The Ninja Magazine in or around 1985. This was a really cool shoot in Hollywood on stage and it was my first time around a "smoke machine" which is really very dangerous as it's vaporized diesel fuel! After the shoot my gi or shinobi was diesel fuel soaked on one of my friends upon exiting the stage said "anyone for a smoke"... I said "absolutely don't get near me with an open flame!" It turned out to be a joke as he didn't really smoke but knew my shinobi was soaked.
They later did another shoot and I think this was in the 1986 time frame where they came down to San Diego where my sailboat was and shot some really cool material. We were shooting originally over on "Spanish landing" across from Harbor Island Marina where my boat was at the time. Here is a picture of the shallow water drowning technique which was shot just before the Harbor Patrol and the Police made a surprise visit to our shoot. I had a back of weapons and they held me and my opponent at gunpoint then went through my bag. They also harassed the Hollywood guys who only made things worse... so we moved to the marina where it was private property.
Media
Magazines
The Ninja Magazine in or around 1985. This was a really cool shoot in Hollywood on stage and it was my first time around a "smoke machine" which is really very dangerous as it's vaporized diesel fuel! After the shoot my gi or shinobi was diesel fuel soaked on one of my friends upon exiting the stage said "anyone for a smoke"... I said "absolutely don't get near me with an open flame!" It turned out to be a joke as he didn't really smoke but knew my shinobi was soaked.
They later did another shoot and I think this was in the 1986 time frame where they came down to San Diego where my sail boat was and shot some really cool material. We were shooting originally over on "Spanish landing" across from Harbor Island Marina where my boat was at the time. Here is picture of shallow water drowning technique which was shot just before the Harbor Patrol and the Police made a surprise visit to our shoot. I had a back of weapons and they held me and my opponent at gun point then went through my bag. They also harassed the Hollywood guys who only made things worse... so we moved to the marina where it was private property.
Over at the marina we did some really need stuff in and around my boat plus up in the pool with Ninja weapons. This shoot dominated the next Ninja magazine but I did share some space with Hollywood type ninjas… not the real kind.
And later I was in the knife fighting book "Tanto Techniques"
I will next share some of the content in these books but first, I think I have been one of a few people who have shown "ninja net techniques" anywhere on the web! One black belt test, which is on Anjing Banfa.com we trained with them and you can see some of that footage there too.
Here is a link to that:
https://www.anjingbanfa.com/BBTest08/BlackBelt08Highlights.html
https://www.anjingbanfa.com/BBTest08/BlackBelt08Highlights.html
Also my three-part Ninja Demo in 1982 in Boulder Creek CA. The first part is the history and the other parts show off about 1500 years of Ninja weapon history:
https://www.anjingbanfa.com/NinjaDemo1982Pt1.html
https://www.anjingbanfa.com/NinjaDemo1982Pt2.html
https://www.anjingbanfa.com/NinjaDemo1982Pt3.html
And yes that's me... a very young me!
Documentaries
The crazy rulers of the world in three parts by Jon Ronson of the BBC. I'm in the first part and you can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAMIvDmWbQs
This lead to the "men who stare at goats book"... which I found myself in playboy magazine... then Clooney plays me in the movie!
Well, this belongs in the next section too.
Movies
Well, the "men who stare at goats" put me on the map from that stand point. The "predators" sold out and of course later I changed the name to "the defenders" https://www.pdws.biz.
The movie was cool as you can see what I did in the Crazy Rulers of the World and the book made it into the movie. They sent me a screenplay of it, oh something like 400 plus pages.. and quite frankly I didn't have time to look through all of that ... did the defender or then the predator make it into the movie? was my question
Well, that answered that and the sales went through the roof!
TV
TV was the last frontier for me I guess. Hollywood came out and wanted to do a reality TV show on me... we worked on it for some time and the History Channel picked it up in Dec... but then reanalyzed their shows and dropped most of the reality tv shows... darn it.
I will pull up some videos of that time here: https://youtu.be/H1Zf1l7nkis
Next video https://youtu.be/VvQGSamsH8g
That is the chase scene!