Production Notes
Dogtown was a state of mind, but in the first instance it was place, a rundown urban beach neighborhood, with a legacy of outlaw surfing. It bred aggressive, territorial competitors with a home-grown street-smart sense of style.
Dogtown was the name given by its denizens to a section of Santa Monica and Venice that by the early 1970s lay almost in ruins, a gang-infested "seaside slum" that was an early Mecca for pioneers in the fields of custom car design, low-rider ostentation, graffiti, and the art and science of eye-gouging surfboard design.
"I spent a portion of my life living on the Old Lick Pier at the address of 1 Navy Street," Dogtowner Craig Stecyk wrote recently. " This was the literal border between Santa Monica's Ocean Park district and Venice. On the north side of the pier the S. M. P. D. was empowered, while on the south side, the Los Angeles Police Department enforced the laws of the land. In the middle, we dwelled in a twilight netherworld of jurisdictional ambiguity. There was no law other than the golden rule of doing it first, doing it harder, and doing it better. "
Dogtown and Z-Boys director Stacy Peralta grew up in Santa Monica in the 1960s: "Main Street" at that time was basically boarded up. I worked at this place called the Old Venice Noodle Company, on Main Street, which was one of the first glimmers of gentrification. At the end of the night when we got done busing tables we'd go out and skate on the street, and we'd go by barred up place after barred up place. It was like a Ghost town. "
Through an artful assemblage of vintage still photographs and movies, augmented with intense first person testimonies by the Z-Boys as they are today, edging toward middle-age, founding-Zephyr team member Stacy Peralta, now a respected TV director and screenwriter, tells a riveting story, documenting the peculiar set of circumstances that came together to nurture the Z-Boys and enable their continuing impact upon the culture:
Apart from Dogtown itself, central elements of the story include:
A neighborhood hangout, the Jeff Ho & Zephyr Productions Surf Shop, whose owners, Skip Engblom, Jeff Ho, and Craig Stecyk, created a refuge of acceptance ---part clubhouse, part foster home--- for a group of gifted kids with troubled histories and attitude to burn. Engblom later told Michael Brooke, author of The Concrete Wave: The History of Skateboarding (Warwick, 1999), that he assembled the team for maximum dramatic impact, as if he was casting a movie: "I had Stacy as the serious skater, Tony as moody, Shogo being Zen-like and Nathan Pratt as geeky. " Membership of the Zephyr team, Peralta recalls, "was like joining the Mafia. You were a made man in the neighborhood. "
A sense of "outlaw" style, formalized by artists like Ho and Stecyk, that was strongly influenced by the heady multi-cultural stew in the area, a working-class enclave in which Latino, African-American and Asian influences squeezed out the blonde-god surfer ethos. The innovative Zephyr surfboard designs borrowed their motifs (like the famous "Dogtown cross") from the street art that surrounded them, becoming, Engblom says, "a portrait of an environment. "
A rundown municipal pier at Pacific Ocean Park, whose bent pilings attracted young surfers with no other venue to call their own, and forced them to create a defensive, dodging, danger-courting new style of surfing---and to adopt a pugnacious territorial attitude that they carried with them into the well-mannered world of competitive skateboarding.
The enormous impact of a single idolized surfer, Hawaiian superstar Larry Bertelman. The Z-Boys saw Bertelman in early surf movies and quickly adapted his signature moves, as they surfed waves of asphalt on their scratch skateboards. The ideal image of the low, pivotal style pioneered in Dogtown was "Larry Bertelman on concrete. "
The invention in 1972 of polyurethane wheels for skateboards, replacing the clumsy early clay models. These wheels led to the creation of skateboards fast and maneuverable enough for the surfing-influenced moves the Z-Boys were attempting.
The construction of banked concrete playgrounds at new five LA-area schools in the late 1960s. The magnetic attraction of their smooth slopping flesh-shredding hills helped transform skateboarding from an occasional after-hours pastime for die-hard surfers into an obsessive pursuit of athletic perfection in its own right.
A drought in the mid-1970s that left hundreds of LA-area swimming pools bone dry. Skateboarders had tried unsuccessfully to ride pools in the sixties, but it was the combination of the urethane wheel, new larger skateboards, and the sudden availability of hundreds of these curvy high-walled spaces which allowed Z-Boys like Tony Alva to systematically develop the modern vertical or "vert" style of skating.
