Flying High Out of the Debris of Dogtown

“It was summer vacation for 20 years.”

--Jay Adams, Z-Boy

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People may be lining up here at the Sundance Film Festival to see Julia Roberts, Gwyneth Paltrow and Christine Lahti, but one other golden ticket in town is a low-budget documentary on the Venice skateboarders of the 1970s titled “Dogtown and Z-Boys.”

Located at the border of Santa Monica and Venice, Dogtown was the last great seaside slum. “This was not,” says Stacy Peralta, the film’s director and one of the original Z-Boys, “the place people came to vacation.” At the corner of Bay and Main streets, a surf and skateboard shop called Jeff Ho’s Surfboards and Zephyr Productions was run by Ho, a legendary wild-man board shaper, along with big, bighearted, big-talking Skip Engblom. Just blocks from the shop was the heart of Dogtown, the late-lamented Pacific Ocean Park pier--POP--where insane surfers danced among the pilings, rebar and rubble--a place, says Nathan Pratt, who now owns Horizon’s Surf shop in the same location, “where the debris meets the sea.”

A bunch of kids grew up, in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, watching the surfers, trying to learn their moves, copying their attitudes and style on their homemade, self-styled boards, some of them fashioned from the bottoms of bureau drawers. Every so often, Ho or Engblom would give them a piece of advice. They were pretty pissed-off kids, most of them growing up with single mothers or fathers, many of whom were junkies, some surfers or skateboarders themselves. The kids went to one of five elementary schools in the area; “these schools all had banked playgrounds that were indigenous to L.A,” Peralta says. After school, they would skateboard, always looking for interesting surfaces on which to set up their courses, using pieces of urban landscape in ways that no architect could ever have dreamed up.

When the kids started to look for more and more vertical spaces, combing the back streets of Venice, they looked over fences for empty swimming pools. The ‘70s witnessed one of the worst droughts in California history, so there were quite a few. The boys devised a simple pump to remove any stagnant water. They would station guards at various checkpoints, so when they heard police sirens, they could disappear over fences and bushes like wild animals. “The drought,” says Engblom, “was a midwife to the skateboard revolution.”

The Z-Boys skated the pools, doing one-wheel edgers, two-wheel edgers, looping up to the rim, trying to get up around the lights. Craig Stecyk, another young skateboarder, started taking pictures--beautiful, fast black-and-white shots of the boys, upside down and sideways, sometimes screaming with the exhilaration. And serious. They had a uniform: dark blue T-shirts that said Dogtown, blue jeans and dark blue Vans sneakers. Style was everything. And it was exclusive. If you didn’t have the moves, you couldn’t use the pool.

Stecyk, today a well-known photographer exhibiting on both coasts and in Japan, is the guy who created the Dogtown aesthetic. He is tall and straight-faced and does not suffer fools. His photos ran with a series of articles on Dogtown that ran in SkateBoarder magazine, beginning in 1975. “My dad,” says Stecyk at a party here for the film, “was the first guy to shoot Hiroshima.” He handed Stecyk a camera. “If he hadn’t given me the equipment, we might not have had the photos today.”

“Dogtown and Z-Boys,” produced by Agi Orsi and narrated by Sean Penn, cost just $400,000 and is one of Sundance’s surprise hits this year. The filming is graphically Venice--urban, fast. Frames are sped up and slowed down, jump cuts that pull up the dialogue. “We didn’t want to beautify it,” Peralta says, “we just wanted to make something for ourselves, something that would make us happy.” The music is the Allman Brothers, Jimi Hendrix, Blue Oyster Cult, Led Zeppelin, Ted Nugent, James Gang, Iggy and the Stooges, and Robin Trower.

