I answered the phone at the shop one day, and the caller identified himself as an intern for Pilgrim Films. “How would you guys like to do television or a show?” the intern asked.
“We’d love to,” I answered.
There wasn’t much to the phone call. The intern said he wanted to see if we were interested and that he might call us back.
Come to find out, we had made it onto Craig’s top-ten list, but he wound up selecting a shop in New Hampshire.
A few weeks after the initial call, my father and I had pretty much given up on the possibility of being part of a show. Then one day I answered another call at the shop. It was Pilgrim’s owner this time, not an intern. Craig asked if we would be interested in filming a pilot featuring us going to a junkyard, picking out an old Harley, and restoring it to showroom-floor condition. When my father and I spoke with Craig, he told us that he had a crew set to film at a bike shop in New Hampshire. Airline tickets had been purchased and hotel rooms booked. But Craig did not have a good feeling about the builders he had chosen for the pilot. Craig said if we wanted to do the show, he would send his crew to our shop instead and film us. Then he added that his crew would need to leave that day so he needed a decision right away. My father and I said we’d do it.
We agreed to the junkyard proposal because this was our opportunity to be on television and make a bigger name for our business. But I was not keen on the idea. We had a couple of years under our belt and, for the most part, knew who we were as custom builders. I agreed to the junkyard visit fully believing the crew would see the types of bikes we built and prefer those bikes instead. That proved correct a few days later when the film crew arrived at our shop.
NO—IT’S NEW YORK!
Orange County. Not California, but New York. My father’s decision to include our location in the Orange County Choppers name turned out to benefit our home county.
In our early days of visiting trade shows, people naturally assumed we were from Orange County, California. It got a little better as our name grew in stature within the industry, but when American Chopper came along, that cleared up any confusion. Just one episode with snow on the ground reminded people watching that we were in New York State. Even folks from as far away as Australia recognized that our business was based in New York.
Some of the locals have told us that we put Montgomery on the map, and that’s cool because I love my hometown. But most of the time, we were associated with Orange County.
Orange County was named for King William III of England, who was a prince of the House of Orange. George Washington did more than sleep here—he lived in nearby Newburgh during the Revolutionary War, and Washington’s headquarters were located here. The United States Military Academy at West Point is in Orange County.
When the weather is bearable, this is a great place to spend time outdoors. Our county is located between the Hudson River to the east and the Delaware River to the west. The Appalachian Trail runs through here, too.
And visitors to Orange County never know when they might see someone test-driving a brand-new, really cool chopper!
By the standards of what the filming of our show would become, the pilot was pretty rudimentary. We had a skeleton crew of, best I can remember, three: a producer, a cameraman, and a sound guy. The camera was not high definition. Lighting was poor. When I look back to the pilot and initial episodes, the picture quality is poor compared to later seasons.
Filming lasted six weeks for the one-hour pilot, and getting used to the camera was a big adjustment, particularly since I did not even like having my picture taken. At first when the crew interviewed me on camera, I talked slowly because I wanted to be genuine. Turned out I was talking too slowly and looked anything but genuine. So there was a big learning curve. Fortunately, with six weeks of filming, we had time to get used to working with the crew in our shop.
I decided to build the Air Force fighter jet–themed bike that was a tribute to my grandfather Paul Leonardo. With a camera following us, we took the Jet Bike to the Laconia Bike Week in New Hampshire. But rain wiped out the rally.
As my father and I grew comfortable around the camera and crew, we started acting like our normal selves. That included the arguments. The tension was heightened because the crew was with us all the time filming everything—the pilot represented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and we were going all out on the Jet Bike, sparing no expense at a time when OCC wasn’t rolling in money.
Craig had been receiving reports from the producer about how often my father and I fought. When Craig took his first look at the show during production and noticed that the fighting had been cut, he fired the editor. After a second round of edits, the crew came back for two weeks of additional filming.
From what we heard, Discovery almost did not air the pilot. But the pilot was accepted and scheduled to air on September 29, 2002, a Sunday night. As would be the case for every episode in the series, my father and I did not see the pilot ahead of time.
We were nervous leading up to the airing of the show. We figured we would have the one documentary and then be done TV-wise. Our mind-set was, How many people get to have a show on TV? We would record the show for a keepsake and be able to say for the rest of our lives that we were on television. We knew the level of success that Jesse had achieved through Motorcycle Mania by observing him signing autographs at bike events. We realized the potential was great, but by no stretch of the imagination did we expect what happened.
FROM “OH NO” TO “OH YEAH!”
Just like everyone else, we watched the pilot for the first time on television. The Jet Bike looked really cool, but overall, we did not know how to feel about the show. We had expected a documentary with a polished presentation of our relationship.
We weren’t polished.
By the time we reported to work the next morning, my father and I thought we were ruined because we had looked like idiots arguing with each other. The mood around the shop was kind of down because we had been serious about competing with the other custom builders and feared that all the effort we had put into building the business had been for naught due to one hour on TV. I remember sitting with my head in my hands thinking that we would never be taken seriously again.
