The newest cinematic look at Los Angeles is one of the most realistic portrayals of its paradoxical culture. The theme is a potent backdrop for original Z-boy Stacy Peralta's Dogtown and Z-Boys, which hails Dogtown (the "surf barrio" between Venice and Santa Monica Beaches) as the birthplace of vertical skateboarding in the mid-seventies.

MPM's L.A. Gun Melissa Guerrero talked to director Peralta and co-writer Stecyk...

MG: What was it like rounding up the Z-boys? Were they psyched or reserved about doing the documentary?

Stacy: First of all, we had to hire a detective to find two of the original members of the Z-boys. One of the members, whose name I won't mention, didn't want to do it. He wanted money. I said there's no money in this. He said, "Well someone is going to make money on of it." I said, "Well you know what, someone's taking a chance on this by putting money into it and if they make money on it, so be it. But they're offering us a chance to tell our story." He wouldn't do it. One day he came into our office and Craig just verbally mauled him.

MG: Gave him the Dogtown treatment?

Stacy: Yes, in a mentally subversive way. Within three minutes this guy was shaking and was saying, "Okay, okay I agree. I'll do it. I'll do it."

Craig: [laughs] It wasn't quite like that.

Stacy: It was.

Craig: He was just doing hardcore business. He's a street guy and he was shaking the business down to see what was the deal. I just made it a business deal for him. I said, "Look we're trading people, who normally get thousands of dollars to do film transfers or whatever, cases of tennis shoes. I can get you a case of tennis shoes, which I realize doesn't mean anything to you since you're wearing iridescent alligator skin boots. [laughs] You can at least give them to the kids in the neighborhood.' He said, 'Okay fine.'

Stacy: To get him on board, I had to give him some of my magazines out of my archival collection. He had a list.

Craig: He cut a really good deal for himself. I wish he cut the deal that we made because he was the smartest business guy.

MG: What about people you can name?

Stacy: Jim Muir said to me, "Look, I trust that it's you and Stecyk doing this. For that reason I'll get on board and I'll give you everything I got. But if you screw up, I'm gonna kick your ass." I was threatened [laughs] below the jaw. When he saw it [Dogtown] for the first time, he was looking at me really straight, really glaring at me. He's a lot taller than me and he goes, "You can relax. It's okay." That was all he said, so I thought, "Okay he's pleased."

Most of the other guys were really excited to be able to do the story. In fact, Wentzle Ruml said, "Man, I can't believe you're calling me right now. It's not that I want to be in this documentary, I have to do this. I have to say this right now." We flew him into California. He got in at four in the morning. I hadn't seen him in 20 years and he starts telling these stories as we're driving from the airport to the hotel. I was screaming. I was laughing so hard. It made me realize this guy is going to be an amazing interview. I said, "Wentzle don't tell me anymore, stop talking." The next day we sat the camera down and he started going off. He made me laugh so hard, I had tears running out of my eyes. I had to leave the interview. I mean I was convulsing.

MG: Any mistakes?

Stacy: Yeah. Wentzle and Jay Adams were best friends and before Wentzle's interview we showed him part of Jay's sequence [from a correctional facility]. It stunned him so badly that we had to get him out of the room and get him back in gear because he was so distraught.

MG: The documentary doesn't hide the fact that Jay Adams is in jail right now. Do you think the film will inspire him in any way?

Stacy: I really hope so. This LA Times woman who wrote a story said, "I'm so touched by him, I want to go to Hawaii and do a separate story on him." People are really identifying with him. He comes across so real.

MG: What made you guys think of Sean Penn to narrate and how did he get involved?

Stacy: One day someone in the cutting room said they saw Sean Penn at the X-games with his son. We're going, "Oh my God, he'd be the perfect person to do the voice-over for the film." Glen Friedman, our co-producer, said he knew someone who knew Sean's assistant and goes, "Maybe we can get him our trailer." Everyone in the room is going "Yeah right, there's no chance in hell that's gonna happen." We sent it anyway and five days later Sean's assistant calls saying he [Sean] saw the trailer and loved it. She told us he wanted to see the finished film before agreeing to anything. We told her we weren't finished. Then she said he was going to be in town that Friday and to send what we had to his hotel. I sent him three acts of the film with a letter saying I'd really like to meet with him tomorrow, thinking there's no chance in hell he's going to come because he's mixing his movie The Pledge with Jack Nicholson at the time.

