July 13 movie: Dogtown and Z-Boys. I had seen about half of this movie last year, and have been waiting for it to show up again on IFC so I could see it all the way through. It's a documentary about the Zephyr Skate Team who (according to them) revolutionized skateboarding in the 70s by incorporating surfing techniques and skating in empty pools, creating the vertical and airborne styles.
The movie was fascinating to me on a bunch of levels. First, it does a really good job of capturing the creation of a subculture & letting the viewer feel the excitement of the moment. But besides that, the filmmaker (Stacy Peralta) was himself one of the Zephyr team, which maybe gave him better access than an outsider would have had, but also raised a lot of interesting questions about point of view in a documentary. For one thing, when Peralta is on camera (which he frequently is) who interviewed him? During interviews with other Z-boys you can hear Peralta laughing at stories or in-jokes, which creates the impression of listening in on a conversation between old friends rather than watching a documentary.
And of course, the filmmaker being one of the gang means that self-aggrandising statements tended to be taken at face value. I know nothing about skateboarding so I have no way of knowing if their claims are true. But it does seem that they might have been more a part of a culture than lone trailblazers. At times the Z-boys talked about skating in pools as though they were the only people doing it, but then they said that a good pool was a closely guarded secret because they didn't want a lot of other people horning in on their good thing. Which would indicate that there were others doing similar things.
Maybe the Zephyr club did revolutionize skateboarding. But I'm guessing they wouldn't have ended up so famous without photojournalist Craig Stecyk, co-founder of the Zephyr shop that sponsored their team, who wrote a series of articles about them in Skateboarding magazine. They also had a photographer (Glen Friedman) hanging out with them at the time, creating a mountainous photographic record which is heavily drawn on by the film.
The only disappointment for me was the lack of airtime given to Peggy Oki, the only female member of the Zephyr team. It comes off as a testosterone-driven environment (for example, 2 different Z-boys compare skating a new pool to having sex with a virgin), and I really wanted to know about her story. How did she get in with this group, and why were no other women included? Did they accept her, did they consider her as good as them? Did she get the endorsements that were thrown at the male stars? None of these questions are answered or even asked.
Oki has a couple of quotes and shows up in the group shots, like most of the Z-boys. The only people who are profiled in any depth are Tony Alva (who comes off like an egomaniac), Jay Adams (who is not dead, although I assumed he was from the tone of his profile -- actually he's in prison), and Stacy Peralta himself (as Georg said, these guys aren't exactly humble). I guess 90 minutes wasn't enough time to examine every member of the Zephyr team in detail.
The soundtrack is spectacular. There are a few misfires ("Maggie May"? *shudder*) but mostly the music makes the Z-boys seem gloriously cool, like Bowie, Iggy, the Buzzcocks, Sneaker Pimps, and Devo. "Gut Feeling," yeah! Unfortunately none of that stuff is on the soundtrack album. Maybe they had problems with music clearance or something.
The last thing I have to say is that Dogtown and Z-boys included one startling technique that I had never experienced before: at one point narrator Sean Penn stumbles, coughs, then has to repeat a word before finishing the sentence. And they left it in. That's gonzo filmmaking for you!
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