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This is part one of a two part interview with Dylan Weiss. Dylan is the man behind a ton of great hot car and hot bike video documentaries. His latest is called Twist the Throttle, and it's just fabulous. As always, you can read the entire interview at midliferider. Here's a snip.

It’s been a couple of weeks now, so I’ve already forgotten how I first met Dylan Weiss. Actually, that’s only sort of true. I found him while searching out more information on Ted Bishop, the author of my current favorite riding book, “Riding with Rilke.” Dylan had done an interview with him, and it kind of went from there.

Dylan has one of the coolest jobs in the world. He gets paid to make TV shows about fast cars and fast bikes. I think there’s more to it than that but I lost interest after hearing those parts. I mean really, what else is there to know.

Being the mid-life softie that I am, his story about how he got into both bikes and the business turns on his dad, Milt . . . a figure who shows up later in the drama as a co-producer with Dylan of Twist The Throttle, a very tasty video magazine about great bikes and great manufacturers.

Someone in the middle of all this Dylan manages to pen a widely regarded blog called Twisting Asphalt and to correspond with me about all manner of bike and non-bike related foolishness (Dylan has something about the word twisted that bears investigating).

I have broken this interview into two parts. There’s just too much good stuff here to spatter about in one posting. So come back tomorrow for the rest.

To the unwashed, doing documentaries about cars and bikes sounds like the coolest “job” there is. You say on your blog that it just sort of happened. Tell the story of how it happened.

Well, for starters I feel very fortunate to do what I do for a living – you’re absolutely right creating documentaries about cars and motorcycles is a cool gig and I love it. Right now I can’t imagine doing anything else. Of course it’s harder work then most realize, and there’s all kinds of ups and down that go with it and that the camera never catches, but I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that it’s also a very satisfying job… Certainly I think so and I’m very thankful for it.

How I got started? Hmmm… Well, there’s a very long-winded and highly convoluted version of how I got in the business, but the short version goes something like this:

Growing up my father spent many years working in the broadcast television news world and as a child, I watched from the sidelines as he got to experience one incredible event after another. For example he was there when The Berlin Wall fell, he covered Presidential debates, Elections, basically all the big-ticket moments in our world history over a twenty plus year span - And I thought that was the coolest thing in the world, to in effect be a bystander to history as it happened.

As I got older my attraction to ‘Journalism’ as a profession itself didn’t really take hold – partially because I’m a terrible speller and at the time I didn’t really like writing, which of course is highly ironic since these days I spend a great deal of time writing, both for work and for “Twisting Asphalt”.

Over time what I began to realize was that I was far more attracted to the medium then the news itself. The idea that you could affect an audience emotionally with moving pictures was fascinating to me – and frankly still is. Eventually my interest in visual arts led me to The University of Southern California and more specifically The Cinema-Television department. It was a great place to immerse yourself in possibilities and dreams. Then a year after graduating, after working at a few different production companies around LA, I took a long ride up the California coast and had an epiphany of sorts, where I realized that within the vastness of the visual medium, what I really wanted to do was create documentaries.

So that was the moment I jumped out of the airplane, so to speak, and started Cry Havoc Productions.

Looking back I guess television and things with engines were intertwined from the start! Of course I was fairly naive about a lot of things at the time, particularly related to starting your own business – which is much harder then you’d think it should be - but I was also aware that I didn’t want to look back on my life down the road and say, “Why didn’t I have the balls to try going after my dreams?” That seemed like a much more dangerous proposition in the long run then giving something a go when I had absolutely nothing to lose.

The part that just ‘sort of happened’ on its own was the blending of my interest in cars and motorcycles with my passion for the visual arts. There certainly wasn’t any great master plan involved, that’s for sure!

But I guess where it’s all kind of come full circle is that just like Milt [Dylan’s dad] got to experience all kinds of crazy world events during his tenure in the news business, the combination of things with engines and documentaries has offered me the opportunity to experience some really incredible things within the moto-community and it’s certainly something that I don’t take for granted…

What projects are you working on now?

Currently we’re working on another project for Discovery Turbo, this one is tentatively being called ‘Amazing Machines’ and may evolve into a weekly (or bi-weekly) look at cool parts of the automotive and motorcycle world.

So one week we might be taking out a new Supercar, the next week we might be interviewing a head designer or engineer at a car company, the following week we might be at some ‘secret’ car event… So the content will keep changing, but you’ll be able to show up every week and know you’ll see something fun. At least that’s the hope…

Long term, we’ve also got some more – perhaps let us say, ‘dedicated’ motorcycle projects in the works. I can’t really talk about them just yet, but I doubt Twist The Throttle is the last sportbike project you’ll see from us ☺

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Read my blog at www.midliferider.com

2006 FJR1300, 2007 Aprilia RSV1000R Factory, 2005 Suzuki SV1000S