April
26, 2002 | Since I've never been a skateboarder -- and I've always
been grateful that my teen-age son isn't one, either -- I foolishly assumed
that Dogtown and Z-Boys wouldn't appeal to me.
But
after viewing Stacy Peralta's aggressively and arrestingly spirited
film, winner of the Audience Award at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival,
I'm reminded once again that some of the finest documentaries are those
that can bring you to unfamiliar worlds, or immerse you in exotic subcultures,
and enable you to share the enthusiasm of a filmmaker who's eager to
serve as your tour guide.
In
this case, Peralta is singularly well suited for the tour-guide job
because he's actually one of the original "Z-Boys," street-smart
wheeler-dealers known collectively as the Zephyr Skating Team. Back
in the halcyon days of the early 1970s, in a rundown beach neighborhood
known as Dogtown on the fringes of Santa Monica and Venice, these working-class
teens and twentysomethings established their own swaggering-outlaw approach
to surfing, gang-banging and graffiti-spraying. When they sampled the
then-dormant skateboarding craze, they did it on their own terms, in
their own in-your-face style. Which, amazingly, became the predominant
style for skateboarding throughout the known universe.
Looking
back with equal measures of amazement, romanticism and hard-edged melancholy,
Peralta weaves a crazy-quilt tapestry of talking-heads interviews (with
himself and many others), scratchy home movies, TV-news footage, mainstream
and niche-audience reportage -- and lots and lots of flashy-trashy segues.
The
overall style might best be described as cocksure grunge, with skittish
music-video shock cuts and a brazenly up-yours attitude. (Try to imagine
an entire movie that looks like the opening credits of Seven,
and sounds like the playlist for a '70s-skewing golden-oldies radio
station.) Sean Penn serves as off-screen narrator, and while he's plainly
intrigued by the subject, he just as plainly doesn't feel the need to
do much more than read his script. At one point, he noisily clears his
throat in the middle of a sentence, then presses on. In a different
kind of movie, that would be unforgivably sloppy. Here, however, it's
all of a piece with Peralta's anything-goes approach.
Peralta,
who has directed several other film and TV documentaries, offers a history
lesson in which shards of imagery and testimony collide and coalesce
with what only seems like randomness. Pay attention, and you'll easily
grasp what's important: The rise and fall of the Zephyr Production Surf
Shop where the skaters came together; the 1970s water shortage responsible
for all the empty pools where the Z-Boys mastered their vertical swerves
and curves; the 1975 skateboard championship where the Z-Boys set new
standards with their riffing, low-slung style; the sudden fame and fortune
achieved by some skaters, the obscurity and self-destruction endured
by others.
Co-written
by veteran photojournalist Craig Stecyk, one of the first to document
and celebrate the exploits of the Z-Boys, Dogtown was financed
by Vans, Inc., manufacturer of shoes favored by champion skateboarders.
But don't expect a lot of product placement, or even much image-conscious
revisionism. The movie makes it very clear that the Z-Boys -- along with
Peggy Oki, the only Z-Girl -- were bad boys. That's what made them, and
continues to make them, so fascinating.