An epochal skateboarded competition, The Bahne-Cadillac Skateboard Championship, at Del Mar, CA, in 1975, when the Z-Boys made their public debut and set the conservative skateboarding establishment on its ear. "Skateboarding from that moment exploded," Peralta recalls, "and became what it is today. It was also a defining moment personally, because from there the team split up and we all went off on our own career runs. "
And last but not least, a visionary artist and photojournalist named Craig Stecyk, who had been chronicling the surf scene for years and who understood at a glance what the Z-Boys were trying to pull off. For him, these rowdy kids "took the ruins of the twentieth century and made art out of it. " His celebrations of their exploits, in kinetic words and published in SkateBoarder magazine, in a series of pieces that became legendary as "the Dogtown articles," infected the imaginations of wild boys the world over.
The original Z-Boys, especially Jay Adams, Tony Alva and Stacy Peralta, have exerted a defining influence upon the development of skateboarding. Alva formed a company to market signature brands of skateboard products when he was just 19-years-old, and Peralta, as a partner in the industry-dominating Powell-Peralta skateboard company in the 1980s, assembled the legendary Bones Brigade skate team. By promoting the stars he signed to the team (latter-day legends like Tony Hawk, Steve Cabellero, Lance Mountain, and Rodney Mullen) in a series of visually innovative promotional videos, Peralta helped create the way for the next wave of skateboard fever.
Dogtown and Z-Boys is a propulsive and informative chronicle of a definitive movement in modern popular culture. It is also a human story with a sometimes somber subtext. The Z-Boys are interviewed, their images are poignantly juxtaposed with freewheeling snippets of their exuberant younger selves. Some of the Z-Boys, like the hugely gifted Jay Adams, succumbed to the lure of the party-all-the-time lifestyle before they could fully exploit the opportunities their new fame had to offer
The influence of Dogtown has extended far beyond a new repertoire of moves on the boards, the so-called "concrete wave" approach to duplicating surfing maneuvers on dry land. Dogtown was (and is) a style, a look, a lifestyle, an attitude, a nexus of unexpected links between the skating world and other areas of youth culture.
"When Jay Adams emerged on the punk/skate scene," writes photojournalist Glen E. Friedman, "he brought with him his own style, one influenced by the Mexican lowriders, or cholos. Jay would turn up at parties and punk rock shows in full vato gear, complete with a blue bandanna around his head, khaki pants, a white T-shirt, and flannels. " As Friedman told SPIN magazine's G. Beato in 1999, the fuck-off-and-die attitude of the skaters was as electrifying to their young fans as their pioneering airborne maneuvers: "What the Sex Pistols started doing in 1976, Jay Adams and Tony Alva were doing a year earlier. "
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
In his teens, Stacy Peralta spent most of his time riding pools, and winning prizes, as one of the original Z-Boys of Dogtown, USA. He spun off his fame as a world-class skateboarder to become one of the leading entrepreneurs in the field he had helped to create, at the innovative Powell Peralta company. And on the strength of the bold promotional videos he made there with homeboy Craig Stecyk he moved on to a successful decade as a writer and director in network and cable in television.
But Peralta had always hoped that at some point he might be able to bring the two phases of his professional life together again. "The goal all along has been to write and direct my own projects," he says, "and in the back of my mind there was always the thought that someday I would do a movie about Dogtown, hopefully with Craig. "
And then in March, 1999, SPIN magazine published an article by G. Beato entitled "The Lords of Dogtown," which re-animated a chapter of pop culture history that had been lying dormant for years. Suddenly, Dowgtown was hot. With its vivid portraits of the wild Z-Boys the story struck many in Hollywood as natural movie material. "As soon as the SPIN article broke," Peralta says, "people who knew me in the business started to call. I got calls from five studios within a week wanting to buy the life rights to my story and the stories of the other guys. And I was thinking, 'How did this happen?'"
At just about the same time, producer Agi Orsi, who was already at work on a feature project about snowboarding, happened to be in the office with one of these sharp-eyed execs when the SPIN article came across his desk. Orsi had been introduced to Peralta at a party only a few weeks earlier, "so before I had even read the article I said, 'I'm sure it mentions Stacy Peralta. I know that guy. ' The executive was immediately intrigued, so I got Stacy on the phone and said, 'Do you want to do something?'"
