Summer
2002
Volume 1 • Issue 4 Write Between the Linesis an exploration and articulation of the obvious and the obscure.
A cavalcade of creation and commentary designed to amuse and bemuse.
Pools
Rule Cuz Tricks are for Kids
Dogtown
and Z-Boys
Film Review
by
Katharine E. Monahan Huntley
"It
was dirty. It was filthy. It was paradise." — Skip
Engblom
Dogtown
and Z-Boys is a bittersweet reflection on a seminal time
for skateboarding, when artistry and skill created legends—predecessors
to Tony Hawk and the video game aesthetic. Winner of the Sundance
2001 Documentary Directing Award and the 2002 IFP/West Independent
Spirit Award for Best Documentary (among other honors), the
film chronicles Santa Monica pioneer skateboarding punks in
the mid 70s with X-treme eloquence. Director and screenwriter
Stacy Peralta, one of the original Z-Boys, relays the renegade
religion in a particular geographic and historical context.
Co-screenwriter Craig Stecyk's spectacular photos and footage
give the documentary its poetry in motion.
What truly
compels is the exuberant gang of juvenile daredevils known
as the Zephyr Team. Anonymous and abandoned, these outcast
hellions became high style outlaw skaters—banded together
by Jeff Ho (Does Your Shaper Surf?) and Skip Engblom, partners
in Jeff Ho's Surfboards and Zephyr Productions. Endless practice
and exhilarating performance led to competitions and the inevitable
commercialization of the sport. Cash in hand, corporate America
became the new parental influence for the Z-Boys. Ho and Engblom
faded into the kind of obscurity where myths originate.
As one
of the focal points of the story, Peralta is not quite objective.
Yet as a collagist he adroitly leads us through the creation
of "the birth of the now" with a realistic take
on what happened was . . . Set to the heat of the rock n'
roll beat, the audience is awestruck as these skateboarding
zealots sideways slide in and out of empty pools and fly over
the asphalt streets "where the debris meets the sea."
Youth
is callow and fame does fleet and, for the most part, the
Z-Boys put on the brakes and moved on from Dogtown. The poignant
exception is Jay Adams—the Z-Boys' "chosen one."
Celebrated in the film for his gift from the gods, twenty-five
years later he is interviewed while incarcerated.
A Peter
Pan lost boy — foundering in memories of paradise lost.
