Pipe Dreams: Stacy Peralta's New Documentary

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Outside Magazine May 2004

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Pipe Dreams
Stacy Peralta, the director of "Dogtown and Z-Boys," is about to drop his next boarding epic, "Riding Giants," into a theatre near you—and now the Hollywood big time is calling. Josh McHugh rolls up on the auteur of the stoked set.

By Josh McHugh


	Peralta ripping in back of Mar Vista Elementary School—the first playground he was officially kicked out of as a young skate rat. (Sam Jones)

Stacy Peralta extends an arm toward the ghost of Pacific Ocean Park, the amusement complex CBS created on an old pier over the Santa Monica breakers in 1956. After the park was shuttered, in 1967, the area around the corroding mega-pier quickly mutated into an autonomous zone ruled by a ferocious crew of Venice and Santa Monica surfers, and the scene came to be known by the nickname for their run-down seaside neighborhood: Dogtown. The crew's inner sanctum was a surf break called the Cove, protected on three sides from wave-killing winds by a bristling grove of 20-foot-tall pilings. Throwing punches, jetsam, and stolen carburetors at interlopers who tried to poach their sacred right-hand wave, the crew created a kind of Thunderdome-by-the-Sea.

The pilings and the Cove are long gone—the ruins of the park were finally demolished in 1975—and the only thing remaining is a sign on the beach warning swimmers about underwater debris. "There's not even any debris left," says Peralta. "I checked it out." He doesn't sound wistful—he's just setting the record straight.

With black wraparound shades and a blond goatee flecked with gray, Peralta, 46, is the picture of the aging surfer. You could easily mistake him for one of those glaze-eyed union guys working the boom on a movie set, pulling together enough cash to disappear to Baja or Indonesia for a few months at a time.

But you'd be wrong. Stacy Peralta is, in fact, one of Hollywood's hottest new filmmakers. Three years ago, he reached down into Davy Jones's locker and memorialized on screen the whole decaying eminence of Pacific Ocean Park and, more famously, the Dogtown skate scene it spawned—the Big Bang of modern skateboarding. Peralta's 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys pulled off the trick of making everyone who saw it wish they'd been there—while garnering the approval of those who actually were. It also earned Peralta best-director and audience-favorite awards at that year's Sundance Film Festival.

Now Peralta has followed up with a second boarding epic: Riding Giants, a documentary on the birth and explosion of big-wave surfing that he put together in ten months for just over $2 million. The film became his second triumph at Sundance, opening the festival in January and earning a standing ovation from an overflow crowd. Sony Pictures Classics snapped up the distribution rights, and the film rolls out nationwide July 9.

When the lights go down, audiences will be hit with a blast of apocalyptic horn-and-organ music played over slo-mo aerial shots of man-killing ocean avalanches. This segues into the sound of turntables scratching over metal guitar riffs as tiny surfers plummet down waves at monster breaks like Maverick's and Jaws. Jumping from slo-mo to fast-forward to reverse, splicing razor-sharp 35mm film with grainy 16mm footage, Peralta unrolls an almost forensic examination of the stormy November 1957 day when Greg "Da Bull" Noll, Pat Curren, and a handful of other Southern California haole imports paddled out into 20-foot waves at Waimea Bay, on Oahu's North Shore, and cemented big-wave riding as a sport unto itself. And that's just the first ten minutes.

Having established himself as the Ken Burns of rad, Peralta now finds his edgy authenticity in high demand. Hollywood is thirsty for the box-office juice that recent surprise surf hits like the babes-on-boards feature Blue Crush and the documentary Step into Liquid delivered, and screenplays have been pouring in. Meanwhile, this spring, Columbia Pictures will begin shooting a feature based on the Dogtown days, and Peralta has been talking with Sean Penn (who narrated Dogtown) about directing the Oscar winner in an adaptation of In Search of Captain Zero, Allan Weisbecker's 2001 surf-trek memoir. There's also a third picture in the lineup, based on Noll and the North Shore pioneers.

But as Peralta stands here on the Santa Monica sand, all that seems far off. What's currently showing on the busy screening room inside Peralta's skull is the terror and wonder of his first Pacific Ocean Park experience, in 1970. Peralta, a platinum-haired 13-year-old, and two equally frightened friends had snuck through a passageway under the park's corroding hulk, watching in awe as the Cove crew rode their secret wave.

"What are you little punks doing here?"

Looming over the three eighth-graders was Craig Praycon, a Cove legend, wearing a Russian Cossack hat and military-surplus overcoat.

"If I ever see you here again," Praycon told them, "I'll kill you and bury you in the sand!"

"We left skid marks," Peralta laughs now.

But Peralta went back, alone. He endured hazing and intimidation, working his way up the pecking order until the local Zephyr Surf Shop, which sponsored both the surfers and skate rats, offered him a spot on its junior surfing team. "As a kid, you need to find out who you are," Peralta says. "That's how you find out."

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San Francisco writer JOSH McHUGH is a contributing editor at Wired.

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