Saturday morning at the office, Paul Crowder, the editor, comes into the production room pointing to the phone whispering "Sean Penn." I take a breath, thinking I gotta be cool I'm going to talk to Sean Penn. I pick up the phone and it was instantly like talking to an old skate, surf buddy. He says, "I'm in my car where do I go?" We gave him directions. He shows up. He sits down and says, "Look, I only got about ten minutes. Show me what you got." About an hour later, he gets up and he says, "It's making me sad seeing this."

MG: Why?

Stacy: Because he grew up 30 minutes north of us, he knew about our scene and he skated the same hill and same schools. As we were watching the film he kept going, "Is that that surfer? Is that that school?" What was really weird, too, a couple of day later we talked and he goes, "I want you to know that day I left your office, I walked down to Bicknell Hill that night. I wanted to see it. The next day I drove to Paul Revere [Jr. High] to see the school." It was so cool that he was touching into all of this stuff.

MG: Both of you were responsible for the first skate videos ever, such as The Search For Animal Chin. These videos were shot on film and video, had full plots, and have been embedded into the brains of a generation. When did you have the time to learn filmmaking while running the powerhouse skate company Powell-Peralta?

Stacy: Just doing it. A good friend of mine suggested in 1983 that Craig and I should make a skateboard video. This was on the eve of the VCR revolution. People were just starting to have them in their living rooms; and MTV was just coming on strong. We hired a Hollywood crew, but had to fire them the same day. We got a camera, an editing system and eight months later we had a finished video. We simply made this to promote our team and to give kids an understanding of what our team was capable of doing, but it turned into a rallying call. Our distributors forced us to make one every year because they were bringing kids into the sport. Craig and I like to have a lot fun, so we put a lot of gags and stupid things from culture in there.

It's weird when I meet filmmaking kids who tell me they grew up on our videos. It thrills me because I had no idea what I was doing. But because we didn't know what we were doing, we were able to make the right mistakes that actually lead to interesting ideas, camera movements and editing techniques. If we had known too much, there are things we never would've done.

MG: Dogtown shows some signs of experimentation. How did you decide on the non-linear story line?

Stacy: It wasn't decided, but we knew we needed this point and that point. One week we would be cutting this, and the next week cutting something else, and the next week something else. All the pieces started to take shape. We realized that one sequence should probably go here, and another should probably go there, and if this one was going here then its going to affect what we say there. Three months into the process we started writing less and letting the film tell itself. We got to the point where the film was telling us what it wanted to be. That's the point you want to achieve with every project, when you get out of the way and just follow the film.

Craig: We're more interested in random access information than linear information. We used to make those little skate videos that were designed so you could go into any spot of the skate video, press start and get content out of it. That way people could watch them over and over again, or watch them out of sequence, or watch them however they wanted to watch them and the content would still be fresh.

Stacy: That's not to suggest a haphazard approach, though. We're very non-linear, but at the same time we know we got to put the guts of this in here. If there's no guts, it's not going to hold people.

MG: What were you guys ultimately trying to do with Dogtown?

Craig: We were trying to make it have meanings on different levels. It had visual meanings, aural meanings, narrative meanings, and the music meant something.

Stacy: You have all the different elements supporting each other. We talk about this a lot. It's almost like an Impressionistic painting where sometimes you're just feeling an impression but not a direct underlying thought.

MG: Dogtown seems like it means more to you than mere nostalgia for your youth. How has skateboarding changed your life?

Stacy: It's real simple. Everything good in my life, except my 10 year old son, has come from skateboarding. Even my filmmaking ability comes from skateboarding. I began life as a kid who thought he was devoid of any particular talent of any kind. Skateboarding introduced me to myself and continues to do so today.