Historical
The Performers Now
A Radically Different Approach
Take five professional skiers, put them into a red-white-and-blue-emblazoned bus and send them around the country spreading the newschool gospel. This was the intent of the 1996 remake of Dick Barrymore’s infamous ski film The Performers. Featuring Kent Kreitler, Jimbo Morgan, Jason Moore, Darian Boyle, and “the kid on the trip,” Seth Morrison, as well as Robbie Capell and Tory Bland tail-gunning in Capell’s truck, the new Performers were tasked with “putting the stoke back into skiing.” Produced by Steve Winter of Matchstick Productions, The Performers Now brought the skiers to Jackson Hole, Squaw Valley and Sun Valley, where they re-created the infamous wet T-shirt contest that got K2 into so much trouble in the 1970s.
The Performers Now was a punk rock take on a rock ’n’ roll theme—their ride was actually older than the original Performers’ Winnebago. “That whole trip was pretty crazy,” Morrison remembers. “[The bus] was [Pearl Jam frontman] Eddie Vedder’s old tour bus—this old, piece-of-shit school bus. It was very dangerous, let’s put it that way. We went to Snowbird and we had to get back down Cottonwood Canyon and they wouldn’t let us ride down the hill in the bus because they were afraid the brakes were going to give out. We were just waiting for that thing to break down. We had a beer sponsor, Henry Weinhard’s or something, so all we did when we were sitting in that thing was drink. It took way longer to ride that bus than it would have to drive a car. It was an interesting trip.”…