LORDS OF DOGTOWN was on the other day and it brought with it
nostalgia of my misspent youth, my childhood as a skate punk in Fells Point,
with leather gloves with the fingers cut off and my Tony Hawk pro board, the 3rd
he did, the one with a hawk face and a claw talon thing around it and on the
top the Powell Peralta skull which I proudly displayed with clear griptape.
The board was fat and shaped like a fish with a slight nose and big fat wheels
and trucks. I watched movies like H-Street’s SHACKLE ME NOT and Hollywood
flicks like GLEAMING THE CUBE (one of the reasons I moved to California) and
THRASHIN' but the movie that made the most impact on me as a young skate punk
with my rat tail and flipped bang halfway over my right eye was Powell Peralta’s all-time legendary skate
flick THE SEARCH FOR ANIMAL CHIN. It combined the best skateboarding of legends
of the extreme sports world (Steve Caballero, about whom the maneuver Half-Cab
and the Vans Cab and Half-Cab shoes are named; Mike McGill, who invented the
McTwist; and a young, awkward-looking lanky little geek named Tony Hawk) with a
loose story of searching for a legendary skater. It starts with Stacy Peralta,
a skate legend himself, mocking the corporate attitude assailing skateboarding
(typified by supermarket brands like Nash). Then these legends charge down the
streets of San Francisco in search of the soulful sage Animal Chin, go to a
backyard punk party where they skate a small ramp, then a party where RodneyMullen (who invented practically every flip and street trick by himself)
charges it, Skip Engblom (the owner of the Zephyr shop who founded the Z-Boyz)
is the door man and a punk band incites rebellion. The film culminates in a
monster double halfpipe with a portal between the pipes, the true culmination
of the dreams and fantasies of every human being who had ever ridden a board
for fun before and after (I still haven’t seen a halfpipe half as mind-blowing
and just plain cool as that one). Even at this point in my lilfe, with my knowledge of the
industry and appreciation for mainstream skating much higher, the only legit
skate flick I own is a DVD of SEARCH FOR ANIMAL CHIN I found at a small skate shop
in Webster, FL, just outside Pensacola.
So anyway, yeah, LORDS OF DOGTOWN, based on the doc DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYZ, the greatest movie that
nobody paid much attention to. Catherine Hardwicke-directed but more like THIRTEEN than
that rotten TWILIGHT. Heath Ledger in a performance with enough hints at The
Joker to at least show where that character was first born. Emile Hirsch at the
height of his popularity. Nikki Reed. Michael Angarano. Sophia Vergara before
MODERN FAMILY. Victor Rasuk before CHE, ER, and HOW TO MAKE IT IN AMERICA, Shea
Wigham before BOARDWALK EMPIRE, Rebecca de Mornay, even Jeremy Renner’s in this
fuckin’ movie (in a blink and you'll miss him role as Jay Adams' manager). And in an interesting
nod, Cheyne Magnusson, son of old-school skate legend and H-Street founder Tony Magnusson, plays one
of the Z-Boyz. And all the original Z-Boyz get cameo roles.
But on top of the top-caliber talent and the depiction of
possibly the coolest lost cause in skate history, Jay Adams, this movie hits me
because it was Peralta’s documentary DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYZ which I first watched
living as a semi-flop in San Diego on the dusk of my 2nd great
stint as a SoCal skater/surfer kid, during a summer when my brother and I,
living like Sweet Jane in TRUCKIN’, took some time out of every day to skate in
a small strip mall next to the local power plant. Later it served as
inspiration to get out and surf everyday as I prepared to leave the beach
(little did I know I would return to it in a year or so, current SoCal stint #3). It epitomized
everything I’d always loved about these sports – the expression inherent in this individualized athletic endeavor, in general
the idea of individual performers instead of a team of parts and counterparts,
the idea that skateboarding and surfing weren’t just things you did but in fact
they were your whole lifestyle, they were part of who you were - this rang truest in my chest. The Z-Boyz grew
up in the last “seaside slums” and for a lot of them this little skateboarding
thing was rebellion as much as simply an activity they liked to do surrounded by
people they liked to be surrounded by. They broke into houses to ride their
empty pools. They weren't skating for anybody but themselves at first and unknowingly started a revolution. These punk kids totally turned the world of skateboarding on its
fucking head – the precedent and the apotheosis of punk rock and for the first
time uniting 2 things which will forever be entwined, punk music with extreme
sports. Which leads to Peralta’s other documentary NO ROOM FOR ROCKSTARS (technically he just produced, didn't direct) about
the Warped Tour. But right now let’s focus on Peralta, Z-Boyz, and
skateboarding.
The Z-Boyz epitomized the anger of the youth generation in
the wake of the flakey “peace and love” movements that had left behind traces
of drug-addled parents who refused to parent and a general disillusionment from
society that had seen the summer of love metamorphose into a winter of crystal meth. For all these reasons DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYZ is possibly one of
the best cultural documentaries of all time, if not without a question from the last
decade. It detailed a revolution, the birth of a new sport, the new music and art coming out then and a version of America after the wave of the 60's had crashed and rolled back.
