Also this issue:

Nukes? Nah.
The latest Tom Clancy flick tells improbable tales of things that already haven’t happened.
-Cindy Fuchs

Day of the Dead
Local wunderkind Andrew McElhinney's A Chronicle of Corpses finally gets its day in the sun.
-Sam Adams

repertory film

Screen Picks

Showtimes

May 30-June 5, 2002

movies

Of Boards and Boys

dreaming the cube: Tony Alva grabs some air.

A fond look back at the birth of skateboarding.

Dogtown and Z-Boys

by Cindy Fuchs

Dogtown and Z-BoysDirected by Stacy Peralta A Sony Pictures Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse

recommended

Tony Alva is airborne, his hair flying, the balls of his feet barely touching his board. On one level, he’s skateboarding, expertl and gracefully, but on another, he’s imagining a more fantastic, wild way to live -- on earth and in time.

The time part is tricky, though. It moves fast. And so you need to make an effort to keep it in perspective, to preserve and record, to pass on. Because the dominant history is so incessantly available, subcultures have to do more to maintain their pasts, to make them visible and comprehensible for outsiders: Ask any dedicated hip-hopper. It's perhaps especially important to claim and clarify history when the mainstream comes knocking. What with the recent inclusion of snowboarding in the Olympics, the overwhelming popularity of skater-based clothing lines, and Tony Hawk's video-game superstardom, the time is very right for Stacy Peralta's Dogtown and Z-Boys.

Documenting and unabashedly celebrating skateboarding's creative explosion during the 1970s, Dogtown, laconically narrated by Sean Penn, recalls the youthful genius of the Zephyr Skating Team, assembled by Jeff Ho, Skip Engblom and Craig Stecyk. Consisting mostly of local, underclass latchkey kids, the team's members congregated around Dogtown, then a rundown section of West Los Angeles comprised of Hughes Aircraft and Douglas factories, low-income housing and a drug rehab center -- as the film's narration puts it, "the end of Route 66."

Though skateboarding had a brief run previously, the replacement of heavy clay wheels with urethane wheels in 1972 changed everything: Once their vehicles allowed more flexible moves, skaters became increasingly inventive, emulating surfboard gymnastics and imagining ways to get themselves up in the air while skating schoolyards and public parks that provided "asphalt waves." Even more "fortuitously," California was hit by a drought in 1976-77, and drained swimming pools became the skaters' turf. While one of their number played lookout, the kids spent hours perfecting contortions, captured in incredible stills and movies by photojournalists Stecyk and Glen E. Friedman.

Dogtown includes interviews with Alva, Peralta, Jay Adams, Peggy Oki, Bob Biniak, Shogo Kubo and Paul Constantineau, accompanied by a vintage soundtrack (Hendrix, Zep, Ted Nugent, Iggy), as well as appreciations by those indebted to the culture, like punk artists Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye, as well as the magnificent Hawk, here appropriately deferential.

Given Peralta's investment in Z-Boy culture and mythology, it's not surprising that the film, which won audience awards at the Sundance and AFI festivals, assumes a seductively vigorous and pumped-up style, including a hilarious clip of Peralta guest-starring on Starsky and Hutch. Much like the Z-Boys, the self-described "freaks of the sport," the film is fun and often thrilling to see. Self-love is part of the process, the faith that made the brilliance possible. As Peralta told me, "When you get into a critical moment, you can feel it: We were all pushing each other. If you could carve a pool, and in a critical moment, just kind of tilt your back a little -- wow! It's like a matador. The audience goes insane."