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YEARS BEFORE STACY PERALTA EVER PICKED up a camera, he was defying gravity on a skateboard. He began skating at the age of five and went on to become one of the sport's legends. He didn't know it at the time, but it was good preparation for filmmaking. In his documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, Peralta draws on the same energy and flair that he once brought to skateboarding.
Narrated by Sean Penn, this multiaward-winning film takes an insider's look at the birth of modem skateboarding. It follows a gang of surfers who emerged in the mid-1970s from Dogtown, a rundown section of Santa Monica and Venice, California. These outcasts were known as Z-Boys, named for the Zephyr Surf Shop that provided them refuge. When the waves were low, they took their skateboards to canyon playgrounds and rode the paved hills as if they were ocean waves. Then, when a drought dried up hundreds of LA-area swimming pools, the Z-Boys made the best of it. They trespassed into backyards and rode the concrete pools with a bravado and style that took the sport in a new direction.
Written and directed by Peralta, one of the original Z-Boys, Dogtown shows how a bunch of hard-knocks kids unintentionally created a cultural phenomenon. "When I grew...