About midmorning, the secretary brought us an e-mail she had printed: the sender had looked us up on the Internet to tell us that he had enjoyed the show. Then another e-mail came. And then a few more. By the end of the day, we had received about a thousand e-mails from people who had loved the show. The Internet was fairly new at that point, and receiving that many e-mails was unheard of to us. Unknowingly, we had struck some kind of chord with the audience.
That evening, the first ratings came in, and our show had won the night with more than two million viewers. Discovery had a few bike shows at the time, and ours had outperformed them all.
The success of the first show led to another proposed pilot, with orders to rush it to air. For the second pilot, we created the Cody Project. Cody Connelly was a kid who had started working with us the year before when he was fourteen. I was getting a haircut at his mother’s shop in town, and one of the ladies working there—who was a good friend of my sister’s—recommended Cody as someone we could hire to help around the shop. Cody came in and swept the shop and did other menial tasks. He was a good kid, smart, hard working, and eager to learn.
Cody was fifteen when we started filming the second pilot, which was geared toward the upcoming Bike Week. We had some bikes set up to show in Daytona and, hopefully, sell. Seven days before Daytona, my father and I decided to let Cody design a bike. It was Cody’s first fabrication project, and I took on more of a teacher role. That bike was also the first OCC bike with a chrome frame, so it was a learning time for all of us. It wasn’t one of our modern theme-styled bikes; Cody came up with an old-school model that turned out really nice.
Through Cody’s mother, we arranged for him to miss school and go to Daytona with us. There, Cody was able to hear the
praise his bike drew. We also surprised Cody with a photo shoot on his bike for Street Chopper magazine. It was a fun bike to build and rewarding to see Cody’s excitement. The Cody Project appeared on the January 19, 2003, episode and made for a feel-good show for Discovery.
Discovery decided to turn American Chopper into a series. Coming off the Cody Project, OCC was hot. Discovery wanted to pump out episodes, so we started an ultrafast six-week turnaround.
Most of the builds aired as two episodes, with the first hour covering the fabrication and the second week consisting of the assembly and finish.
The first two episodes featured the Black Widow Bike, kind of a 2.0 of the Spider-Man Bike with webbed fenders and gas tank. There was no client for the Black Widow. I had started building the bike as my own project during downtimes as nothing more than a creative expression for me.
When we were offered a series and talked about what we could build for the show, I showed Craig and Sean Gallagher from Discovery the Black Widow in progress. The bike was almost finished in its raw form. The fenders were pretty much ready and tacked together.
“Let’s do this,” Craig said.
Most people don’t know that Discovery wanted the bike constructed from scratch, and I wound up starting the bike over again so the process could be filmed.
The final product was the original Black Widow that I had been working on. What viewers watched me build on the show were the replica parts. Two years later, those pieces were auctioned off in New York City to benefit the Wounded Warrior Project—and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith placed the winning bid!
We built the Black Widow more than a dozen years ago, and to me, it has stood the test of time. Some of the bikes we built early on date themselves a little bit. But not that one. The Black Widow is an iconic bike.
We didn’t handpick that bike for the opening episodes, but I don’t think we could have chosen a better build to kick off the first season.
Viewers related to the Black Widow. Discovery was doing well with its motorcycle shows, and the people who loved bikes were a fairly easy draw. But the Black Widow, and the themes that followed, allowed us to captivate an audience that could not have cared less about motorcycles.
Once the second Black Widow episode aired, the phones at the shop started ringing off the hook. It’s still crazy to me that we made it onto television only because a production company was looking for an East Coast bike shop, saw our website, and was intrigued by our bikes and the fact that a father-son duo was producing them. Then after only two pilots and two episodes, we were off and running at high speed.
Following the Black Widow episodes, we devoted two episodes to the Race Car Bike for TrimSpa. The dietary supplement company was our first customer for television. We had not been paid to produce the Jet Bike, the Cody Project, or the Black Widow, but TrimSpa gave us $150,000 to make the Race Car Bike.
In our first opportunity to build for a corporation, I began by looking at TrimSpa’s product because I wanted the bike to reflect the product. The company’s CEO, Alex Goen, wanted the bike to match the car TrimSpa was sponsoring in the upcoming Daytona 500 NASCAR race. That led to an interesting mix of a masculine-looking bike with feminine qualities in the lines and shapes.
We unveiled the Race Car Bike in Daytona three weeks after we started on the project. When our bike was parked next to the race car, as my father said on the show, it looked like the same person built both the car and the bike. The crowd and Alex loved the bike, and the Race Car Bike became an in-demand exhibit for TrimSpa. Our first job for a corporate client turned out to be a rousing success.
I felt a lot of pressure producing a bike for a client, on a very tight schedule, and knowing the client was paying us $150,000. It was the most money we had received for a bike, and the Race Car Bike opened the door to bringing in other clients for the show.