And appropriately Stacey Peralta was one of the Z-Boyz. He
was kinda the geek, the straight-laced worker counter to Tony Alva’s
attitude-fueled egotist and Jay Adams’ brooding athletic madman genius. In
LORDS OF DOGTOWN they show Adams making fun of Peralta when he says he’s
leaving G&S to start his own company. That company he founded with George
Powell, creating Powell Peralta, at one point the top skate company in the
world and still considered by most with an appreciation of the old-school as
the most hallowed. And Peralta hand-picked his team of Hawk and Caballero and
McGill and Mullen and Lance Mountain and Tommy Guerrero and Mike Vallely and plenty
of others who paved the way for Eric Koston and Danny Way (later on a BONES BRIGADE) and Ryan Sheckler and
Shawn White – hell, in some ways they paved the way for all pro boardsports
kids and certainly for what extreme videos can be.
While running Powell Peralta, Stacey started experimenting
with videography like C.R. Stecyk and Glen E. Friedmann had been doing when Stacey was a Z-Boy coming
up. He came up with the idea for the Bones Brigade videos, producing 8 in the
80’s including such groundbreaking sk8 flicks as FUTURE PRIMITIVE, PUBLIC
DOMAIN, BAN THIS (a direct comment on the fact that in the 80’s bald-headed
squares in bad polyester suits were actually trying to get skateboarding BANNED
from the streets of America) and PROPAGANDA, as well as of course ANIMAL CHIN.
Stacey, ever the worker, had found a new love and left
Powell in 1992 to become a TV producer and director, trading his board for a
camera and honing his story-telling and production skills.
In the 2000’s, equipped with this new knowledge and skillset, he got
together with all the old Z-Boyz, scrounged together a bunch of old footage and
photos taken by SoCal luminary photogs C.R. Stecyk and Glen E. Friedmann, threw in a couple other old
school skaters for good measure and, like the hero returning to the woods to
bestow a gift upon his ignorant world, he delivered DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYZ. He used
the popularity and paycheck from this to make RIDING GIANTS, a movie about the
evolution of big-wave surfing which turned a lot of heads and was good but
nowhere near the Dogtown movie. Maybe it’s because he surfed but was never a
big wave surfer (and in LORDS OF DOGTOWN it’s hinted that he was never that good
a surfer no matter what size waves) and as such his heart wasn’t as in it. He
liked the lifestyle, maybe even loved it but it wasn’t in his bloodstream like
skating. His third doc in what Peralta was touting as his SoCal trilogy was CRIPS AND BLOODS: MADE IN AMERICA an eye-opening doc about the evolution of Los
Angeles’ deadly street gangs but if his heart wasn’t in RIDING GIANTS, I don’t
know what the fuck was in MADE IN AMERICA and it showed. Did any of you ever
hear of this flick? EXACTLY.
I saw it premiere downtown during the L.A. Film Festival
surrounded by members of L.A. wealthy, influential, and inner city communities
and even they were all a little underwhelmed by his over-thought, overly
methodical attempt to catalog and explain a phenomenon with which he had very
little personal experience. Still worth a view but after I saw it, I gotta
admit I was a little worried that Peralta’s film days were over.
And then this year he releases BONES BRIGADE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, premiering at Sundance to critical applause, even from
non-skaters, even from people who know Tony Hawk as that guy on those video
games and couldn’t tell a McTwist from a kickflip. This is about the birth of
what has come to be one of the most omnipresent athletic toys of our generation’s
culture, the skateboard.
I’ll always remember the day I was driving around the rich
homes of Seminary Overlook in Baltimore County and saw two kids playing in a
cul-de-sac. This is the typical Baltimore suburban vision. But what was
different, what made me smile ear to ear was the fact that the two kids weren’t
passing around a lacrosse ball. They were skateboarding off a shitty little
plastic ramp. And they looked like they’d been doing it for hours. And it made
me think back to my days getting heckled by blue-bloods and prepsters for
skatin’ around town with one earring in my left ear. To see that it was
changing, to see that society was finally learning that there’s something out
there besides team sports playing with balls and rules and old men trying to make you into what they never were, running around in chalked or taped shapes – to see us moving away from that for the first time in Western athletic history was
revolution manifested through sport.
And to think that one of the original revolutionaries
himself – in fact by many accounts THE revolutionary if you look at all the
impact he and his teams had on skateboarding in particular and extreme sports
in general – not only videotaped most of it but had the ability and the
prescience to wind brilliantly-drawn tales of that revolution unfolding – it’s
simply astonishing. I can’t think of a single other athlete to do anything even
remotely like this. And maybe that’s the real essence – because he’s like
nobody else. Because these athletes aren’t like the ones who came before. They’re
something completely new. They’re the future. Even these guys in the video, they were so ahead of everybody else that they're still the future. Now.
You like that? Yeah you did. Make sure to check your local listings to see if BONES BRIGADE's gonna be coming through your town anytime soon. Hell, it'll be better than re-watching KONY again, right?
- Ryan
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