Dogtown and Z-Boys

Stacy Peralta, one of the inventors of the ‘skateboard-video-genre’, was in the seventies a member of the Zephyr skateboard team, that was at first no more than a group of kids who hung around on the beach at Dogtown, a slum neighbourhood of the rich Santa Monica. In Dogtown and ZBoys the former Zboys reminisce and talk about the sudden change in their lives when commercialism turned up on the scene. The kids not yet twenty at the time were offered vast sums to do something they did all day anyway: skateboarding. Some made clever use of this chance to escape the poverty of Dogtown, for instance Tony Alva, who started his own skateboard brand and Stacy Peralta himself (who even played a guest role in Charlie’s Angels).The archive footage of the suntanned, longhaired punks on surfboards and skateboards, along with the soundtrack (including The Stooges, Black Sabbath and Jimi Hendrix), provides a nostalgic picture of the birth of skateboarding. During an extremely dry period there was a great water shortage, as a result of which the swimming pools of exclusive villas around Santa Monica were empty. These smooth, round concrete basins were an ideal surface for the skateboards (there were not yet any halfpipes), so the Dogtown group moved from garden to garden, until the next angry villa inhabitant called the cops.