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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Stacy Peralta's sun-drenched skateboarding documentary captures the vibe (and inflates the legend) of Santa Monica in the '70s.
May 1, 2002 | Skateboarding is something between sport and dance, and like both, if it's done well you don't need a story to appreciate it. The grace, the joy, the sheer guts are enough to communicate something about freedom, spontaneity, even youth.
All this is another way of saying that the best parts of "Dogtown and Z-Boys," a documentary by Stacy Peralta about skateboarding in the mid-'70s, are when we get to watch a bunch of scruffy teenagers roll along asphalt streets, concrete playgrounds and backyard pools. There's something so carefree about the way these kids move. Life for them is about surfing and skating, about hanging out with friends, about getting as low to the ground as possible and looking cool. Seemingly unspoiled by parents, jobs or thoughts of the future, these kids are having too much fun to even realize the cameras are watching -- or that someone is waiting to buy a piece of them.
"Dogtown and Z-Boys"
Directed by Stacy Peralta
Narrated by Sean Penn
But there are a lot of words and stories to "Dogtown and Z-Boys," and while some of them are genuinely fascinating, the majority of them never outweigh the pictures. That's not necessarily a good thing, even for a documentary with original footage as excellent as this. The film is mostly concerned with a pivotal group of skaters based in Dogtown, a seedy part of Santa Monica and Venice, Calif. Most of these kids were also surfers who hung out around Jeff Ho's Zephyr Surf Shop in the early '70s, and who, with new polyurethane wheels, flat waves and an endless supply of concrete, rescued skateboarding -- a dying pastime of the '60s -- and reintroduced it to a country of teenagers with a fluid style and an aggressive attitude.
The main point of the film is that these kids are responsible for skateboarding as we know it, a thesis that the movie backs up with archival footage, talking head interviews with the grown-up Z-Boys and lots and lots of photos. And Sean Penn, who narrates factoids with all the energy of the cafeteria worker reading the lunch menu for the school hot line. (The involvement of a celebrity like Penn -- a skater who grew up near Santa Monica -- might have helped get the film produced and distributed, but his muffled enthusiasm doesn't do much for the overall quality.)
The earliest parts of the movie set up the fierce, locals-only surf culture of Santa Monica, with its crumbling neighborhoods and a beach towered over by a decrepit abandoned amusement park, a potent image of the California dream chased to the edge of the world by the nightmare of the '70s. We don't meet specific skaters here as much as we meet skater types. Most of them were from rotten homes and lived to surf. When the waves were out they'd hang around Ho's surf shop, or grab skateboards and head for stretches of concrete -- including, notably, backyard swimming pools left empty by a long drought.
As the film explains, the kids started translating surfing moves into skateboard moves. Mostly, this meant that they made the same deep carves and cuts that surfer Larry Bertleman made in the water, got low to the ground and dragged their hands as if touching the inside of a wave. The style was inscrutable to the older skateboarders who rode rigid and upright, hanging their toes off the nose of their boards and riding wheelies. At a 1975 competition in Del Mar, the Z-Boys unleashed their radical, fuck-you street style. In that instant, the film posits, everything changed.
It feels as if every single person interviewed in the film remembers this competition. And their wistful memories give the film a bit of self-mythology -- some faded glory, some nostalgia. And, particularly from Jay Adams, the most naturally talented and financially unrewarded of the Z-Boys, there's also a whiff of melancholy, the kind that you hear from middle-aged men when they look back on a perfect moment of yesterday, a time that slipped past before anyone realized it would, a club that busted almost as soon as it came together, a second before commerce would taint everything.
That's because after the Del Mar competition, the Z-Boys split up as several other skate teams and companies poached the riders. The most talented among the skaters, including Stacy Peralta, Jay Adams and Tony Alva, helped create a skate revival that in turn made them into teenage celebrities.
