By ALEXANDRA GLEMBOCKI
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Look up at Rob Dyrdek on your television. Look down at your Vans sneakers. In fact, look out the window at Fordham University’s campus. You are likely to see someone skateboarding. Skating is inarguably an integral part of our culture, but it was not always that way. A rad new world was created by a group of skaters who made their reason for living into a living. That group of skaters is the Bones Brigade, and this is their story in their own words.
Selected for the Sundance Film Festival against 12,000 other films, Bones Brigade: An Autobiography traces the history of modern skateboarding through the eyes of the men that shaped it, including Tony Hawk, Stacy Peralta, Steve Caballero, Lance Mountain and Rodney Mullen. Out of its six screenings at Sundance, it received five standing ovations.
Director Stacy Peralta (Lords of Dogtown, Dogtown andZ-Boys) never planned on The Bones Brigade: An Autobiography becoming such an important film. In fact, he never planned on making the documentary at all.
“I never wanted to make it […] I just wasn’t comfortable doing another skateboarding film, and I wasn’t comfortable doing a film where I’m one of the characters in it,” Peralta said.
Time proved to be a heavy factor in pushing Peralta to create the film.
“About two years ago Lance Mountain called and said, ‘Look, we really want to do this. Would you reconsider?’ And I still didn’t want to do it, and he said, ‘Look, we are now older than you were when you made [Dogtown and Z-Boys].’ And that’s when I just realized, ‘Okay.’ So I decided to just live with my fears and attack it,” Peralta said.
Along with Lance Mountain, Bones Brigade member Tony Hawk felt that there was an urgent story that needed be told.
“[There is an] unknown that surrounds the origins of modern skating, and then definitely the Dogtown era was well documented, but between that and now —how did we get to what skateboarding is now?” Hawk said. “I think that evolution has not been told.”
Peralta’s documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, a 2001 Sundance selection narrated by Sean Penn, covered the origins of skateboarding and the rise of Peralta’s legendary skateboarding team, the Zephyr Team, during the 1970s.
In the 1980s, Peralta formed a skating team of his own called the Bones Brigade. Peralta handpicked each skater, most of which were youngand unknown at the time.
“Well, with each guy I saw something different, but there was always something unusual,” Peraltsa said. “Like I said in the film with Tony [Hawk], I just saw a kid who was going to stop at nothing, and was never going to be satisfied with anything he was doing. And that told me a lot about what his future was going to be like, that there was a kid would never rest.”
Peralta’s film career began out of the necessity to promote the Bones Brigade team. The first installment of the “Bones Brigade Video Show,” a series of films displaying the team’s skating talents and sense of humor, premiered in Tony Hawk’s parents’ living room in 1984.
According to Peralta, skating and filmmaking have a lot in common.
“They’re both art forms, and they both require skills, and they both require development,” he said. “And they both hurt when you fail. Skateboarding hurts because you slam into concrete. Failing with film hurts because you fail in front of a lot of people.”
Despite his great success in filmmaking, including a Sundance Film Festival Best Director, Peralta is conscious of the fact that there is constant room for improvement.
“Both [skating and filmmaking] require a lot of attention, a lot of practice, and a lot of discipline, if you will,” Perala said. “Filmmaking — every time I think I know what I’m doing, I discover I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s a really difficult thing to become good at, how when I think I’m good at it, I discover that I’m not good at it.”
For the Bones Brigade documentary, Peralta used two cameras — one for wide shots and one for close ups — in order to capture the intimate moments that unfolded during the interviews. For the skaters involved, having Peralta as the interviewer eased the process.
“I think that for this project, it was much easier because we all spoke from the heart, and we were talking to the person who was right there with us all along,” Hawk said. “It’s always fun, you know, [Stacy Peralta is] always very complimentary and respectful of you as an individual. And who would be better to tell the story than the person who created the team?”
For Peralta, Bones Brigade: An Autobiography is not just a skateboarding documentary — it is the story of all of us.
“Whenever I set out to make a film I try to always not make it about what it’s about,” Peralta said. “That’s the goal. I don’t just want to make films that please the people that like that subject matter. I try my best to make films that are inclusive, that tell a universal story, hopefully, people that may not be interested in that subject matter at least feel welcome to step inside this world for a moment, and see something that they might not normally see and experience.”
While the success of the documentary was unexpected, it is much deserved.
“It wasn’t till we started doing the interviews,” Peralta said, “and I saw what the guys were bringing to the picture, that I realized, ‘Wow, we’ve got a much more important film here than I realized.’
The Bones Brigade: An AutobiographyDVD can be purchased on BonesBrigade.com. See the list of worldwide screenings on the same site.
