Narrated, fittingly, by the once and future Jeff Spicolli — Sean Penn — this engrossing, definitive documentary on the birth of Southern California’s outlaw skateboarding culture is a jaw-dropping piece of work. And why not? Director Stacy Peralta was there at the beginning, in 1975, when a rag-tag group of teenage misfits from the wrong side of the tracks (or canals, actually — we’re in Venice, California, aka Dogtown, here) yanked the wheels off of their little sisters’ roller skates and jury-rigged them to a tatty oak board, forming their first skateboards. Weaned on the “locals only” surf culture of the Santa Monica piers and Venice’s own squalid breakers, where being from another neighborhood could get you into some serious trouble and surfers always ran the risk of being impaled on the submerged and rotten pincushion pilings, a handful of now-legendary names — Peralta, Jay Adams, Tony Alva, Jim Muir, Peggy Oki, and Shogo Kubo, among a handful of others — inadvertently gave birth to skateboard culture and the SoCal punk rock vibe the sport has carried with it ever since. Miscreants from dysfunctional families, drop outs, stoners, and surf rats, the Zephyr Skating Team was created by Jeff Ho, Skip Engblom, and Craig Stecyk, the owners of a Venice Beach surf shop, who saw the potential in these scruffy blond bad boys, sponsored and outfitted them, and let them loose on an unsuspecting world at 1975’s Bahne-Cadillac Skateboard Championship in neighboring Del Mar. Alva, with his proto-dreadlocked bedhead, and Adams’ fearless goofball smirk made an impression, but it was the Zephyr Team’s low-to-the-ground, cut-and-run style of skating that blew minds and changed the course of the sport into what it is today. Any punk worth his mohawk who grew up in the mid-Seventies to mid-Eighties had either an Alva deck or a Powell-Peralta (unless you were in Texas, of course — then you had a Zorlac, or woe unto you), and it’s no exaggeration to say that today’s skateboard culture, posited on equal parts fuck-you braggadocio and street-smart foolhardiness, is little more than a diluted outgrowth of what happened in Venice and Santa Monica in the Seventies. Peralta has compiled a wealth of archival footage to back up his main points, much of it never seen before, and almost all of it shot by Zephyr Team photographer Stecyk. It’s amazing footage, gritty Super-8 and 16mm, scratched, faded, and edited into 90-plus minutes of pure adrenaline. You don’t have to be a skater to appreciate what Peralta has accomplished here, either. His interview footage of the Dogtown boys (so named because their final hangout — a dying rich kid’s near-Olympic-sized pool — was surrounded by family dogs) is peppered with droll reminiscences (“Basically I was on Summer vacation for 20 years,” says a melancholy Adams.) and astute observations, such as former superstar Alva’s belief that today’s passion for so-called extreme sports likely wouldn’t have come about were it not for the Dogtown crew and their outlaw ethic. Ultimately Dogtown and Z-Boys is a slice of sporting history with an irrepressible rock & roll attitude, half sunshine state smile and half tough-guy pose. That the names Alva, Peralta, Muir, and Adams are as legendary in the sport as they remain is testament to their long-ago accomplishments. That they were just hormonally blitzkrieged kids at the time, unaware of their role in history, only makes Peralta’s superior doc that much more winning.
This article appears in January 24 • 2003.