Flying High Out of the Debris of Dogtown

PARK CITY, Utah — "It was summer vacation for 20 years."

--Jay Adams, Z-Boy

*

People may be lining up here at the Sundance Film Festival to see Julia Roberts, Gwyneth Paltrow and Christine Lahti, but one other golden ticket in town is a low-budget documentary on the Venice skateboarders of the 1970s titled "Dogtown and Z-Boys."

Located at the border of Santa Monica and Venice, Dogtown was the last great seaside slum. "This was not," says Stacy Peralta, the film's director and one of the original Z-Boys, "the place people came to vacation." At the corner of Bay and Main streets, a surf and skateboard shop called Jeff Ho's Surfboards and Zephyr Productions was run by Ho, a legendary wild-man board shaper, along with big, bighearted, big-talking Skip Engblom. Just blocks from the shop was the heart of Dogtown, the late-lamented Pacific Ocean Park pier--POP--where insane surfers danced among the pilings, rebar and rubble--a place, says Nathan Pratt, who now owns Horizon's Surf shop in the same location, "where the debris meets the sea."

A bunch of kids grew up, in the late '60s and early '70s, watching the surfers, trying to learn their moves, copying their attitudes and style on their homemade, self-styled boards, some of them fashioned from the bottoms of bureau drawers. Every so often, Ho or Engblom would give them a piece of advice. They were pretty pissed-off kids, most of them growing up with single mothers or fathers, many of whom were junkies, some surfers or skateboarders themselves. The kids went to one of five elementary schools in the area; "these schools all had banked playgrounds that were indigenous to L.A," Peralta says. After school, they would skateboard, always looking for interesting surfaces on which to set up their courses, using pieces of urban landscape in ways that no architect could ever have dreamed up.

When the kids started to look for more and more vertical spaces, combing the back streets of Venice, they looked over fences for empty swimming pools. The '70s witnessed one of the worst droughts in California history, so there were quite a few. The boys devised a simple pump to remove any stagnant water. They would station guards at various checkpoints, so when they heard police sirens, they could disappear over fences and bushes like wild animals. "The drought," says Engblom, "was a midwife to the skateboard revolution."