Although he had been pondering a Dogtown film for years, Peralta found his feelings shifting as the dream edged closer to reality: "I immediately had a bad taste in my mouth at the thought of Hollywood doing a fictional tale about this. I just didn't think they would ever handle it properly. This was a touchstone to all of our lives. It was a very real moment. And the older you get the more real it feels, because you realize you don't get many moments in life that are that pure. And then it just dawned on me while I was hiking one day: 'Wait a minute, we can do the documentary. Let them do the fictional version. ' So I literally ran home and banged out a treatment. And then I called Craig and Agi and said 'Forget these guys. '"
Orsi was familiar with the world of extreme sports, having produced two award-winning documentaries about kayaking in remote locales, Bashkaus: Hard Labor in Siberia and Curtain of Ice. "I didn't know anything about Dogtown," she admits, "but when I sat down and read the SPIN article I thought, 'This is perfect. ' What I was attracted to wasn't so much skateboarding as a sport but the art and the culture of the scene, what Craig added to it and celebrated in his articles. In fact when we had our first production meeting, with Stacy and Craig and Peter Pilafian, the Director of Photography, what we were all excited about the culture that grew out of Dogtown, in terms of music and art and the extreme sports that we see today. That was all really created by Craig and Stacy when they did their Bones Brigade videos at Powell Peralta. We were determined to make a film that respected that tradition. "
Determined to find an off-Hollywood source of financing for the project, Orsi approached Jay Wilson, Vice President of Global Marketing for Vans, Inc. , Southern California's global lifestyle, shoe and aparell company. Vans canvas deck shoes had been fixtures on the surfing and skateboard scenes since the 1960s. According to Wilson, the secret of their popularity was a specially formulated patented form of rubber: "They were made of a secret rubber compound in a waffle pattern that made them really sticky. In fact you used to take them out of the box and the inside wrapping paper would stick to the bottom of the shoes. "
A manufacturing and retail company that had sixty outlets in the Los Angeles area by the early 1970s, Vans also had an early supportive connection with the Zephyr Shop skateboard team. "I was the first skater ever to get paid to endorse shoes," Peralta says, "and it just so happened that Vans was the company that paid me. They were also the first shoe company to ever pay attention to skateboards. They took a liking to us when no one else gave us any respect. Once a month we'd get free shoes from the store in Santa Monica. And they've stayed authentic ever since, staging events like the VANS Warped Tour and the VANS Triple Crown Series that aren't purely business decisions. "
Jay Wilson quickly became an enthusiastic supporter of the project. "Vans was the shoe the Z-Boys wore," he says, "so we just had to make this film with Stacy and Craig. The Dogtown story had to be told. " Wilson saw Dogtown and Z-Boys through to completion as the film's Executive Producer.
The basic facts of the Dogtown story were already right there, present in the filmmakers' vivid memories. The only real question, at the outset, was how to organize the presentation of the story to make it crystal clear to outsiders, deploying the wealth of visual material that quickly became available. They decided to structure the movie not so much as a chronological account but as an epoints," key events or historical xplanation on film of the Z-Boys phenomenon. They organized it around a series of "turning developments that, taken together, had made the innovations of Dogtown possible.
"Some things were obvious," Peralta recalls. "One was the drought that hit California in the 1970s, which led to the pool-riding explosion. Surfing was a big part of what we did and Larry Bertelman had a huge impact. We also knew that there was a contest at Del Mar in 1975 which was not only a turning point for us, but a defining moment for the sport itself. And then we said, 'We have to follow some of these guys in their career movements after Del Mar, and we have to talk about the Dogtown articles in SkateBoarder magazine, because Craig was such a heavy influence. ' So that was terrain we knew had to cover.
