Action sports filmmaker and co-creator of the X Games Paul Taublieb spent the early part of his career in San Diego as an investigative reporter.

I’m watching a guy on a high-performance dirt bike in full racer gear fly through the sky as fans in the stadium go wild.

It’s a scene out of Pay Dirt: The Story of Supercross. The film, which premiered at the prestigious Newport Beach Film Festival last October and traveled throughout California, introduces the little-known sport of supercross (think: motocross competitions in a stadium) to a bigger audience.

The guy who made this feature length movie that, before the year’s over will be shown in 500 theaters worldwide (it’s currently in Canada), is Paul Taublieb, filmmaker and co-creator of the X Games who I’m sitting across from via Zoom. His wife Susan Cooper serves as producer on many of their projects and is a partner in Taublieb Films, a multiple Emmy award-winning production company and creative agency that they run out of Malibu. Monster Energy and ESPN have relied on the agency for both short- and long-form, cinematic video storytelling. So has Ferrari.

Pay Dirt, like many of their films, was made specially for the big-screen experience. Some people’s exposure to supercross or big-wave surfing or snowboarding might be limited to that time, between bites at TGIF, they glanced at whatever competition was playing on the TV monitor.

But on the big screen, it’s a more visceral experience; it’s not something that’s on in the background. The viewer is dropped into this new world, at the center of the action. When a guy takes off on a massive wave – as Nic Von Rupp does in Taublieb’s 2023 big-wave documentary, Ground Swell: The Other Side of Fear, you feel like you’re right there in the lineup with him.

His films are designed to appeal to both a core and mainstream audience. To reach the mainstream audience, the thinking goes, you need to make your audience care about the characters and their journeys. That’s the job of story. And as someone who was a writer before he was a filmmaker, Taublieb knows how to tell a good story. His character-driven, highly cinematic approach is his point of difference as a filmmaker, he says, noting that these days most anyone can purchase the video-camera and equipment needed to make high-quality video clips, or edits. Not everyone, however, can tell a story that captures your attention for 90 minutes. Not everyone can fuse extreme sports content and programming with stories that resonate.

It seems to be working. This is what racer.com said of Pay Dirt:

“As someone who has spent over five decades immersed in the world of motorsports — and as a dedicated supercross fan since the mid-1970s — it’s rare for a film to genuinely stop me in my tracks. But Pay Dirt, Paul Taublieb’s latest cinematic triumph, did exactly that. This film isn’t just a documentary — it’s a deeply human exploration of the raw, unfiltered realities behind the intoxicating, adrenaline-fueled world of Monster Energy Supercross.” Monster provided financial support for the film.

The hero’s journey

A hero-protagonist who is challenged, or challenges himself, to take enormous risks and overcome enormous odds in order to reach new heights and achieve a larger objective—that’s usually the narrative.

Or, in Taublieb’s words: “The guys in the Old West who became the gunslingers, or in the Roman army days, the guy who said, ‘I want to be on the front line of this attack.’ There’s a certain group of people who have who had this DNA of wanting to push themselves to the limit, at high risk to themselves. They want the adrenaline. They’re willing to risk their lives. They want to see what their limits are, and that’s why they’re so fascinating.”

His exploration of big-wave surfing in 2023’s Ground Swell, which Taublieb produced on behalf of Monster Energy, is a good example. We see surfers try to tackle and tame ferocious, unforgiving mountains of water. We’re reminded that these heroic surfers charging freakish waves like Nazare in Portugal and Mavericks in Northern California are not machines or AI. They may in some sense of the word be godly, but make no mistake, the most insanely courageous surfers on the planet are, most importantly, human. And I think that’s Taublieb’s point: They have animal emotion – fear – pulsating through their bodies, but they also have a brain and reason to counter and help modulate and manager their fear. They concede their worries and doubts and yet somehow find the internal strength to double-down on their determination—that, as much as their physical prowess, is what makes them heroic.

This theme is immensely relatable even for non-surfers, because everyone feels fear and must stare it down on a daily basis. As Taublieb puts it, “How do you deal with fear, and how does it relate to the person who doesn’t surf 100-foot waves? How do you overcome fear in your personal life?”

Taublieb is aware of the need to find the right balance between action and story. If he gets too focused on the intricacies of the sport that he ignores the intricacies of the heart, his wife will check him. “One of her jobs is to come in and go, ‘I don’t know what’s going on here. I don’t care about these crazy tricks. Where’s the humanity? Where’s the story?’”

Which makes me wonder about Taublieb’s story.

Origin story

Born and raised in Long Island, NY, Paul Taublieb was expected by his parents to be an accountant or doctor. But something unexpected intervened to change the course of his life. When he was around 14, “my parents took me to see the surf film The Endless Summer.” He was already a strong swimmer but after seeing the 1975 movie, he knew he wanted to surf. His parents wondered what had happened to their boy.

And so, his path in life would take him not to medical or law school but to the hyper-adrenaline-ized world of extreme sports, AKA, action sports, and specifically, to Southern California, where he would earn a reputation as a successful promoter of action sports and as a serious filmmaker who has brought narrative-driven, documentary-style film making to the world of action sports.

Taublieb’s call to adventure began when he left the cold winters of New York behind for San Diego. Back in the ‘80s, he worked as a writer for Surfer magazine while he covered San Diego news for various outlets, including San Diego Magazine, for which he wrote an investigative piece about the cannabis industry.

