Flutterby™! : Lords of Dogtown

In the "almost forgot about this" department, we watched Lords of Dogtown on Friday night. I really enjoyed Dogtown and Z-Boys and was hoping that a dramatization of those characters and that era in skateboarding could be really compelling. But it wasn't; I think I enjoyed it more than Charlene because I'd seen Dogtown and Z-Boys and knew something of the history of the sport and of those people, but the film felt like a set of disconnected vignettes without deep background, and characters that we never really connected with.

For those of you who don't know about this era, it was the 1970s, Dogtown was a run-down rough neighborhood in Santa Monica, and the local surfers zealously protected their breaks under the pier, and hung out at the Zephyr surf shop. A bunch of high school kids aspired to be stoner dropout surfers, skateboarding on the old ceramic wheels down to the beach to surf.

Then silicone wheels happened, and these surfing kids started going to the formerly ritualistically formal skateboard competitions and doing new things; getting low on the board, carving, touching the pavement. Then the southern California drought happened, pools were drained, and bowl skating was born as these guys snuck into back yards while the inhabitants were away at work or school and surfed the hell out of those empty pools.

Promoters discovered the new styles and forms, "extreme sports" were born, skateboarding blossomed, and a bunch of punk kids from the slums were in strong demand.

Dogtown and Z-Boys captures this transformation fairly well from old video and reminiscences, but Lords of Dogtown misses something in the dramatization. By trying to stay true-to-life it loses the strong story arc we expect in movies, but by being a dramatization it loses some of the gritty realness, and in these days of big air and ollies and all sorts of other things that are as foreign to the skating those guys did as what they did was to the manuals and handstands of the ceramic wheels era, the impact of the evolution of those years gets lost.