"But in order to really explain how all that stuff happened we also had to go deeper. We had to evoke this run down beach community we all came from and that shaped our attitudes. We had to make it clear that it all revolved around this little shop, the Jeff Ho & Zephyr Productions Surf Shop, where Skip Engblom and Jeff Ho and Craig Stecyk created a sort of clubhouse for a bunch of discarded kids who wanted to be somebody. And we just happened to have this incredible footage of surfing at the Pacific Ocean Park pier in its decrepitude, and that footage became the linchpin. It really set the tone for the type of performance ethic and the people that developed out of Dogtown. "
One of the factors that that sets Dogtown and Z-Boys apart, apart from its footloose editing style and its bold graphic-art flourishes, is the sheer richness of the vintage visual material the filmmakers were able to assemble. Some of this material, like a clip of the Z-Boys fleeing the scene of one of their illegal pool rides, just a few jumps ahead of the Brentwood police, was new even to Peralta: "That was something that was taken by a British TV crew, from the BBC, when they were over here doing a piece on us. "
Much of the period motion picture footage included in Dogtown had been shot, often at great personal risk to life and limb, by the film's co-screenwriter, Craig Stecyk, then a 26-year-old photojournalist. Stecyk can be seen in the movie hefting the World war 2-era still and movie cameras he had borrowed from his father, an Army combat photographer who had documented the devastation of Hiroshima. Stecyk spent a fair amount of his time in the mid-70s sprawled flat on the decks of illegally accessed swimming pools, inches from the rim as skateboards caromed at his head, capturing indelible images of the airborne Z-Boys in their prime.
"Originally we were thinking about making a 46-minute video," Orsi recalls. "But there was so much great material that it just sort of grew into a feature. "
Another key factor in the sheer richness of content in Dogtown and Z-Boys is the simple fact that all the major participants in these epochal events are still alive. And because the film was being put together by two of their own, the OGs were not just willing but eager to participate. Tony Alva told Peralta flat out that because "it's you and Craig doing this, we trust it will be done right. " And Jim Muir summoned up the true hometown spirit: "Listen homes, I'll give you all my support. But if you screw up I'm going to kick your ass. "
Orsi recalls "doing pre-production at a sports show in early 2000. That was the first time word got out that Stacy and Craig were going to do something on Dogtown. People were coming up that they hadn't seen in years. It was amazing, the start of a reunion that was also the production of a movie. "
It was a stroke of good fortune that the crucial elements fell into place so smoothly, because a production schedule that had seemed adequate for a short video documentary began to seem severely pinched when the project ballooned into a feature. "By the time we finally got around to working on it full time," says Peralta, "it was the spring of 2000 and Van's had originally slotted the video for Christmas. So we had to start with no pre-production time whatsoever. We literally spent a week getting the office together, and a week later we were interviewing people. "
There were a few moments of high anxiety, Peralta says: "Craig said at the beginning, 'The guys are never going to agree to do this. That's why the whole thing blew up in the first place, because nobody could agree. There are too many alpha males. ' We had to hire a private eye to find some of them. We couldn't find Bob Biniak or Paul Constantineau at first We never did find Chris Cahill. It was literally a mistake that we found Shogo Kubo in Hawaii. "
The legendary Jay Adams, a crucial figure both because of his enormous talent and his impact on the sport, was one of the sadder cases. He had carried the wild Dogtown lifestyle to self-destructive extremes, and it had been ten years since Peralta and Stacyk had clapped eyes on him. "We had heard that Jay was somewhere in Hawaii," Orsi says. "Jeff Ho had been trying to track him down for us. But we didn't know exactly where in Hawaii. He could be at a re-hab center or in jail. But we couldn't imagine doing the movie without him, so we just flew over to try to find him. "
Peralta began making phone calls to people he knew on the dark side of the Hawaiian surfing and skating scenes: "Finally we got the number of someone who was caretaking Jay I'd call and he'd go, 'Call me back in twenty minutes. ' And then it would be, 'Call me in ten minutes at such-and-such a number and I think we'll have him. ' Finally we showed up at this strange, dark place, and it's like, 'Jay will be here. ' I was skeptical right up to that last minute. But suddenly, there he was. "
For Peralta, the Adams interview proved to be the toughest of the lot. "It was really hard," he agrees. "But Jay took the interview to a place that I wouldn't have on my own, a much more personal place than any of the others. He started talking very frankly, without any self-pity at all, without blaming anybody else for his mistakes, about going off the track and getting drunk and into drugs. And I was like, 'OK, if he's going to go this way, I will follow him. '"
