Dogtown and Z-Boys

Dogtown was a seaside slum in Los Angeles, with a legacy of outlaw surfing. The Zephyr Skating Team was an ethnically diverse group of local teenagers who used the surf shop as a refuge from their broken homes. The Z-Boys took their clunky early skateboards onto asphalt-banked school playgrounds and empty swimming pools and created a fluid, surfing-inspired style that was both stylish and improvisational. The Z-Boys caught the mainstream skating world off guard at the "Del Mar Nationals" in 1975. Within a year, the aggressive Dogtown style, and the pugnacious attitude that went with it, came to dominate the sport. Ironically, the Z-boys' debut was both the beginning of their rise to fame and the demise of their existence as a team. In this documentary, Stacy Peralta, one of the original Dogtown skaters, has interwoven these vintage images of skaters and skate spots of the past with new interview material to create an eyewitness account of the birth of modern skateboarding.