DOGTOWN AND Z BOYS

Dogtown and Z Boys

Friday, September 3rd 2004 at Creek Park in San Anselmo

Showtime: 8:00 pm

Sponsored by

SF Connection

Narrated by Marin's own Sean Penn (it's a stretch, but we really wanted to show this movie).

Stacy Peralta 2002

If the sign of good documentary is its ability to enthrall you regardless of your prior interest in the subject, then Stacy Peralta's hugely entertaining film earns high marks. The subject is skateboarders, specifically the Zephyr Skating Team, a group of California teenagers whose gravity-defying vertical style redefined the sport. If you think it's a topic without much appeal to anyone over 21, think again: Narrated by Sean Penn, Peralta's film is not just about a youth phenomenon, but a fascinating look at the origins of a subculture.

The story begins with the renegade surfers who rode the dangerous, debris-strewn waters around the rusting hulk of the abandoned Pacific Ocean Park pier. Once the "Coney Island of the West," this resort community was left to rot when the bottom fell out of L.A.'s tourist trade in the mid-1960s. By the early 1970s, it was home to junkies, artists and outlaw surfers who hung around the innovative Jeff Ho & Zephyr Production surf shop in a seedy section of Santa Monica know locally as "Dogtown." The "Zephyr Team" were the super-aggressive antithesis of the Beach Boys — punk before punk was codified — and handed down their pugnacity to the second-generation Z-Boys who adapted radical surfing styles to skateboarding. Skating the asphalt slopes that banked playgrounds in the surrounding hills and the drought-emptied swimming pools of the tonier neighborhoods, the Z-Boys rode pavement like waves — crouching low, touching the ground and adding cut backs to their increasingly revolutionary repertoire of moves.

In 1975, the 12-man Zephyr team (which included one girl, Peggy Oki) brought this radical style to the Del Mar Nationals, the biggest skate competition since the 1960s. As one journalist noted, the Z-Boys came on more like a street gang than a skate team, and the world of skateboarding would never be the same again. Set to the music of the era (lots of Black Sabbath, Aerosmith and the Stooges) and stylishly rough, the film is constructed primarily from the words of now middle-aged Z-Boys, who offer testimonials to the spirit of the times and the genius of Tony Alva, Jay Adams and Peralta himself, three of the team's biggest talents. The soul of the film, however, lies in the extraordinary photos and Super-8 films of Craig Stecyk and Glen E. Friedman, photojournalists whose dynamic work appeared in publications such as Skateboarder magazine, and helped ignite a nationwide phenomenon. — Ken Fox