The X Games

After a stint of surfing and reporting, Taublieb returned to New York, to determine the next chapter. By the early ‘90s, he’d produced some niche snowboarding videos for ESPN and knew the key executives at the network. Around that time, then-new ESPN 2 was seeking action sports content for the channel. They considered different ideas but nothing stuck. Finally, in a moment of revelation, Taublieb suggested ESPN create its own, branded extreme-sports event. “Bring the sports together in an Olympic-style event,” he advised ESPN’s Ron Semiao.

“And from there the X Games were born.”

The X Games, which debuted in 1995, weren’t just “born,” they were developed. Taublieb employed his writing and storytelling skills to create an 80-page “white paper” and a TV show called “Extreme Games 101” spelling out his vision for the Extreme Games, or what would become known as the X Games: skateboarding, BMX, skiing and snowboarding competitions held against a festival-style backdrop.

Taublieb would spend 16 years producing and promoting the X Games. In the late ‘90s, he was involved in “launching the first-ever pro snowboarding tour on ESPN” and later “producing a variety of content and events for ESPN.”  Surfing would later have a short stint with the X Games before it was dropped.

Freestyle motocross would also be added to the X Games, a move Taublieb was instrumental in making happen.

His fascination with freestyle motorcross began when he stumbled upon a video, Crusty Demons of Dirt, which he describes as an “action video about guys who were doing skateboarding-like things on their motorcycles in the desert.”

He brought it to ESPN’s attention.  

“I could take these motorcycle guys and find a way to make it into a competition,” he told them. At the time he was running a snowboard tour. He knew how things worked and, more important, he had the chutzpah to pull it off. Despite ESPN’s initial reluctance, Taublieb “ran a contest in Costa Mesa called the Freeride Moto X Championships and produced a TV show based on the contest for ESPN. It had very good ratings, proving that there was a much bigger market for what had previously been regarded as a fringe sport.

How big of a moment was this? It led ESPN to introduce the sport of freestyle motocross to the X Games, where it remains today.

Taublieb’s fascination with freestyle motocross would continue to grow over time, leading to his Netflix documentary, Unchained: The Untold Story of Freestyle Motocross, and 2018’s Blood Line: The Life and Times of Brian Deegan, about one of the best freestyle motocross riders in history.

It’s been one crazy ride for a kid from Long Island who grew up dreaming of the perfect wave and forged his own path in life, bucking cultural and family expectations. Surfing continues to play an important role in Paul Taublieb’s life. He has lived at, and surfed, Point Dume in Malibu for many years and looks forward to the annual surf trips he takes with family and friends to Indonesia and Mexico. Can you say, stoked!

70-year-old Taublieb dropping into a wave during a recent surf trip to the Telos Islands, in North Sumatra, Indonesia. 

One of the benefits of his job is that he gets to know some of the most talented and courageous athletes in the world. When I bring up Nathan Florence, the big-wave aficionado and brother of world champion/Olympian surfer John Florence, Taublieb takes off his film maker hat and puts on his surf fan hat: “I’ve met him and he’s actually quite intelligent, really a smart guy,” he says enthusiastically. “Nathan has said, ‘Look, how long can I risk my body to make a living?’ But he’s honest about it – ‘Putting myself online is how I’m making a living.’ And he’s very conscious of exactly what he’s doing.”

Despite living by the beach and having a passion for surfing, Taublieb is not your quintessential laid-back, SoCal dude. He has a certain intensity to him, a drive, which has not abated, even after many years in the California sun, and is likely a factor in his success. “I’m a New Yorker originally,” he reminds me, “and still retain some of those characteristics, I’m told.”

Awards

Taublieb has earned street credibility among hard-core competitors and fans. Trained to sniff out posers, they trust him to tell a story that isn’t contrived or inauthentic, but that they know to be real and true. Taublieb and his wife Susan have also earned the respect of their Hollywood filmmaking peers, evidenced by two Emmys that they’ve taken home: Hawaiian: The Legend of Eddie Aikau, which, as part of ESPN’s “30 by 30” series, won a 2014 Emmy Award for Best Sports Documentary, and Unchained: The Untold Story of Freestyle Motocross which was released on Netflix and won the 2017 Emmy Award for Outstanding Long Sports Documentary.

Ground Swell: The Other Side of Fear received the Prix du Jury award at the International Olympic Committee’s FICTS Beausoleil Cote d’Azur Sport Film Festival in Nice, France, and was also honored at the Dana Point Film Festival. 

Taublieb showed his once-skeptical parents that their son “the surfer” had managed to eke out a good living and achieve personal and professional success by following his bliss and doing it his way.

The future

But what will the future bring?

This summer, Taublieb tells me, he’ll have big news to announce. He can’t share many details now except to say that in July, he’ll be “producing a live, 90-minute show on a major streaming network that will feature a world record on a motorcycle. It’s going to be a major, major stunt with a major, major network,” he emphasizes.

He also shares, with some excitement in his voice, that his NASCAR-based documentary, Blink of an Eye: Triumph to Tragedy, the Greatest Sports Story Never Told, is being developed into a feature film. “We have a script and are in the process of attaching an A list director and at the same time reaching out to A list stars,” he says.

One thing that’s certain is that, at 70 years of age, Paul Taublieb is not slowing down. Consider this: While bringing this story together, I needed to fact-check a couple items. I tried emailing him but didn’t hear back.

Finally, I received a message:

“On location shooting.”

Editor’s Note:  Check out Taublieb Films and his IMDB page HERE.