Hanging Out With the Boys

It is a triathlon just to see it. Two additional screenings had to be added after the first sold out in two days and left a block-long line of people outside. Eight hundred people come to the party for the film, with hundreds more turned away. People beg at the gatehouse and use names of well-known people to get past guards. Security guards with wired ears and cashmere coats respond: “Just don’t argue with me, man.” Inside, these are not your everyday Hollywood celebrities: Tony Hawk--perhaps today the most famous skateboarder in the world (think of Michael Jordan coming to a party). And the people who found him--Ho and director Peralta, 43, who at 19 walked away from his lucrative career as a skateboarder to become a major entrepreneur in that world--like so many of the Z-Boys did. My 8-year-old son has instructed me not to come home without Tony Hawk’s signature. I go to a local sports store, and when I tell the guys I’m going to the Dogtown party, they beg me to take them. They pick the board I’ll bring home to my son, a Tony Hawk birdhouse board, and the pen, a sharpie.

It’s all about style. “I was just a boy when that era was ending,” Hawk tells me. I’ve stopped him on his way out to get a drink at the outdoor bar shaped like an igloo to ask him about the movie. “I was amazed at how well the movie told the story of the evolution of skateboarding. It wasn’t like, after all this time these guys have gotten jaded. It’s still like, yeah, if you weren’t cool, you didn’t have style, you were an idiot.”

“How’s it going?” someone asks Nathan Pratt. “No, no,” he says, “just, ‘how’s it?’ ”

Once in, the first person I see is Ho. In the movie, many people testify that Ho was crazy, demanding, unpredictable and the best surfboard shaper in the world. Today, he seems happy to be here, with his fiends around, big and comfortable. “I guess I was a little obsessive,” he admits. “I’m still trying to build better boards.”

The most conspicuously absent person at the party tonight is Jay Adams. The other Z-Boys call him the “pure seed,” “the chosen one,” and it’s true: When you watch him at age 13, doubled low to the ground, gliding and turning, you know you are watching the purest art of skateboarding. “Freedom,” mutters the woman sitting next to me at the screening when he comes on. But Adams today has obviously suffered--and you can see it in the film. He’s in a correctional facility in Hawaii for drug-related charges. He has the same beauty he had at 13, but his eyes look tired and a little frightened.

When most of the Z-Boys went off in their various directions, endorsing products and starting their own line of boards, as Tony Alva did, Adams gave the existential bird to the commercialism and marketing. He clung to the original reason for skating.

“It all got too serious,” he says in the movie. “It stopped being fun.” Still, all the other boys now look to him as their angel of inspiration. Engblom says that when Adams gets out, they’re going to try to help him get set up. “He can’t fill out forms and stuff,” Engblom says. The movie shows some beautiful sweet shots of Adams at 4 and 5. A little blond child; his mother was absent, and his father drank too much, but still tried to get Adams to competitions and encouraged his skating. “They tried,” says Stecyk, but “you know how it is.”

Director Peralta lives in Santa Monica today with his 10-year-old son. “I never expected to go down this path again,” he says, looking stunned and happy, standing--sort of bouncing--in a corner of the mansion on the hill at Sundance, where the party is in full swing; the Fu Manchu band making the floors shake.

“The story found itself while we were making the movie,” he says. “At the beginning, I was inventing and writing too much. Then I just let it happen. I stopped being so methodical, which can happen in a documentary where you’re using a lot of stills and old footage. I wanted it to have the same kinetic, energetic feel it had when we were skating.

“When I was growing up in L.A.,” Peralta says, “I constantly heard there’s no culture here. Well, there is--and always has been. It’s just different from the East Coast. It wasn’t co-opted.”

“I saw Stacy sitting on a wall at a party in Point Dume,” says producer Orsi, “and he told me about his life and the Z-Boys, and I went to Vans for underwriting and they said, ‘Yes. These guys are the real thing,’ ” At the party, Vans is giving out custom-made Dogtown sneakers (covered with their sort of heavy-metal logo), T-shirts, hats and backpacks. People are clawing each other to get the merchandise.

“This would freak Jay Adams out,” says one guy who knew him. “He’d get on a board and take off down the mountain.”