Knoxville's Self-Shoot Stunt Birthed Jackass
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- Jeff Tremaine first met Johnny Knoxville in 1995 on the set of Spike Jonze's music video "California" for the band Wax, while Tremaine was editor of skateboarding magazine "Big Brother."
- Johnny Knoxville pitched a 1997 article to "Big Brother" in which he'd test self-defense equipment on himself — pepper spray, stun gun, taser darts, and a bulletproof vest self-shooting — in a Hunter S. Thompson style.
- Tremaine greenlit the piece but got cold feet about the gun, instructing cameraman Dimitry Elyashkevich to skip the shooting but hand Knoxville the camera to film himself; Elyashkevich later became a Jackass producer and cinematographer.
- Big Brother was owned by porn publisher Larry Flynt at the time, so Tremaine gave Knoxville a stack of Flynt's porn magazines to stuff inside the cheap bulletproof vest as padding — the magazines fell out mid-stunt, with Knoxville pointing the gun at the camera while scrambling to retrieve them.
- Tremaine was so struck by the returned footage — which he described as reading "like the start of a found-footage snuff film" — that he called Spike Jonze and said, "I think we can make a TV show."
- Jonze, Tremaine, and Knoxville pitched "Jackass" as an eight-episode season to MTV, but the network never aired the original gunshot footage.
- "Jackass: Best and Last," the franchise's concluding film, includes the previously unseen origin footage with heightened onscreen warnings, drawing from the 30-year "Jackass" archive.
Why it matters: The origin footage MTV refused to air for two decades is now canonized in 'Jackass: Best and Last' with onscreen warnings that exceed what previous Jackass content required — the franchise's final film surfaces the 1997 amateur stunt, complete with porn-mag padding, that Tremaine credits as 100-percent born out of Jonze's skateboarding-video influence.
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