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'Skate ninja' taking Denver skills to Hollywood

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Contributed by: Eric J. Lubbers/YourHub.com on 11/13/2007

He's a Christian school alum, L.A.-via-Loveland-via-Texas transplant, stunt double for Orlando Bloom and more than a million people have watched him turn Denver landmarks into the unlikeliest stunt props in skateboard history.

Twenty-four-year-old William Spencer is living the kind of life that sounds like a teenager's fantasy.

"He's the nicest guy you'll ever meet, for real," said Tony Mellick, the owner of the Denver Shop, 2323 E. Evans Ave., and filmmaker behind the now Internet-famous video William Spencer Hollarado!, which highlights some of the skate/stunt hybrid tricks that Spencer has been crafting for years.

"He doesn't really know how it's happening to him, but he deserves it," he said.

Click here to watch William Spencer in action.

Spencer, now living in L.A., is back in Colorado filming a follow-up for the Hollarado video and just returned from Japan, where he did stunt work for a commercial starring Bloom and recently wrapped up a short film/commercial for Mountain Dew.
Spencer's part in the Hollarado film was posted on YouTube in December 2006, and has since received 820,000 hits, not counting the countless reposts on other sites.

In the video, Spencer grinds down the I-beam statue at the Denver Art Museum, jumps over the windows on the incline of the Colorado History Museum and, in the most don't-try-this-at-home moment of the shoot, does a running front flip from the top of the stairs at Civic Center Park onto a waiting skateboard and rides away unharmed.

According to Mellick, tricks like that don't' just happen.

"It took him about a year to pull that one off," Mellick said. "He'd, you know, break his board, land on his ankle a dozen times before he got it right."

"This ain't the Olympics. We're just trying to have fun."

-William Spencer

Since the success of the video, "It's gotten weird," Spencer said.

Weird, of course, is relative. Spencer has been using the film as a stunt reel in Hollywood and it has netted him the aforementioned gigs, not to mention stuntwork at Magic Mountain in L.A., being approached, along with skate legend Rodney Mullen, by Cirque du Soleiel, and he is currently casting and planning a pilot for MTV to be based in Colorado.

The Colorado scene, he says, is "a breeding ground for creativity."

"There are so many good people in the state and you can go skating with all the different crews and everyone is totally rad," he said. "They challenge each other and they really do their own things."

"This ain't the Olympics. We're just trying to have fun."

Mellick, the man behind the camera on the video, couldn't be happier for Spencer.

"He's doing things that have never been done on a skateboard before. And he's taking things to the next level

When he was growing up, his brother Shad, who has skated for the Denver Shop team for years, provided some of the inspiration for his one-of-a-kind style.

"Shad used to do flips and back handsprings in the backyard and was just a super-talented gymnast and I just thought 'That's awesome," Spencer said. "But after Shad hurt his wrist skating and couldn't do those things anymore, I figured I'd learn how to do it now."

He joined an acrosports team at Campion in high school to go along with his black belt in Wado/Kai karate, all of which he incorporates into his stunt work and skateboarding.

"And my parents made us water ski when were were, like, 5," he said.

While Spencer is more inclined toward his stuntwork, he never wants to stop skateboarding, he said.

"I'd love to do both. I'm more inclined to stunts, but stunts are easier than skateboarding. I can't get enough of the challenge. Doing a mini-tramp over a car is fun, but it's pretty simple. When you land a trick for the first time it's like 'Wow, that was really hard.'"

To see more videos from The Denver Shop, including more from William Spencer, check out http://www.youtube.com/user/thedenvershop.

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