny was so obviously a TV star, even in that small clip. I thought, ‘Who is this guy?’
JOHNNY KNOXVILLE: We had all these ideas of what a TV show might be. I would be kind of the host, like The Daily Show, and we would have all the guys come on and do stunts. Spike finally said, “You guys already have the show. The Big Brother videos – that’s the show.”
SPIKE JONZE: At the start, when we didn’t know what it was, it could be anything. We thought, “We’ll have 22 minutes on TV every week to do whatever we want. We can do anything. Let’s not underestimate what ‘anything’ is.”
For the full feature and images grab the November 2013 issue of MAXIM, in stores October 17 – November 21, 2013.
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