BEYOND DOGTOWN

The real world of skating and surfing was always urban and idyllic for Stacy Peralta. Now the skater-turned-film director is taking that reality deep into the Hollywood mainstream

To the lords of Dogtown, the ocean was a sacred refuge, made all the more precious by its fickle moods and run-down surroundings. In the early 1970s, when the surfing world was looking to places like Hawaii and Australia for inspiration, Dogtown's no-man's-land between Venice and Santa Monica was an urban backwater, with waves small and blown-out or, in times of swell, walled-up and painful. Nothing to get excited about. Except for the dedicated dogs who knew that, with the right direction and push, the overlooked waters of urban Los Angeles could produce epic sessions, diamonds in the rough seas at sketchy locations open only to the locals.

To the surfing world today, the urban coast of Los Angeles County is still barely on the map – a polluted bay of sloppy wind-chop and bloated tourists. And while these celluloid-exposed shores helped spark the sport's early '60s entrée into popular culture, today the business of surfing itself has moved to places like Irvine and Costa Mesa. Skateboarding, too, has migrated away from the L.A. shoreline, toward the O.C. and other big cities like New York, San Francisco, and Philadelphia.

It is against this backdrop that Stacy Peralta has become Hollywood's unlikely liaison to some of the subjects that defined its ethos – surfing and skating. His pure-L.A. childhood, in a place often under the radar of the “action sports” mainstream, has made Peralta a credible storyteller of the urban myths and legends of a Westside long gone. Working in television, producing and directing, Peralta paid his dues and paid the bills as he wouldn't let go of his dream to direct his own films. In 1999, a Spin magazine feature on Peralta's teenage skateboarding mecca forced his hand, and he pushed out the 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, an homage to the pioneering street skateboarders of Venice and Santa Monica that took the audience and directing awards at the Sundance Film Festival.

The documentary put Peralta's name in the Hollywood hopper, and now he's written and directed a documentary just as close to his heart. Riding Giants rides a narrative history of big-wave surfing. The Sony distributed flick, out in a few weeks, marks the board-rider's ascent in Hollywood, and is a prelude to his first major feature film credit. It's a long way from Dogtown's bygone ghetto-by-the-sea to the industry's red carpets, but Peralta has finally found his wave.

“I was stuck in television for six years trying desperately to get out, and making Dogtown and Z-Boys enabled me to get out,” Peralta says, sitting at a bench inside Venice's venerable House of Teriyaki Too. “I felt that way about Riding Giants, too. It was a risk to do another documentary, but I was getting offers to do bottom-of-the-barrel comedies. I told my agent I'm going to do this. Had that failed, I think I would have looked like a one-hit wonder.”

Our Man in Hollywood

In fact, Riding Giants has become a success even before the first ticket has been ripped. Earlier this year, it became the first documentary ever to open the Sundance Film Festival, and within three days of the industry showcase, Sony Pictures Classics purchased its distribution rights for a July 9 national release. Surfing magazine editor Evan Slater says Peralta is the right choice to be the sport's man in Hollywood.

“He comes from our culture,” he says. “He was born and bred in this environment, and he knows the nuances of what you can and can't do. And he's not so arrogant that he thinks he can do it all himself. He works with the experts. So far I've been impressed.”

The true-to-its-roots Riding Giants is as unlikely an industry success as Peralta, but somehow both have life in an otherwise reality-averse Hollywood. Perhaps it's Riding Giants' wholesome good-life feel (ironic, given the sport's original countercultural status) that has Hollywood giving it an insider's thumbs up. Post-9/11, as the nation reckons with being stuck in the sands of Iraq, near-record pump prices, and an ugly presidential race, we can sit in air-cooled theaters and dream about how much simpler life was in the golden age of longboards.

“He captures the spirit of big-wave riding,” Slater says. “He did a real good job with accuracy and emotional connection.”

The documentary starts with a requisite nod to the sport's Polynesian roots and surf revivalist Duke Kahanamoku. The journey mostly skips past the pre-World War II roots of modern surfing (Bob Simmons' pioneering coastal explorations and surfboard designs), racing ahead to the '50s, where the filmmaker's heart clearly senses deep reserves of untapped soul.

“My girlfriend was eager to see the first cut,” says Peralta, who wears an ever-present baseball cap and scruffy facial hair. “I fired up the edit bay. The '50s scenes showed, and I looked over and she's crying. She says, ‘You'll never see days like this again.' This is idyllic. That's the one part of the film I love.”

