Film

Get a Grip, Mom. The "X" Rating Just Means It's Really Extreme.
IMAX breaks new ground with a dizzying homage to the world of radical sports By Nick Heil

Herbert Glacier is a mile-wide swath of tourmaline blue that rolls down from Alaska's Coast Mountains in a perpetually rearranging jumble of fissures, crevasses, and towering ice blocks before it disintegrates into the headwaters of the Herbert River. To veteran ice climbers like Barry Blanchard, this is the sort of tableau that leaves one breathing heavily and salivating in anticipation. To Jon Long, an ambitious director working on his first IMAX movie, it's the kind of locale that screams "money shot!" But to Long's safety team ù which was attempting one day last April to jury-rig a harness capable of supporting both an 80-pound, $500,000 camera and a cinematographer who would dangle for hours on the side of the disturbingly fragile serac that Blanchard intended to ascend ù it was the sort of situation that made them wish they'd chosen a safer line of work. Like, say, beat cop in the Bronx. "We had to get pretty creative," recalls Blanchard, who helped fashion a rigging of cables and pulleys from which they eventually suspended the cameraman. "We wound up holding it together with bungee cords and duct tape. It was definitely guerrilla filmmaking."

Ah, yet another workday in the making of Extreme, the 70-millimeter tribute to the cutting-edge world of wilderness skiing, radical snowboarding, big-wave surfing, and high-performance climbing that premieres throughout North America this month. A 45-minute panoply of harrowing images set to a trip-hop sound track, Extreme aims to broaden IMAX's reach beyond its tiny following of Sunday-afternoon museum visitors and elementary-school field trippers, mainly by appealing to the mainstream viewer's suicidal inner child.

The film is the latest career move for 38-year-old Long, the respected but somewhat obscure auteur of such powder-porn classics as Snowdrifters and Cosmic Winter. Three years ago, when he was seized by the notion of adding IMAX to his repertoire, Long confronted the challenge of persuading the notoriously conservative IMAX Corporation ù which until the recent release of Everest was renowned for such dramatic tours de force as Africa's Elephant Kingdom and Beavers ù to underwrite a project focusing on an overexposed theme with an undeniably clich‰d title headed by a director known for producing gonzo ski-bum videos. "I wanted to use the IMAX medium because I felt it could truly capture the beauty of nature," Long says, recalling his initial pitch and then suddenly turning glum, "even though at first they weren't really interested in my style."

Not deterred by the lukewarm response, Long rustled up some investors, rented a few IMAX cameras, pinpointed some choice sites such as Castleton Tower near Moab, Utah, and the Purcell Mountains in British Columbia, and signed on a slew of gravity-sports celebs including rock climber Lynn Hill, boardsailor Robby Naish, free skier Gordy Peifer, and snowboarder Terje Haakonsen. With all the pieces in place, the director led his caravan to location, at which point fortune performed some rather auspicious twists.

In April 1998, a massive storm in the Chilkat Mountains outside Juneau, Alaska, laid down ten feet of maritime snowpack that allowed the film crew to record a number of first descents. In May on Maui, exceptionally robust winds and wave conditions combined for an epic boardsailing sequence. And five months earlier, 45-foot swells spawned by El Ni~no were breaking on Hawaii's North Shore just as Long's team arrived, resulting in what Extreme's publicity materials breathlessly proclaim as "the biggest waves ever ridden."

Somewhat less impressive are the voice-over narrations that Long dubbed into the film to "reflect the head space of the people who participate in this kind of thing." Thus viewers are bombarded by breathtaking images while athletes offer up weightless musings on personal freedom and the prophylactic virtues of their gear. "I knew the rocks were coming," deadpans Peifer as we watch him pinwheel over a cliff. "As it turned out, I did hit my head. Fortunately, the helmet was there for me."

Despite such flaws, the result is still impressive: The rides through the tsunami-size surf, the pioneering cliff-hucks, and the solo first ascents are rendered with unique intimacy by the large-format film. "I've been rag-dolled by five-foot waves, but when I saw the expression on Ken Bradshaw's face as he's towed into a 40-foot wave, it blew me away," says Kelly Pearn, 26, a surf junkie who finagled his way into a sneak preview. "I watched Long's videos all through college. But there's so much more power when the screen is 80 feet high."