(Young Stacy Peralta, above, right, in Dogtown and Z-Boys.)THE ACCIDENTAL REVOLUTIONARY
by Terry Keefe
(Our line-up of previously unposted interviews from the Naughties continues with my short talk in 2002 with Stacy Peralta, whose Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary went on to spawn an entire sub-genre in the documentary world - as in, "It's Dogtown and Z-Boys set in the formative days of 'fill-in-the-blank sport.'" In 2005, Dogtown was also adapted into the popular narrative feature, Lords of Dogtown, which was directed by Catherine Hardwicke, and gave an early career boost to Emile Hirsch. It also featured a very off-beat performance from Heath Ledger, indicating what he was really capable of as an actor aside from the pretty boy roles he had been typecast in previously. This article originally appeared in Venice Magazine.)
If there had been a few more days of rain in Southern California in the early 70’s, today’s skateboarders might still be earthbound, an entire industry might not exist, and Stacy Peralta might not be a legend. See, back between the years of 1973-75, there was a massive drought in this state. Most of the swimming pools in Los Angeles were drained because water conservation was required by law. There were empty swimming pools all over the place. Useless, right? No way. Because shortly thereafter a group of teenagers from the rundown Venice and Santa Monica area known as “Dogtown” started skateboarding in some of these empty swimming pools. Suddenly, they discovered that you could do aerials and vertical maneuvers on a skateboard. It was like the difference between night and day, between an acoustic and an electric guitar, between still photos and motion pictures. And the world would never be the same.
Stacy Peralta was one of those teenagers, along with fellow skateboarding legends Tony Alva, Jay Adams, Bob Biniak, Chris Cahill, Jim Muir, Shogo Kubo, Nathan Pratt, Wentzle Ruml, Allen Sarlo, and Peggy Oki (the lone female of the group), among others. They were part of a skateboarding team who called themselves the “Z-Boys”, after the famous Zephyr Surf Shop where they all hung out and which became their sponsor in competitions. Dogtown and Z-Boys is a terrific documentary directed by Peralta which chronicles the rise of the modern skateboarding industry through the eyes of the Z-Boys of Dogtown.
(Tony Alva, above.)
Peralta and the Z-Boys were accidental revolutionaries, in that they had no idea that they style they were developing would ever be so influential. Recalls Peralta, “We knew it was special but we didn’t expect anyone else to think it was special. Because we had been doing stuff like this for so long without ever getting any feedback. No one ever told us, ‘You’re good.’ It was always like ‘Get out of here. Get lost. We never want to see you again.’ And it was also at a time of the 70’s before everything became so ‘corporatized’. Since the dawn of MTV, whenever something cool happens, the corporations pounce on it and they put it in commercial television the next week. That didn’t happen in the 70’s, so we were able to sort of exist in this petri dish and develop our own little culture.”
The homegrown style that they were developing in Dogtown bursts onto the national scene during the 1975 Del Mar National Skateboarding Championship, where the Zephyr Team takes the skateboarding world by storm. The amazing documentary footage from this competition is like watching the birth of rock-and-roll - the spectators and the other skateboarding competitors are blown away by the Z-Boy style. Up until that point, skateboarding competitions consisted of doing headstands on a skateboard, and skating around cones while standing upright. Says Peralta of the reaction from the “old guard of skateboarding” at that first competition, “ I don’t think they looked at us as a threat because I think they felt we were trivial. The people that took us seriously there were the kids. They were the ones who ran up to us and said ‘We want to ride what you guys ride. We want to wear what you guys wear.’”
Over the years Peralta and the other Z-Boys had received so many offers from film studios to buy their life stories, that Peralta finally decided he had to tell the story himself. Says Peralta, “We did this (the documentary) to protect the story. If it’s going to happen, it should really be told by us first. I think I can speak for all of these guys when I say this period was the most precious time in all of our lives.”
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