The response of the other definitive Z-Boy superstar, Tony Alva, was more typical, Peralta says, of the way the original members of that crew embraced the project: "Tony was amazing. He did everything that we asked of him and more. I think he knows that the innovations he achieved in those days are his legacy. "
Because the schedule was so tight, the production and post-production periods had to be folded together. With editor Paul Crowder, Peralta began assembling footage "before we were even finished shooting, with interviews still to do that might have effected the storyline. And we didn't cut in linear fashion, either, because we were dealing with the footage as it happened to come in. Everything was cut out of time sequence. We would cut one segment that was an hour and a half down the line, and then another that was right at the beginning. But somehow it worked. We kept up with it. What happened is that it started to take shape on its own. Pieces started telling us, 'OK, now that we have this done it's quite obvious where we have to come from to get here. '"
Peralta was encouraged by producers Orsi and Wilson to do some of his most adventurous work as a flimmaker, in terms of editing and music and graphical choices. He hadn't felt this free to experiment and take chance, he says, since the go-for-broke days of the Bones Brigade videos. "I work in commercial television," Peralta explains, "where everyone wants to be really creative, but they're not allowed to be. In that world they don't let anything go until it's completely ruined. They make sure every laugh is gone and every real moment is gone, and then they'll approve it. So we were itching to cut loose. We shot torn up photos, we shot things 'incorrectly'---because it just felt right that way. It seemed to fit the material.
"And not only did Van's not object, they never asked to see one foot of film. We had to beg them to come and see us. Finally Jay Wilson showed up one day and he said, 'I'm not here to see anything. You guys look really tired and I'm hungry, and I'm going to take you out to a nice lunch. ' He said, 'You have a flow going, I don't want to interrupt it. '"
When it came time to put the finishing touches on the wealth of footage they had orchestrated so artfully, Peralta and company reaped unexpected benefits from the broad cultural influence the Dogtown style has exerted. Musicians, especially, who as teenagers drew inspiration either from the Z-boys themselves or from Craig Stecyk's articles about them, were eager to participate.
"This was one of those projects," Peralta says, "where we just got lucky, as far as doors opening. " The soundtrack features evocative cuts by such members-in-spirit of the Dogtown extended family as Blue Oyster Cult, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zepelin, Ted Nugent, James Gang, Iggy and the Stooges, and Robin Trower.
When it came time to cast a narrator, Peralta had the perfect person, and the perfect persona, firmly in mind---but at first he wrote off the notion as a pipe dream: "We had seen Sean Penn on TV, with his son at the X-Games, and we started to talk about it. We knew he had lived in Point Dune, that he had skated some of the same places we had. And he had played a surfer in his first movie, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a very funny performance that surfers really love. And beyond that, our sensibility just seemed to jibe with a lot of the work that he had done, like Colors. "
Penn eventually sat down to watch the footage and, in Peralta's words, "he was getting it all. 'Is that such and such a school? Is that this guy? Is that surfer so-and-so?' It's like it was opening up his world and his own childhood. After about half an hour he goes, 'I can't watch any more. I'm going to start crying. ' Two days later we got a call: 'Sean would love to be involved. ' That was probably the single best moment of the whole process, for me. I mean, you work hard on every project. But when you do a movie like this, that is so personal, and you're working on such a low budget, and then you get perks like this, it's just a tremendous affirmation. You think, "Well, that's cool. We must be doing something right. '"
Now this groundbreaking movie itself is poised to become another chapter of the Dogtown legend, the filmmakers have allowed themselves to hope that in addition to setting the record straight as to who did what first, and where. With luck, they suggest, the film could jump-start the imaginations of a new generation of young skaters, kids as yet unborn when Dogtowners like Tony Alva and Jay Adams were barging into strangers' swimming pools to try out daring aerial maneuvers.
"As it says in the film," Peralta observes, "Style is really important. Style is everything. But for the last ten years what's been important in skateboarding has been going big, going extreme. All the old Z-Boys agree with that, that the kids don't have any style today. So I guess what we're hoping is that when today's kids see the way we used to skate, they might go, 'Wow, that's a whole different approach. ' We hope the movie will influence younger riders to incorporate some of that style into the amazing new tricks they are coming up with on a daily basis. As the movie says, 'Going big worked only as long as you looked good doing it. '"