X-Dance Film Festival Opens

The X-Dance Film Festival features 44 films from over 200 entries this year starring some of the biggest names in action sports. Travis Pastrana's "199 Lives" is a biographical story on the motocross star. "Across the Grain" features Tara Dakides and her rollercoaster of a ride through the world of snowboarding. Tony Hawk also has a film that will be shown.

The festival has gotten so big, it had to move from Park City to Salt Lake City. It runs from January 19-23 at the Off-Broadway Theater. Visit the X-Dance site.

Don’t Look Down - Shaun White Documentary Opens at Mountainfilm

It even started like a movie.

Brothers Charlie and Willie Ebersol stood in a pricey souvenir store in Turino, Italy, as Willie contemplated buying “an overpriced Turino jacket,” as Charlie tells it, in the midst of the 2006 Winter Olympics. “Just buy it,” Charlie told him, as a woman standing nearby chimed in.

“I’m buying it,” she said. “My son just won the gold medal!”

Within 24 hours, the two Ebersols, whose father, Dick, is chairman of NBC Universal Sports and Olympics, were forging their now-epic friendship with the then-19-year-old Olympic gold medalist Shaun White (and his older brother, Jesse, a designer for Burton) in a back row of one of the two NBC jets that travel daily between New York City and the Olympics. Complete article here.