by Katharine Elizabeth Monahan Huntley
| “It was dirty. It was filthy. It was paradise.” — Skip Engblom Dogtown and Z-Boys is a bittersweet reflection on a seminal time for skateboarding, when artistry and skill created legends—predecessors to Tony Hawk and the video game aesthetic. Winner of the Sundance 2001 Documentary Directing Award and the 2002 IFP/West Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary (among other honors), the film chronicles Santa Monica pioneer skateboarding punks in the mid 70s with X-treme eloquence. Director and screenwriter Stacy Peralta, one of the original Z-Boys, relays the renegade religion in a particular geographic and historical context. Co-screenwriter Craig Stecyk’s spectacular photos and footage give the documentary its poetry in motion. What truly compels is the exuberant gang of juvenile daredevils known as the Zephyr Team. Anonymous and abandoned, these outcast hellions became high style outlaw skaters—banded together by Jeff Ho (Does Your Shaper Surf?) and Skip Engblom, partners in Jeff Ho’s Surfboards and Zephyr Productions. Endless practice and exhilarating performance led to competitions and the inevitable commercialization of the sport. Cash in hand, corporate America became the new parental influence for the Z-Boys. Ho and Engblom faded into the kind of obscurity where myths originate. As one of the focal points of the story, Peralta is not quite objective. Yet as a collagist he adroitly leads us through the creation of “the birth of the now” with a realistic take on what happened was . . . Set to the heat of the rock n’ roll beat, the audience is awestruck as these skateboarding zealots sideways slide in and out of empty pools and fly over the asphalt streets “where the debris meets the sea.” Youth is callow and fame does fleet and, for the most part, the Z-Boys put on the brakes and moved on from Dogtown. The poignant exception is Jay Adams—the Z-Boys’ “chosen one.” Celebrated in the film for his gift from the gods, twenty-five years later he is interviewed while incarcerated. A Peter Pan lost boy — foundering in memories of paradise lost. |
Postscript:
Two documentaries from Jim Boyd’s NoDance Film Festival (2003) expand the SoCal state of mind: Dana Brown’s most excellent surf doc Step into Liquid visually enlightens us to why: “Surfing is not a matter of life and death, it’s more important than that,” and Brad Bemis’ Venice: Lost and Found embellishes on Albert Kinney’s Venetian dream, Venice Beach, California—”a tidal pool, a distillation of the greater metropolis” that is Los Angeles. Featured interviews with Dennis Hopper, Gregory Hines, The Doors‘Ray Manzarek, cameo by Dogtown and Z-Boys‘ Skip Engblom.
Riding Giants: As he did with skate boarding in Dogtown and Z-Boys, Stacy Peralta places big wave riding in historical and cultural context — and examines its allure, best illuminated by Greg Noll, a surf forefather, with his romantic relationship with the surf siren: “I looked out; I think she winked at me.”