When I designed a bike for a client, my goal was to fully integrate the product, corporation, or charity into the bike, telling the client’s story through the creative process of building the motorcycle. I believed special, one-off custom bikes to be in my wheelhouse rather than everyday, average-guy bikes.
This first big bike sale enabled us to create a business model of theme building that people would watch for the next ten years.
The reception at the TrimSpa unveil before the Daytona 500 was huge. It seemed like everyone wanted to talk about our bikes and ask for our autographs. Before our first show aired, I recall only one person requesting my autograph because he liked our work. I felt awkward and at first told the guy I didn’t want to sign. The guy continued asking, nicely, so I signed “Paul M. Teutul” to differentiate from my father’s name. Early on, when the autograph requests started because of the show, I continued to sign my name that way. But it didn’t take long for me to decide to shorten my signature to “Paul Jr.” I had to do something to help my right hand handle the load.
Signing became a tricky deal. I didn’t want autograph signing to feel like an assembly line: scrawling my name and sending people on their way as quickly as possible. I enjoy being around people and talking to them. But on the other hand, I realized that people were spending a long time waiting and I wanted to accommodate as many of them as possible. They were investing their time in watching our show and coming out to meet us, so I tried to be as generous as possible with my time while also taking into account the growing lines.
We followed up the TrimSpa bike with the Fire Bike, and that one rocketed our popularity through the roof.
On September 11, 2001, I was working in the shop under the cantilever when I heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower. My initial thought was that the plane must have been a small Cessna and something had gone wrong mechanically or the pilot had flown off course. Then a few minutes later, the plane was reported to be a commercial airliner. Shortly after that, a second airplane flew into the South Tower.
I left the shop and went to a pizza place at the end of the road. The television there was tuned into the news, and I became almost sick as the reports unfolded about the other two hijacked planes and confirmation that our country was under a terrorist attack. We usually never took days off at the shop, but none of us worked the rest of that day.
An hour-and-fifteen-minute drive from New York City, Montgomery feels like the backyard of the city. We’ve had numerous NYC firefighters and police officers live in my hometown and commute to work. I admired firemen and policemen as a kid, and in Montgomery we grew up knowing first responders in the city.
In 1991, a NYC firefighter from Montgomery named Al Ronaldson had died in a fire. The second floor of a two-story building collapsed under him and a concrete slab fell on top of him. Mr. Ronaldson had been a hero of ours from a couple of years earlier when a tornado struck a local elementary school. He was home that day, heard what had happened on his fire radio, and was the first rescuer on the scene. Although seven children died that day, Mr. Ronaldson was credited with rescuing at least two kids.
Mr. Ronaldson’s death was big news, and I’ve never forgotten how much it hurt his family and the people of Montgomery when he died. Although our town already felt a connection to the NYFD and NYPD, I think we might have grown a little closer to New York City first responders because of Mr. Ronaldson.
THE LEAST WE COULD DO
After we started filming the series, we had conversations about the type of bikes we could build for the show. One day, I was in the back seat of my dad’s car. I don’t recall how the idea came up, but we were discussing creating a fire tribute bike. That was about a year and a half after 9/11. Since that date, I had wanted to find a way to honor the firefighters who lost their lives, but there is a fine line for when to do a tribute connected to a tragedy. The day of the conversation with my father, the timing felt right. Plus, I knew the TV show would bring more attention to the memories of the 343 firefighters lost in the attacks.
I started spit-balling ideas about the creative process and what could be
tied into the bike. The more we talked, the more momentum the idea gathered, and we decided to create what would become known as the Fire Bike.
The Fire Bike was another two-episode build, but the episodes had a break between them. The first episode aired in late April. After five weeks off the air, a special from Daytona Bike Week aired, and the following week was the conclusion of the Fire Bike. So there were about six weeks between the two episodes. We had hoped to have the bike completed for our trip to Daytona, but we resisted the temptation to rush. Instead we took our time and ended up getting the bike we wanted. I’m glad we did.
I had a feeling before we started that the bike would become one of our most special builds. At the beginning of the creative process, I visited the Montgomery Fire Department—touring the same station I had as an elementary school student—and took pictures of fire trucks and various pieces of equipment and instruments.
Early on I decided that the fuel tank would be a key piece of the bike and took the unusual step of sketching out my plans for the tank. I arranged with Mike Stafford of MGS Custom Bikes in California to design the fire truck’s cab-shaped tank based on my sketches.
Building the bike was draining, both physically and emotionally, because throughout the process I felt a heavy responsibility to the fallen firefighters. One of Al Ronaldson’s sons, also named Al, was a junior fireman with the NYFD at the time. He and Mikey had been friends for a long time, and Al arranged for us to visit his fire station. In addition to showing us equipment, he introduced us to his fellow firefighters. While we were there, a call came in, and we went out with the firefighters. Although it turned out to be a false alarm, following them on a call was a surreal experience, as Mikey and I both realized that every time the firefighters went out, there was no certainty they would return to their station. Just those few hours we spent talking with the firefighters and taking a few steps in their shoes increased the inspiration to nail the tribute bike.
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