Dogtown & Z-Boys: Onde Tudo Começou

My skateboarding career ended in 1974 when my two-by-four skateboard with steel roller-skate wheels hit a rock and I tumbled, for days it seemed, down the sidewalk outside my parent's house in Boston. By the time the cast came off my arm, summer was gone.

But I have always admired the X-games types and surfers especially. I think I spent the first month after I moved to Southern California on the beaches and piers watching the surfers, bemoaning that fact that I had missed my calling. It's the sort of thing you should learn young, before the horrible senses of self-preservation and self-awareness burrow in. Or else at best, you'll be so worried about not getting hurt or laughed at, you'll wind up looking like a trained bear.

I always admired how a good surfer seems to not care about anything but that moment, that wave, that experience. At one with the forces of nature. A good surfer makes it look like there is nothing else but that wave right there, and the way you interact with it. There's a lot of Zen in it to me.

This documentary outlines how a few young folks took the surfing concepts and extended them to skateboarding. Ramps, downgrades, low sweeping curves while interacting with the cement waves beneath their feet. In their day and time, this was all new. radical. Prior to the Zephyr Skate team the idea apparently was to go as fast as you could in a straight line on a skateboard, hence my long "Evel Knievel at Caesers Palace" like tumble down the front walk.

This film is a look back through time, to an America before EVERYTHING was labeled, tagged, marketed, and jam-forced down our throats as "Extreme". (Seriously, what's so "extreme" about an "Extreme value meal" at Taco Bell? Other than the fact that it is an extreme hazard to your colon...)

Watch this film and watch the birth of 'extreme sports'. Before there was an X-games, before Boom-boom Huck-Jam, before Crusty Demons, before the ASA...there were these young street urchins who created 'extreme sports' without really trying. They were just doing it for the purity, the pure pleasure, of skateboarding in the sun with friends.

I hope they get a cut of the 'extreme' money out there. Goodness knows they don't get the credit they deserve. Maybe this film can correct that.

Excellent film with a great soundtrack, a portrait of a Southern California, indeed an America, that no longer exists.

I don't care for Sean Penn but he does a decent job narrating.

I never surfed or skateboarded but I still found this documentary fascinating. I accidentally stumbled on it while channel surfing (not sidewalk surfing) and watched it a second time later in the day. The Z-Boys made me think of the early days of rock and roll when young kids with no formal musical training basically "invented" rock and roll as they went along.. It seems the Z-Boys did the same with skateboarding.

I have seen this movie twice now on cable. The first time I saw it, it caught me by suprise. The skaters I was seeing were the guys we followed in the pages of Skateboarder magazine back in the late 70's. These were the guys we copied and tried to become while skating. I am glad that a film was finally made that gives an accurate account of how it all came to be. I am almost 40 years old now and I guess a pretty uptight kind of guy with all of life's problems, however; this film did a great job of taking me back. Back to the vacant pools, the backyard halfpipes and the road trips to Cherry Hill NJ. I suspect that in order to really understand this movie and appreciate it, you had to live it. Otherwise, it probably won't have the impact on you as it did me. But for those of you (and you know who you are), who did live it, you know exactly what I am talking about! In any event, I don't care who you are, if you get a chance to see this movie...do it! I give thanks to the Z-Boys of Dogtown for the memories of my youth and thanks to Stacy for making this movie! JOB WELL DONE!

I'm sure glad I finally took the time to rent and watch this documentary! It really brings back a lot of fond memories of skateboarding when I was a surfer kid back in the early seventies. Everything in this movie was familiar to me, the surfing, the skating, the names of the skaters, the equipment they were riding. As I watched all these kids ripping and doing the moves we strived so hard to emulate, I could feel the old stoke returning to my veins. Peralta (a great skater himself) really captures the electricity and energy of the time and the place. I'm 47 years old now, but after seeing this movie I'm so fired up I think I may have to get a board and get back out there (wearing a helmet and lots of pads, of course).

First off, the movie was great. It did what it was supposed to do.. and that was to tell the story of a certain time, place and people. Maybe the Z-Boys weren't choir boys (and one girl) but they were real people (kids) and they took the whole idea of skateboarding to new levels... I absolutely enjoyed this movie.. not only because I am from Dogtown (Venice/ Mar Vista/ S.M (south of Wilshire)), used to skateboard (I sucked) and that I dealt with the Z-Boys a few times when they were using my aunt's pool and were scaring my grandma.. but because this movie was about them (the Z-Boys) and the time and the place. Sure there was a semi skateboard culture in the 60's that died out pretty quickly... but the Z-Boys restarted the whole skateboard thing again.. and not only did they restart it; they resurrected and recreated it. Nowadays it is almost a regular thing to see some guy flying out of a pool or a half pipe getting air, etc.. But back then it was something new. They revolutionized the whole thing. There were electric guitars and guitar players before Hendrix but he took it to a whole different level and what he left in his wake is the same thing the Z-Boys left in their's.

To the people who seem to want to criticize the movie or the Z-Boys for talking about themselves.. well the movie was about them.. Remember what it is like to be young and invincible.. and to revolutionize something that they loved by just doing what they loved.. sure it is easy to get an ego.. just ask a kid who learns how to finally play a Hendrix song on a guitar... it is the same thing except the Z-Boys defined the revolution that was to come. They were young, brash and from a place that was a slum by the shore. Sure it was wrong to trash and terrorize people who came to their beach or whatever.. but by the same token.. people from this side of the hill would get a lot of abuse when they went to the Valley or other areas. That doesn't make it right but it does make it what it was. There was a sectional divide in the greater L.A. area. The Z-Boys just happened to be at the forefront of the beach wars.

The Z-Boys rocked and they weren't perfect angels but they were real.. look what happened to Jay Adams.. They were part of the times and places that was the L.A. beach scene.

Finally, I think the style of this movie fit the subject very well. Stacy Peralta was part of the Z-Boys and he did this film as a tribute to what they were all about. It was a rebellion not for the sake of ego but for the sake of something they all enjoyed doing. The camera work, the (killer) soundtrack and the memories were great. The best part, though, might have been the fact that they themselves seemed to document their own history with still pictures and film.

To quote the Surf Punks, "My beach, my waves, my chicks, go home".

Rock on!!!!