Dog days
Stacy Peralta excavates skate history.

By A.C. Thompson

NO QUESTION: the Z-Boys, a 1970s-era crew of skateboarders who adapted slashing, style-laden surfer techniques to the asphalt, were seminal. Dodging the Man, the team – Tony Alva, Stacy Peralta, Jay Adams, and the rest – stole into empty backyard swimming pools, pushing off from the shallow end and flowing along the concrete curves. Taking skateboards where they'd never gone before, Alva envisioned and pulled off the frontside air. But it wasn't just about being first. Setting out only to kill time in Dogtown, their entropic seaside neighborhood, the teenage Z-Boys somehow managed to find transcendence, at least for a few moments. Really, they were accidental Buddhists.

So what do you do when corporate culture/the Hollywood machine announces its intent to make a feature flick about your life as a proto-skatepunk? If you're Peralta, now a 44-year-old documentary film director, you shoot back. "Because of a Spin magazine article in 1999, Hollywood bought the rights to the Dogtown story," Peralta says in an interview with me in San Francisco. "That was too precious a time in all of our lives. I didn't want to see that corrupted into some teenage, high school film, making us all into stick figures."

Hitting up the Vans shoe company for the Davidesque sum of $400,000, Peralta stitched together Dogtown and Z-Boys, a 90-minute preemptive strike now in theaters. Narrated by Sean Penn, the film is a generally dazzling excavation of a skate history unknown to the X-Games generation. It's a narrative Darwin would like: the Z-Boys (10 guys and one girl) started in the water, surfing the breaks off Venice Beach, moved to the land, skating when the waves were flat, and eventually became skate-obsessed, flying their skateboards into the sky and accelerating the art form's evolution exponentially.

This isn't Peralta's first stab at a skate documentary – actually, he pretty much invented the genre. Joining forces with a businessman named George Powell in 1979, he launched Powell Peralta skateboards, the most profitable skate company of the 1980s. In 1984, with VCRs ubiquitous and the cost of producing a video dropping, Peralta hit on the idea of making a skate flick showcasing his team. His baby, the 35-minute Bones Brigade Video Show was the first of its kind, and it was hugely popular. The guys at the skate shop I used to frequent during the 1980s played Bones Brigade endlessly, rewinding Tony Hawk's pool-riding scene over and over.

Print mags like Thrasher and Transworld offered snapshots of riders in action, but the movie was a revelation, giving skaters who lived outside of SoCal a chance to see how the deities really rode – how they prepared for a trick, how they landed it, how sketchily or smoothly or violently they moved. Other companies quickly followed with their own productions.

Today there's a small industry devoted solely to generating skate videos. Just Push Play, an online retailer of "action sports" movies, stocks more than 125 skate docs. There are how-to videos, skater-to-skater showdown videos, regionally focused videos, video magazines, tour videos ... even videos with cameos by big-boobed porn stars.

"I think the videos are helping skateboarding to evolve, but at same time it's kind of weird because there are skaters now who only skate on film," Peralta tells me. "They don't skate unless there's a camera around."

While companies once required their contract riders to show up at the big competitions, plenty of pro skaters these days never bother to enter contests, instead opting to interface with the public through TV.

Video didn't just reshape the skate landscape, it also rewrote the rules for all of the personal alt-sports. Take "freeriding," the biggest trend in mountain biking. Using heavily modified bikes, freeriders huck off cliffs, launch over jumps, plummet down steep rocky chutes, and generally feed the adrenaline monkey. The whole movement started with riders in Canada circulating videos of themselves doing very unwise things.

Likewise, freestyle motocross, a popular X-Games discipline, exists largely because a guy named Dana Nicholson began dragging a 16mm camera out to the desert and filming off-road motorcycle racers as they launched off massive dunes.

Most of the movies – regardless of sport – are sort of pornlike: no plot, bad music, lots of sweat-drenched physical activity, little dialogue. That's what makes Dogtown so exceptional and so cool – it's not just a biggest-tricks compendium, it's a skate movie anybody can dig, a story of adolescent anarchists making art in the rubble of their environment. Hitting only a couple hagiographic low points, Peralta watches some of them grow up to be real estate brokers, sees other get engulfed by drug-fueled chaos, and finds a few are still skating.

Dogtown refers to a sketchy beachfront neighborhood – made up of parts of Venice and south Santa Monica – where white lumpen types lived next door to Chicano families in slummy apartments. It was the place where a Chinese American guy named Jeff Ho established the Zephyr surf and skate shop, giving the Z-Boys a crash pad and a moniker. Where other skaters and surfers lived like squeaky-clean prepsters, the Dogtown posse reflected their hood-rat roots. Outsiders who surfed their spots – which, fittingly, were dangerous and full of industrial debris – were likely find their cars dismantled or have their teeth punched in.

By 1976 skateboarding was at the apex of one of its generational cycles. Interest was huge, boards were selling in massive quantities, Hollywood was churning out cheesy skate-themed features, the talking heads from ABC's Wide World of Sports were covering skate competitions instead of football – and for a couple years, before the sport tanked, the Dogtowners were minor celebs. But before that, before there was any money or fame in it, there was pure, unfiltered experience. "We lived it," recounts Alva, who at 44 still skates daily. "I use the Japanese word satori, the balance between mind and body, where you're not really thinking about it – you're just flowing, you're just grooving.

"Every day we pushed a little bit harder. Could we do frontside kickturns? OK, yeah, we could do that. Could we grind? Grinding on two-, three-inch-wide trucks? That was crazy."

'Dogtown and Z-Boys' opens Fri/3 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.