Home movies portray a carefree gaggle of groms engaged in fireside horseplay in a SoCal of yesteryear. The Hawaiian side of the era is demonstrated with grainy footage of vintage Waimea Bay and other North Shore spots. Big boys tiptoe down rocket planks as liquid hillsides threaten to come down on their heads. It's a dance that could only be choreographed from the heavens. Mainlanders' invasion of the Oahu's North Shore in the '40s and '50s is memorialized, perhaps hyperbolically, as “surfing's equivalent of Columbus discovering the New World.” The first group of North Shore regulars is described as “two dozen intrepid men” and as an outgrowth of “the counterculture of its day” – the Beats, et al. The vintage footage, procured with the help of co-writer Sam George, is pristine, at least in spirit. “It just really added color to a black-and-white era,” says Surfing's Slater.

“You've gotta look under every stone” for footage, Peralta says. “It's being a good detective, being resourceful.”

He even went so far as to attempt to track down the only footage of Greg “Da Bull” Noll's mythic big-wave ride (some say the biggest) at Makaha from 1969. Said by some to be in the hands of '80s pro Shaun Thompson, Peralta did his best to get his own hands on the film – rumored to exist but verified by no one – and came up short.

“I think he probably does have it,” Peralta says of Thompson. “If he does, then I really respect what he's doing. There's nothing better than the imagination.”

The documentary quickly passes by Hollywood's first big fling with board sports, as there was little of relevance to big-wave surfing in the Gidget era besides, perhaps, the throngs of newcomers the celluloid craze sent to prime surf spots in the early '60s. In fact, surfing's history is described in Riding Giants as “pre-Gidget, post-Gidget,” for that very reason. The storms of '65 and '69 that sent massive swells marching toward the islands serve to take viewers away from the days of Beach Blanket Bingo and toward the new survivalist ethic of the sport. Testimonials about the storm of '69, despite the lack of images of Noll's Makaha run, are fascinating. There's a natural-disaster-like sense of urgency. Hawaiians were told to stay away from the coastline, but a few, like Noll, went paddling directly into the roiling abyss anyway.

The film captures the bug-eyed lunacy of big wave surfers. We see mid-'80s antics at the Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational. Named after a famed rider whose life was taken by rough seas, it's one of the hairiest contests ever devised. Soon, we're taken to Half Moon Bay's “Maverick's,” a cold-water mountain known only to a handful and assumed to be un-surfable until it was unleashed in the surfing trades in the early '90s. We go back to 1975, via narrator, to the first time a high schooler named Jeff Clark had the bright idea of paddling out alone at the big, cold Northern California monster break. The theme from Jaws plays before tough guys in five-millimeter wetsuits and riding 9-foot “guns” paddle into impossible caverns of death. We see Mark Foo's easygoing but ultimately fatal drop there in 1994. We hear of other big-wave deaths in the big-wave-crazed '90s.

In the latter stage of the film, viewers are shown what Peralta clearly thinks is the future of big-wave riding – “tow-in” surfing that involves pilots on personal watercraft slinging riders into the mega-waves of spots like Maui's “Jaws.” We get to know the king of tow-in, Laird Hamilton (credited as an executive producer), and his own story of growing up haole in Hawaii with a loving, legendary stepfather, Bill Hamilton, encouraging his fearless forays into water-sports. In one sequence – some say the wave will go down as historic – Hamilton is strapped on a board and towed into a hulking beast as it explodes onto a shallow reef at a spot called Teahupo'o in Tahiti. The deep ocean seems to fold over itself like a tectonic rupture as Hamilton skips along the surface like a pebble shot from space. As he races through a tube made for the Spruce Goose, he must have felt a stoke that only a few humans – astronauts, test pilots, extreme skydivers – have known. And that's the point. Despite the dangers, Riding Giants is a celebration of the hell-men and women who like-a-da-juice. It's a testament to surfing's timeless, triumphant desire to challenge nature and to be a part of her.

Lords of Dogtown

Peralta's next project, Lords of Dogtown, is being shot as we speak. He co-wrote the screenplay and remains on-call as a consultant. Catherine Handwicke, who directed last year's lauded Thirteen, is director and co-writer.

Some of the filming is being done on the very lot, now Sony Studios, where Peralta's parents met. His father was an auditor at Warner Bros., his mother was a personnel manager at a small firm. Peralta clearly likes the word idyllic when referring to decades past, and he says it applies to his childhood in a middle class, southeastern section of Mar Vista called Ocean View. “I had a solid family,” he says. ´´

“It was definitely the dogs, the lawnmowers, the whole thing,” Peralta says. “There were 45 different kids in one three-block area. It was a fun place to live.”

In the '70s, however, even a Westside enclave like his presented opportunity for trouble. “Not every house was occupied,” he says, “and there was some exploration to be done” – on skateboards, no doubt.

