Review: Dogtown and Z-Boys

Dogtown and Z-Boys is a wonderful documentary, exactly the kind they'll be making about hackers in two or three decades. It's the very American story of the pioneering l970's Zephyr skating team, whose LA guerrilla style shook up the mainstream types, and co-opted centuries of building technology to create an appealing and enduring culture with their individualistic brand of guts, energy and drive -- much like the kids who helped build the early Net. Skip the long lines for the hypey and elephantine big epic and get to Dogtown.

Dogtown is a now-gentrified but then working-class neighborhood between Venice and Santa Monica, California. Kids there grew up obsessed with surfing, and with fighting off outsiders, especially in and around the dangerous pilings that once supported a decaying and abandoned amusement pier. A lot of kids were injured or killing surfing off of Dogtown. Since they could only surf in the morning, when the tides were right, they began filing their afternoons with an experiment: they put wheels on mini-surfboards to ride on the roadways that surrounded them. The Zephyr team -- named after a famous Dogtown surfboard store and hangout -- quickly became known for its innovative skateboarding style, much of it drawn from the techniques of the world's best ocean surfers.

Skateboarding waxed and waned in the 70's, until two developments caused the sport to take off (and, of course, this being America, to be commercially co-opted): somebody invented urethane wheels that could take the the twists, turns and leaps that the Zephyrs brought to their boarding, and California experienced a severe drought. In a wondrously American twist, hundreds of drained Southern California pools presented the Zephyr kids an enormous opportunity they instantly grasped. A new kind of skating was perfected and launched.

Usually ignoring outraged neighbors, pool owners and pursuing cops, the Z-boys (and a couple of girls) began cruising the curved sides of pools until they heard the first sirens, at which point they'd leap into some dingy car and take off for another pool. Eventually they lucked out: a terminally-ill teenager from a rich family prevailed on his father to let the Zephyrs use their enormous, empty backyard pool. Riders like Jay Adams and Tony Alva became some of the most celebrated skateboarders in the world, taking boarding to the next level. The eventual twists and turns of the lives of these young pioneers -- all interviewed in their current incarnations -- give the movie a poignant, sometimes shocking punch.

Writer Craig Stecyk wrote about the Zephyrs in a series of articles for skateboarding magazines, casting them as stylish urban guerillas exploiting and transforming American technology (neighborhood school playgrounds were concrete forms placed into the slopes of hills, perfect for illegal skating) to create both artistry and freedom. Stecyk and Stacy Peralta wrote and directed Dogtown with some funding from Vans (the Zephyr boys all wore blue Zephyr T-shirts and blue Vans sneakers).

It's a surprising film, innovative in its editing and herky-jerky flashbacks and sprinkled with great footage from the 70's and 80's. The film itself seems to replicate some of the Zephyr team moves. Peralta tracks and interviews the grown-up, middle-aged members of the original Z-boys, and while some have survived and prospered, you can't help feeling sad seeing the older images juxtaposed against the amazing energy, acrobatics and creativity of their younger selves. It's truly amazing what these kids did with some empty swimming pools and pared-down boards. Archival video and stills from the period really bring the story to life, too. We don't have to hear the saga recalled by its aging survivors; we can see the kinetic, obsessive, exciting images of the time (Jay Adams, in particular, is just astounding).

Like the creation of the Net, this is a particularly American tale, in which a handful of oddball teenagers can use their own alienation and outsiderness and create a rich -- if doomed -- culture of their own. While much of the country is off watching the latest bloated Star Wars epic, you can't do better than skip the long lines of groupies and find a theater showing Dogtown.

Comments

Forget Katz, See the movie.

[ashitaka]

When seeing this movie you got to look beyond just what these individuals did, but the effect on their culture beyond the empty pools of California.

What happened with skateboarding in the late 70's set the stage for the current hacker/boarder culture where grass-toking teens can be Olympic champions.

Skateboarders of the late 70's were outcasts, not just in Venice (CA) but just about everywhere. This included a particularly dead suburb of Toronto, CA called Markham, now the home of many tech firms like ATI. Many things changed when an old barn that used to house cows at the annual country fair was transformed into the first indoor skateboard park in Ontario. Geeks from all over congregated to this, our church of rebellion. For the first time I had a real peer group. No-one cared if you knew how to program the school's IBM 1130. No-one cared if you were one of only two out of 2,100 students who knew how to work the brand new Apple ][ and Commodore PET. But being able to axle grind around the gnarly lip of the pathetically tiny pool was enough to elicit whoops of approval from compatrates who KNEW and UNDERSTOOD. It kept some of us alive, some who otherwise would have been another teen suicide statistic.

We knew who our heroes were. We looked to the West, to Venice, to what we saw as a sun-drenched paradise of perfectly-formed concrete playgrounds. We never saw the grungy side of the culture as we eagerly flipped through the pages of Skateboarder magazine.

Then it all went wrong.

Boarding stopped being about the tricks, it became commercial, followed by the inevitable backlash, and being punk-fuelled it was a complete backlash. It became all about destruction, physically tearing down walls as well as physically wrecking yourself in as many ways as possible.

This is why some of the once-heroes in this film are so shattered now. But at least they survived.

This is not a film about skateboarding. This is about how a far-reaching culture change happens. The hip-hop-blasted half-pipe events of the Olympics trace back to here. The graffiti-covered walls of what were once pristeen communities trace back to here. The overall cynicism of the 80's and 90's that the world was a shitty place and getting worse goes back to here.

But it was also the beginning of the age where geeks made a difference. Denizens of this site marvel at the latest cool tech and wonder about what Great Things lie ahead. You feel as if you have a future, that there WILL BE a future and generally it will be a Really Cool place to be.

Growing up in the 70's, technology was not going to give you a cool future. It wasn't a ticket to a high-paying job. You had to find something to make you want to keep going.

This film is about what gave some of us that hope.

Re:Star Wats

[dswensen]

I have to disagree. I was born in 1971, and have seen all of the Star Wars films at the time of their original theatrical release (although, for obvious reasons, I don't remember that much of the original Star Wars experience).

I loved all the original films, and I like the new films just fine. Phantom Menace was sub-par, but I found Episode II to be at least as much fun as any of the other ones.

My theory is that a lot (not all) of the people who grew up with Star Wars in their childhoods have come to think of Star Wars as being their childhoods, and are inevitably disappointed when the new movies can't strip them of their adulthood and return them to a wide-eyed state of ten-year-old wonder.

Seeing Star Wars as a kid was a wonderful, influential experience. But I'm never going to be ten again, and the best writing / acting / special effects in the world won't change that. It doesn't mean I can't still enjoy Star Wars, including the new films, as an adult. And I don't care how "unhip" that opinion is.

And just as a side note, the acting in Star Wars has never been good. That doesn't take any of the fun out of it for me, though.

As for why the Slashdot crowd hates it -- I'm sure there are an infinite variety of reasons, but I'd put the following things at the top of any list:

Extreme jadedness (years of bigger-and-better special effects blockbusters have produced audiences that bore easily)

A habit of slamming everything for purposes of seeming hip ("Worst Episode... Ever!")

Consumerist angst over the amount of merchandising and marketing surrounding the movies (conviently forgetting, most of the time, how many Star Wars action figures, lunchboxes, etc. one owned as a child)

Just genuinely not liking it... in the case of TPM, there are quite a few things not to like (Jar Jar etc.), and leveling criticism at it isn't necessarily indicative of some greater phenomenon at work.