Legions of snowboarders knew Jake Burton Carpenter as an intrepid entrepreneur who made their sport soar, but millions more are about to get a warts-and-all view of how that came to be in a new documentary.
Directed by Emmy winner Fernando Villena, “Dear Rider” is a Red Bull Media House film that explores the snowboarding pioneer’s life and vision. The documentary is packed with video footage of Carpenter, who died two years ago, from his early years and beyond, including scratchy family movies, on-the-mountain footage, mid-air competition and more telling moments. Twenty-plus riders past and present — including Olympians Shaun White, Kelly Clark and Mark McMorris — share candid snapshots of Carpenter, as do his friends and relatives.
Low-key, but fiercely driven, Carpenter always understood how integral the snowboarding community was to the sport’s future and his company. He crafted his first version of a snowboard in 1977, lobbied ski resorts to allow snowboarding and recruited sponsors and world-class athletes. Snowboarding first became an Olympic sport at the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, and by the Salt Lake City Games in 2002, Burton-sponsored athletes were dominating the field.
The documentary, which premieres with a New York City screening Thursday, also shows Carpenter’s nonprofessional struggles with cancer and the rare nerve disorder Miller Fisher syndrome. The film shows his resilience, entrepreneurial spirit, need for connection and other attributes.
Carpenter had “left a really detailed and specific roadmap of what he wanted the film to do,” the director said in an interview. “He wanted warts and all…after he passed, the family and friends were still grieving. Even though Jake’s wish was not to sugarcoat his life, it was still a big challenge.”
There are lots of lighter moments, such as Carpenter as a boy riding a snurfer, the precursor to the snowboard, in his Long Island backyard. There is also footage from the early ’80s of a snowboarder racing downhill on a board at 63 m.p.h. wearing basketball sneakers, and a home movie with Carpenter advising, “Hit it, son,” as he films one of his youngsters as they snowboard off the roof of his family’s Vermont house. White recalled how when you’re a pro from 13 to 30, you’re bound to make some mistakes, like pulling the fire alarm at a hotel. A prank that prompted Carpenter to ask him, “‘Well, did you have fun?’” White said.
From Villena’s viewpoint, “Dear Rider’s” takeaway is “living your life passionately is better than not. We have one shot. We get one life. You can either live it passionately or not through your relationships, friends and family.”
The film is not just for 12-year-olds, who might be encouraged to try snowboarding, but also for those later on in their lives, who have lost touch with their inner child and understand that the clock is ticking to find a passion. “It doesn’t even have to be sports. It could be ballroom dancing. Go big and do it with everything that you’ve got. Do it with as many people as possible and form a little community. Get more people to do it and go out in style,” Villena said.
More poignant memories abound in the film, such as footage of Burton post-chemo and his youngest son touchingly describing how his father once gave CPR to a bird that the cat dragged in. “That’s just the metaphor for the film. Life meant everything to Jake. I don’t think living as long as he could was his goal. I think his goal was to have as much fun as possible,” Villena said.
Carpenter’s wife, Donna, and their two other sons also make cameos throughout the documentary, which debuts Nov. 9 on HBO and can be livestreamed via HBO Max. The project was initially put in motion in June 2018, when Carpenter was ready to tell his story after overcoming a few illnesses. The original plan was to center on his goal of getting in 100 days of snowboarding annually.
“It was physically a tough achievement each year. But it also was very symbolic in terms of staying close to the community and to the sport, and never losing touch,” Donna Carpenter said Monday. “In the early ’90s, when we watched the ski industry kind of lose its heart and soul, we used to say that they had become a bunch of suits with spreadsheets. So Jake had this determination — I’m going to snowboard 100 days a year. It started counter-seasonally in Chile or New Zealand in the summer, and then they were going to follow him on that journey.”
The film also bares some of the backstabbing that went on in the snowboarding industry as rivals tried to gain the upper hand and in some instances take credit for inventing the sport. Carpenter reiterates in the film how her husband contended that there was no inventor of the sport. To that end, there is a clip of Jake Burton Carpenter showing a snowboard from the 1920s.
“You might find a lot of people claim to have invented the sport. This is a sport that’s evolved over time,” he said at the time.
Following his death in 2019, Villena kept the family involved with the production. Carpenter said of her husband, “He didn’t want to sugarcoat things. He wanted it to be the good, the bad, the ugly of his lifestyle and the ups and downs. What kept me going and what the director’s goal was all along was, ‘Look, we want this being Jake telling Jake’s story through the old interviews and archival materials.’ He really stayed true to that, which made it a little easier for me.”
After exiting a job on Wall Street, his New York City friends laughed at Carpenter’s snow-based career plans and he vowed to prove them wrong. After hiring two relatives and a friend in the beginning, the aim was to make 50 snowboards a week but the company only sold 350 in its first year. The founder later faced other challenges including “the biggest PR f–up” of his career — not patenting the snowboard design, and a boycott of his brand. Through it all, he immersed himself in snowboarding and relied on riders for what was to come. As the breadth of snowboarders featured in the film reflects, part of Carpenter’s legacy requires “making sure that we always listen to the athletes in terms of where this sport is going,” his wife said.
All in all, she said he wanted to be remembered as someone “who cared more about the people and the fun and the sport than the material success. He would want to be remembered as a father and as a husband, because he was a really good father and an incredible husband, and he took his friendships seriously. There’s a point in the movie, where he says, ‘As soon as I started focusing on what was right for the sport and what was right for the community.’ Once it became bigger than him, everything else just followed. He would want to be known for pioneering snowboarding, always believing there was a sport there, persevering.”
The documentary’s title references the name of the consumer letter that the Burton founder would write in the company’s annual catalogue. “When life was a lot simpler, we would send out one big catalogue every year and one big shipment every year. Things have gotten a lot more complicated,” she said, laughing. “But he took that very seriously, bonding with the rider to try to tell them what we were working on, where our R&D was, where the sport was going, why he was optimistic.”
Carpenter himself provides a good deal of the voiceover in the 90-minute film, explaining at the start amidst the sound of snow being carved by riders, “Surfing on snow, in the back of my mind, I always knew it could be a sport. I mean, I saw a sport but I did not see Shaun White on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine twice or snowboarding being in the Olympics. But it’s exceeded, I wouldn’t even say dreams, because I never dreamt anything on the level that we’re on now.”