“There was a woman across the street,” Peralta says. “She was a ballet dancer. Craftsman home. She told her son, ‘I don't want you playing with him because he is going to waste his life on a skateboard.' It was looked at as a toy.

“Then, one day our hippie mail lady – she had hairy legs – she pulled us aside and said, ‘I've been watching you for years, and what you're doing is truly beautiful. It looks like ballet.'”

Peralta took that to heart and eventually avenged the dancer's slight with his own mid-'70s successes dancing on concrete, initially as part of the legendary Z-Boys skateboarding team, a band of misfits in which he barely fit in. He was the most “normal” kid on the team. After all, Peralta was from the right side of the tracks, hanging out in the badlands of south Santa Monica and north Venice – a.k.a. Dogtown – skating with poorer kids who barely had one pair of ripped jeans, let alone two parents and a nice, single-family home. It was this disparity, however, that created the Dogtown phenomenon, one in which the bedeviled mix of boys and girls – one black, two Japanese-American – showed the world how to skate, surf-style and, with the help of drought-drained swimming pools, in the air.

“Back in the '70s, it was the only place with an urban mix of surfing and skating,” he says. “You'd go to San Diego and you'd have avocado groves. Here you had liquor stores and people getting high under the pier.”

After he and Tony Alva took the tricks they learned in Dogtown on the road to great, rock-star-style reception, Peralta joined forces with George Powell to form the Powell Peralta skateboard company in 1978. He also completed about a semester at Santa Monica College, then quit. But six years after starting Powell Peralta, he began making videos as a way to promote the company's products and team, the “Bones Brigade,” which happened to include future superstar Tony Hawk.

Peralta didn't really plan on becoming a filmmaker. In fact, he happened upon the craft when he fired a professional three-man camera crew who he says wasn't getting the whole skateboarding thing. Skateboard cinematography is about the linear flow and fluid lines of the riders (modern cameramen and women often follow behind skaters on their own boards, lenses slung low to the ground), not about stiff symbolism. So he did it himself.

“I fired them after the first day,” Peralta says. “I thought they were a little disrespectful.”

Through the dawn of the '90s, his videos received cult acclaim in the skate world. By the end of that decade, skate videos made in Peralta's wake became core machines in the multibillion-dollar action sports industry, launching the careers of countless pro skaters and even those of fellow filmmakers such as Spike Jonze. Soon enough, Hollywood was knocking at Peralta's door.

“In 1990, my company became really successful – $30 million a year, 115 employees,” Peralta says. “But I was getting more and more opportunities in Hollywood. I felt it was turning into a hamster wheel, so I left skateboarding to work in TV. I didn't want to go into TV specifically, but I had all these opportunities.”

A few years later, however, Peralta felt like that hamster again. He held his Dogtown days close to his chest, a story he'd like to tell via celluloid if given the chance. He also wrote about a half-dozen screenplays, hoping to launch from TV land to the big-screen sea. The '99 Spin magazine article convinced him to get moving on his documentary, and it helped create enough buzz around Dogtown nostalgia to get Vans to eventually fully fund Dogtown and Z-Boys after a 50-percent backer pulled out.

“I always had in mind that the Dogtown experience would make a great screenplay,” Peralta says. “I never thought of it much until Spin's ‘Lords of Dogtown' article in '99. Hollywood got a hold of it and a number of studios wanted to do my life and that of the other guys.”

In fact, producers Art and John Linson and David Fincher moved on with plans to make a feature film based on the Z-Boys story called Lords of Dogtown, even as Peralta stepped up with his own Dogtown documentary. After securing the rights to the life stories of Alva and fellow Z-Boy Jay Adams, the duo approached Peralta and asked for his signature as well. He refused, and when the producers' own screenwriter didn't work out, they finally had their man, his story, and a screenplay.

Peralta is looking forward to directing feature films, including those in his favorite genre, “black comedies.” He's already signed on to direct the adaptation of In Search of Captain Zero. And, when he's not working or skating with his 13-year-old son at the old Dogtown spot known as Bicknell Hill, he's hanging around the set of Lords of Dogtown, checking up on the homies who are working as advisors.

“Alva's on the set teaching kids how to skate,” he says. “Craig Stecyk (who co-wrote Dogtown and Z-Boys) airbrushed surfboards. They actually wanted me to do some skating. There were certain finessing maneuvers they couldn't get. It's a generational difference. Our emphasis was on style. They weren't getting exactly what they needed, so they shot me skating from the waist down.”

“It was like walking back into the Twilight Zone,” he says of the set made to look like the Del Mar contest site at which the Z-Boys burst on the scene in 1975. “It was a visual watershed. It was very, very odd, like a shooting comet of emotion. It was all done like the exact place.”

And then he says that word.