‘Made’ in the Palisades: Filmmaker Stacy Peralta

As a teen, filmmaker Stacy Peralta helped pioneer skateboarding’s evolution…in OUR empty swimming pools!

‘Pacific Palisades helped midwife the birth of skateboarding.’ ‘ Filmmaker and former professional skateboarder Stacy Peralta —————————————————— ‘We were a rowdy bunch, smoking pot, hopping fences. Peter Graves was constantly calling the police on us. Graves must’ve thought, ‘Where is this element coming from?” It’s amusing to picture the alabaster-haired ‘Mission: Impossible’ star trying to bust the skateboard legends Zephyr Boys from his Santa Monica Canyon home as they trespassed onto the neighboring Leo Carrillo estate to pioneer their sport in an empty swimming pool. And yet, in 1975, that’s what went down around Pacific Palisades, according to former Z-Boy Stacy Peralta, who has since created the critically acclaimed documentaries ‘Dogtown and Z-Boys’ and ‘Riding Giants.’ Peralta spoke with the Palisadian-Post right after taking his latest film, the upcoming meditation on L.A. gangs ‘Made in America,’ to the Sundance Film Festival. So forgive Peralta if he’s coughing his way through our interview, as he caught a bug while in Park City, where by his own account his lungs were not used to the bitter weather (that’s why the guy lives in Southern California, folks). You don’t need to be interested in skateboarding or big-wave surfing going into Peralta’s revered 2001 film ‘Z-Boys,’ and its spiritual sequel, 2004’s ‘Giants,’ respectively, to become absorbed in these documentaries. Peralta’s style”a post-MTV marriage of fast-moving visuals and hip music”is hard to resist. Although Peralta, 50, did not grow up in Pacific Palisades, our neighborhood figured prominently in his history and, by extension, the history of professional skateboarding. As he documented in “Z-Boys,” Peralta”along with Tony Alva, Jay Adams, Steve Cabellero, Peggy Oki and other Angelenos” was an early 1970’s teen prodigy, backed by the Dogtown (slang for ‘Venice’) skate shop Zephyr (hence, ‘Z-Boys’) which helped pioneer extreme skateboarding. The Z-Boys’ innovation of vert (vertical) skating became significantly advanced by the skateboard manufacturers’ switch from clay to polyurethane wheels that allowed the Z-Boys to develop all those ollies, kick flips and half-pipe techniques. Mar Vista native Peralta knew this town like the back of his skateboard. In fact, the Palisades was a de facto skate park for Dogtown’s best”before skate parks ever existed. ‘Two schools figured greatly in our development,’ Peralta tells the Post. ‘Paul Revere [Junior High] and Kenter Canyon [Charter Elementary]. Between the ages of 12 and 19, we’d be there after school, on weekends. We figured out what days the janitors were there and weren’t there.’ Peralta explains the external circumstances that made the Palisades a ground-zero point of origin in the evolution of his sport. ‘In the ’70s, there was a drought,’ he says. ‘So we were skating the empty pools. We probably knew those neighborhoods better than the residents who lived there. Palisades is built on hillsides. There were a lot of vantage points where you could see into backyards and find the empty pools. The first pool we found was on an estate. We called it ‘The Birdbath.’ It was a pool made in the ’40s, so it was not quite vertical. It was steeply banked and didn’t have that coping along the rim.’ Peralta sums things up this way: ‘Pacific Palisades helped midwife the birth of skateboarding.’ What makes ‘Z-Boys’ such an exhilarating film is that, in illuminating the birth of extreme skateboarding, Peralta’s narrative is as much an American story as it is a California one. Stereotypical blond, blue-eyed skaters come to mind, but the real back story of professional skateboarding is multicultural, with Asian- and Mexican-Americans having as much a role in the birth of vert skating as the blond Anglo variety. Call it ‘Underdog-town and Z-Boys.’ Half the fun of Peralta’s film is seeing footage of this ragtag crew storming competitions and stealing trophies”something akin to the Bad News Bears on wheels. Tracing the California-born, Hawaiian-bred world of professional surfing, ‘Giants’ spins great surf lore, even if it comes up a few chromosomes short of Peralta’s predecessor (as the moviemaker was not a direct part of this sport’s history). Nevertheless, ‘Giants’ combines rich oral history, on aquatic legends such as Buzzy Kerbox and Laird Hamilton, with fluid visuals. For ‘Made in America,’ Peralta returned to his personal history when he shot footage at his alma mater. Even at the time Peralta attended Venice High School (Class of 1975), ‘we had gang problems. A kid was killed on the first day we started shooting [‘Made’]. ‘All of the different neighborhoods are literally like independent states,’ he continues. ‘There’s an incredible sense of identity. Imagine each one of those being held down by a group of people like surfers and none of them mix. That’s the way it is in South L.A. Every area has its mythological figures, its folklore. We tried to get into this in as many neighborhoods as possible. We didn’t want to make this film Crip-centric or Bloods-centric.’ Peralta relishes his role as an American documentarian. ‘It’s an enriching experience. People will say, ‘My God, you connected so many dots that we never knew existed.’ What I like about this is, as a documentarian, I get paid to learn.’ Here’s what he learned about gang members while making his film: ‘They don’t grow up in the same America as we do, and yet they’re expected to behave as we have. And it just doesn’t work that way. There are generations of families that have people in penitentiaries and people killed by gangs. There are so few role models for people who are born into this. These kids are the canaries in a coal mine. We have to figure out what’s happening and why this is happening because, at some point, it’s going to come to a neighborhood near us.’ So, given the subject matter, was ‘Made’ a more stressful, dangerous shoot? ‘Without a doubt,’ Peralta says. ‘It was never depressing. It was actually very inspiring to talk to former gang members and see how they’ve turned their lives around. But there were some really unnerving moments where I thought to myself, ‘I’ve made a huge mistake!’ Thank goodness, I was na’ve enough to do it.’ As with ‘Giants,’ ‘Made’ had its genesis while Peralta made his first film. He thought about L.A.’s infamous riots in 1965 and 1992. ‘Two civil rebellions ‘ 20 years apart, 7 miles apart ‘ same half-century,’ Peralta observes. ‘A person we interviewed said, ‘Nobody could believe it would happen here”palm trees and movie stars.” When ‘Made’ is released in theaters later this year, it will prove to his detractors what Peralta has known all along”that he has something to say beyond beach culture. Peralta knew that following up a skateboarding documentary with a surfing doc would pigeonhole him, but he rode that wave anyway. ‘I needed to get [‘Giants’] out of my system,’ he says. ‘These are films that I wanted to see.’ The Zephyr team was not the only underdog in ‘Z-Boys”’so was the movie itself. ‘It started at the lowest point of my life,’ Peralta says. ‘I was in the middle of a divorce. My finances were being set to zero. I had spent seven years in television. I thought, ‘I can’t take any more disappointment.” Adding to his gloom: Hollywood was developing ‘Lords of Dogtown,’ a feature version of the Z-Boys story, thanks to a 1999 SPIN article under option. ‘We did not think our film would see the light of day,’ Peralta says. Cosmic things began happening. Peralta’s original photographer, Glenn Friedman, connected him with Sean Penn, whose Point Dume childhood as a surfer/skater had informed his breakthrough performance as Jeff Spicoli in ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High.’ The actor signed on as narrator, and Vans Shoes backed ‘Z-Boys’ with nary a product placement. ‘They let us make the film we wanted to make,’ Peralta says. ‘We just wanted to try to beat the [‘Lords of Dogtown’] feature and say our piece.’ Ironically, he beat the feature and ‘the documentary helped get the film greenlighted and financed,’ with Peralta as screenwriter. But the 2005 ‘Lords of Dogtown’ theatrical film bombed. If you presupposed it tedious to write the ‘Lords’ screenplay after exhaustively exploring the same subject matter with ‘Z-Boys,’ you’d be correct. ‘But I wanted to try to see it get done properly,’ Peralta says. Even though he has written five other screenplays, the prospect of making features leaves Peralta cold. He feels most in control when crafting a documentary: ‘They’re privately financed, they’re not tested, studios are not breathing down my back. I can call my hours. But the drawback is, there’s a [budgetary] financial limit, unless you get into the rarefied air of where Michael Moore is.’ Which may happen soon for the filmmaker, for quality seems assured when a documentary arrives stamped ‘Made by Peralta.’ Not bad for the kid who used to grind at Paul Revere and half-pipe our empty pools. Thankfully, Mr. Graves didn’t dial the cops fast enough.