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Review: Dogtown and Z-Boys
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.
"Dogtown and Z-Boys is a wonderful documentary, exactly the kind they'll be making about hackers in two or three decades."
Drop the self-important B.S. Most hackers are little bitches that go corporate as soon as the heat gets turned up. As for the "kids" that built the internet, it wasn't kids, it was government engineers. Sorry to blow your romantic fairy tale with some facts,
How come Star Wars is suddenly uncool with the /. crowd (Ep 2 was quite fun)? Or maybe because Jon Katz thinks it's uncool, now it's become cool? :D
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Just Curious. Stay tuned for my review of "Gleaming the Cube" and an analysis of the Coreys in modern cinema.
"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"
I don't think they mentioned anyone being killed while surfing in the movie.
And just so you know the tide changes everyday, so although the wind is generally offshore in the morning, creating cleaner, hollower waves, the tide is cyclical and waxes and wanes with the moon. It generally advances about a half hour a cycle, so if it's high tide at 6:30am one day, high tide is around 7:30am by the next morning. It could just as easily be high tide in the afternoon.
The reason they skated during the afternoons was because the waves blew out due to the wind. It turn from off shore to on shore as the land heats up.
It's a great movie, but you should stick to writing about geeky things that you know.
I loved your review, really honestly I loved it! It was the best arrangement of meaningful words I've read in years.
Thank you for giving us the pleasure, nay! PRIVILEGE! of reading this.
And all you katz-haters out there: my mom says you're just jealous...
no seriously for a minute: what the hell is this all about? A lack of decent articles? I'd rather watch my plants grow...
"The majority is always sane, Louis." -- Nessus
http://slashdot.jp
JonKatz managed to fit in the word "elephantine" twice in 2 articles.
Sounds like someone has a new favourite word!
How symbolic! How stunning! How repetitive.
shame on us / for all we have done / and all we ever were / just zeroes and ones
Before I start reading stories here. With rare exception, Katz is out of touch and out of tune with the people he seems to think he's in touch with. The same thing has been said thousands of times before, and will be said thousands of times again.
Slashdot is a great place to discover cultural tidbits. Slashdot says Cowboy Bebop is neat, I watch it, it is neat. Katz says Star Wars II is bloated and not worth it, but it is'nt.
*sigh*
=
The Internet is generally stupid
Actually, John Katz and a few other Slashdot regulars inhabit an alternate reality timeline. Occasionally there's a technobabble rift that opens up and deposits their stories into our universe's Slashdot.
or did kids not build the net, but rather government researchers?
Actually the soundtrack was fairly accurate for its period. Lots of Zep, Ted Nugent and other "hard rock" from the mid-70s. Remember, the Z-boyz were active from about 1974 to 1977. A little before punk hit the West Coast hard.
However, I missed the punk rock, because the skatepunk culture that formed in the Z-Boyz' wake had as its soundtrack stuff like Black Flag and The Minutemen and Suicidal Tendencies and The Germs....mostly the SST bands that thrived just south of Dogtown in the Pedro/Wilmas/Torrance/South Bay area.
I have nothing but contempt for Greg Ginn, but the producers of Dogtown could have done worse than to contact him and get sync licenses for some of the classic Flag stuff at least.
My big pet peeve about this movie: the stealth involvement of Sony Classics in this release. I went to see this movie because I thought, "great, this is an indie, the MPAA isn't getting their cut". However, the first fsckn thing you see when the lights go down is a slide that says "Sony Classics Pictures". I felt like such a tool. Not only was Don Valenti's hand in my pocket, so was the Evil Sony Empire.
Folks, I would recommend this movie but again, you will be putting money in the MPAA's hand if you go. If your conscience allows you to, then yeah, go ahead and check it out. There's some amazing footage in this movie....the P.O.P. footage is worth the price of admission alone.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Yeah, you actually get to see footage of Alva's first aerial in this one. In fsckn credible.
Good to hear that Jay Adams is out of stir...he looked absolutely awful in the movie. It seemed as if maybe he was in a fight the day before he was interviewed because he had scabs on his forehead. He also sounded kind of screwed up...maybe it's the burnout thing or maybe it was taking a couple too many shots to the head...again, I have no idea if I'm right or not.
Alva seems to be the truest to the game...his skate company is still in business 20 years on, and the guy skates every day. He was the most visible of the Z-Boys, the one with the biggest mouth, the Muhammad Ali of skateboarding. He could talk smack and be arrogant all he wanted to be, because the mofo could and probably can still back it up 1000%.
One last comment: yeah, the Dogtown boyz dissed the Valley every chance they got in those days, but guess where the fsck they trolled for pools to skate in? That's right, the Valley. Say what you will about Val surfers and skaters, but we never spray-painted "Locals only! Westsiders stay out!" on walls in our part of LA. I take a fair amount of satisfaction in that fact.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Maybe it's just me, but this sticks out like a sore thumb every time I see a year in a Jon Katz piece.
-- Old Man Kensey
Revenge of the Nerds #1 and #2 have origonal historical footage (and I even appear in one spot, though dont say anything). Dogtown lucked out because thaere was guy intentionally filming the action. Lots of history is not as fortunate.
Dogtown and Z boys does a great job capturing the sense of the moment and place that these guys grew up in. As an East-Coaster transplanted West, I came away with a new appreciation for the beach towns in southern California. And the soundtrack itself was worth going for.
But in many ways the movie felt frustratingly self-aggrandizing. If you notice that the interviewer is always saying "you guys" and "we" to the subjects, while they're discussing the badass things they invented when they were 13, you realize that Stacey Peralta shot a movie about how cool his childhood friends were. That's great as long as the personal perspective is evident - I think my childhood friends are some of most remarkable people I know. But when you present the "we invented modern skateboarding" mantra as an impartial conclusion, it just ends up sounding pretentious.
Still the movie is a great snapshot of what came to be a big part of American pop culture. Stacey Peralta clear has some chops as a filmmaker, and this one's worth a watch.
dave hackett, a friend and former colleague of mine, worked as a graphic design consultant for the web consulting firm i worked for as a graphic guy as well.
hes a really nice guy and has a great eye for design... and who would have thought he'd end up doing web sites after skating for so long.
(btw, dave is the guy who did the MTV logo, and most of the designs for the "jimmy Z" clothing line.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
How can some personal obsrervations about roller blading in Venice, CA, in the '80s be damned as "troll" and "flamebait" to a story about shatboarding in Dogtown in the '70s????
Could those moderators who know even as little about LA as I do from the other side of the Pacific please moderate the parent, not this, at least back to it's starting level, and maybe even give it a +1 interesting.
I wouldn't be posting this except I can't find the moderation abuse link which I'm sure was in the metamoderation instructions only days ago.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Actually, Rancid is not pop punk, it is street punk.
As for the rest, I more or less agree, except that as another post mentioned the events in the documentary took place before punk hit the west coast (which began in 77-78, but the L.A. scene really got going in the early '80s).
BTW, my little brother plays Tony Hawk (I don't know which one) on the N64, and the soundtrack includes Suicidal Tendencies and the Dead Kennedys. Police Truck, actually, although they didn't go so far as to actually include the words, so it's an instrumental version.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
"A lot of kids were injured or killing surfing off of Dogtown."
This place is violent!
j/k, I liked the review, something different to check out...
[o]_O
Skateboarding is energetic, fast, exciting and cool.
Hacking is none of the above.
A bunch of fit healthy looking people zipping around and pulling neat stunts looks good on film.
An obese guy staring at a computer screen in his parents' basement doesn't look good. On film or in real life!
Katz lives in a world of his own...
"Information wants to be paid"