After the underground success of their first film, the super 8mm skateboard classic Fruit of the Vine (1999), Coan "Buddy" Nichols and Rick Charnoski founded the independent production company Six Stair, which operates under the same DIY ethics of the subculture that raised them: skateboarding and punk rock. Since 1999 Nichols and Charnoski have charted an unorthodox path, making a broad range of films that consistently go beyond tired tropes to illuminate deeper truths.
After catching the eye of renowned cinematographer Christopher Doyle for their specialty in Super 8mm and 16mm filmmaking, he tapped Charnoski and Nichols to shoot the dream sequences for Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park (2007). They have since worked with a wide range of respected artists and filmmakers including Cameron Crowe, Richard Serra, Peter Beard, Julian Schnabel, and NeckFace as well as on commercial projects for Vans, Nike, Converse, Mountain Dew and the Gold Effie Award winning Ouch! campaign for Tylenol.
Their documentary work includes Tent City (2003), which followed the notorious Anti Hero skate team throughout Australia; Pearl Jam‘s Vote for Change? (released 2008), capturing the band’s “Vote For Change” tour across America; the feature length Deathbowl to Downtown (2009) narrated by Chloe Sevigny as well as many other short films. Other subjects they have turned their attention and cameras to are Christo’s “Gates” project, fashion shows, music videos, surfing, airplane flight, and Jamaican dub pioneers.
They've shown their work worldwide at countless skate shops and hole-in-the wall venues, as well as the Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, The Graduate School of Architecture, at Columbia University, Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, the MU Art Foundation in The Netherlands, the Melbourne International Film Festival in Australia, MOCA Tucson and MoMA New York.
Currently they produce and direct the popular web series “Love Letters to Skateboarding” for Vans and are in development of their first narrative feature (Warm Blood) and continue to work on a variety of both independent and commercial projects out of their back alley studio in Hollywood, CA.