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Elder Skatesmen
Fast-paced and intoxicating, "Dogtown and Z-Boys" tells how a small group of maverick surfer boys — and one girl — reinvented skateboarding before anyone dreamed of the X-Games.
By JEAN TANG
Offoffoff.com
Sometimes a spoonful of taurine-charged irreverence is all you need to push through the webwork of a nerve-trodden week. So take some advice — if you need a fix, go check out "Dogtown & Z-Boys." Even if you're not interested in the history of extreme skateboarding per se, you're almost guaranteed to come away seeing the world through fresh eyes.
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| DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYS | Directed by: Stay Peralta.
Written by: Craig Stecyk and Stacy Peralta.
Featuring: Jay Adams, Tony Alva, Bob Biniak, Paul Constantineau, Shogo Kubo, Jim Muir, Peggy Oki, Stacy Peralta, Nathan Pratt, Wentzle Ruml, Allen Sarlo..
Narrator: Sean Penn.
Related links: Official site |
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This isn't the result of Sean Penn's earnest narration, nor is it thanks to a novel topic, fascinating though insider views on sport tend to be in their revelations about human resolve. Instead, it's the film's wholesale abandonment of talking suits and dramatization: "Dogtown" pioneers a form, cleverly packing a historical documentary with something unprecedented. Movement.
Fancy skateboarding — replete with tricks — emerged from more than one part of the country in the mid- to late-1970s, but according to the film, vertical skateboarding — the kind that utilizes half-pipes and eye-popping hairpin maneuvers — owes its origins to a maverick group of surfers from a dogged scrap of civilization in lower Santa Monica named accordingly — Dogtown. The inventors, teenage miscreants with a singular passion for surfing, spent every truant moment surfing boards custom-created by the owners of the Zephyr Surf Shop. Like the obstacle course of surf that these riders hoarded — outlined by the decrepit remains of a roller coaster park that had constituted the "Coney Island of the West" — the surfer's lives were dotted with structural catastrophe, but they buried themselves in their sport and bombarded intruders with the vengeance reserved for the society that had cast them as outsiders.
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| | "Dogtown" pioneers a form, cleverly packing a historical documentary with something unprecedented. Movement. |
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These pioneers — among them Tony Alva (often credited with the singlehanded invention of vertical skating), Jay Adams (teenage sensation), and Stacy Peralta (the maker of this documentary) — rode their surfboards smooth and low. But the Zephyr, or "Z-Boys" (including one woman, Peggy Oki), wanted to practice riding when the waves "weren't good."
By then, skateboarding had already come and gone. Manufacturers stopped putting out the boards, which were stiff and dangerous without shock absorption. So the Z-Boys got creative, sawing off roller skates for wheels. A 1972 innovation — polyurethane rollers — changed everything. The Z-Boys soon laid siege to the concrete waves inherent in empty pools and playgrounds, skating the way they surfed, so one served the other and vice versa. Eventually, the mavericks grabbed the spotlight and the attention of a skating community, placing at the national skating competition in Del Mar.
"Dogtown" has the usual elements of historical documentary — archival footage, interviews, narration, old stills, a satisfying dramatic arc. But like its characters and the spirit of the sport it highlights, it applies to these elements a soaring, derelict verve: 5-second interviews, jump cuts amounting to a kaleidoscope of media images, some of which run playfully backward. At one point, the film even stops dead in its tracks to deliver an excerpt from an episode of "Charlie's Angels," and at another, a Sean Penn narrative error is left in there like a piece of iceberg lettuce in a pretty mesclun.
The visual equivalent of a DJ scratch, the response of an MTV generation to a diet of good-for-you PBS, it's nice to know it's possible to find adrenaline at the movies.
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MAY 7, 2002
OFFOFFOFF.COM • THE GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE NEW YORK
Reader comments on Dogtown and Z-Boys:
hi from Jame, Apr 7, 2003
Z Boys from lola, Aug 11, 2004
HOTTNESS from dakota kollar, Jun 5, 2005
tricks from joey, Jun 12, 2005
film from martina...italian girl, Jul 17, 2005
dogtown from monika rozycka, Nov 2, 2006
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