Pipe Dreams: Stacy Peralta's New Documentary

You Are Here:

Home >> Pipe Dreams (cont.)

Today's Question
What's the best way to learn to live off the land? answer

Is it better to buy or make a survival kit? answer

Today's Question
What country has the best ratings for eco-tourism? answer

What is the greenest rental car? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine May 2004

Page:

Pipe Dreams (cont.)


	"Riding Giants": Laird Hamilton's hail mary at Peahi, Hawaii. (Sam Jones)

STACY PERALTA WAS BORN on October 15, 1957—three weeks before Greg Noll's legendary ride at Waimea—and grew up a couple of miles from the beach in a nondescript subdivision in Mar Vista, California. His mother was the personnel manager for an oil firm, his father a movie-studio accountant. "They'd let me skip classes if the waves were really good," he says. When the surf was bad, he would skateboard, pretending his neighbors' fence was a double overhead at Oahu's Sunset Beach.

Peralta and his more flamboyant Zephyr teammates, Tony Alva and Jay Adams, took their skateboards into Dogtown's drainage ditches, asphalt schoolyards, and empty backyard pools. By the late seventies, their Zephyr skate team, the Z-Boys, dominated national competitions, hopping mainstream America's back fence and dropping their extreme selves into its sporting consciousness. Peralta was considered the circuit's best all-around rider.

In 1978, as Alva and Adams descended into rock-star lifestyles befitting their sudden fame, Peralta dipped a toe into commercializing his talent, appearing in a Pepsi ad and on Charlie's Angels. But then, at 21, he left the limelight to join aerospace engineer George Powell's year-and-a-half-old Santa Barbara–based skateboard company, which was rechristened Powell-Peralta. He assembled a team of younger phenoms, the Bones Brigade, tapping a gawky 13-year-old named Tony Hawk for the squad, alongside riders Lance Mountain, Steve Caballero, and Mike McGill.

In 1983, Peralta shot and directed The Bones Brigade Video Show, a skateboard stunt tape that Powell-Peralta shipped out alongside its new line of decks and wheels. Skaters across the country began huddling around stores' TV screens, mesmerized by Hawk & Co. in action.

"The shops started calling," Peralta remembers, "saying, 'If there's one thing you do this year, make another one of those tapes.' " He directed Future Primitive in 1985 and, in 1987, The Search for Animal Chin, still regarded as the genre's lone classic. Tony Hawk remembers how Peralta, legendary for keeping his cool, almost lost it during the making of Animal Chin. "He got frustrated because he had to deal with prima donnas," he says. "Us. He basically left for the day to regroup, and showed up the next without passing blame."

By the end of the eighties, Powell-Peralta was a 150-employee company pulling in $30 million a year. Peralta had recently married Joni Caldwell, whom he'd met in postproduction on the fourth Bones Brigade video, Ban This, and they had a son on the way. Peralta was 33, a subculture mogul. And he was over it.

"I'd spent years hanging out with 15- and 16-year-old guys," he says, "climbing fences with them, risking arrest, living on fast food, and lying under tables to get good shots." He wanted to make films—real films. So, in January 1991, he told Powell he was getting out.

Through his connections from the artfully gritty Bones Brigade premiere parties, Peralta landed a few jobs a year directing low-budget commercials and cable-TV pilots. He'd wake up at 4:30 a.m. to work on screenplays for a few hours before heading off to direct, say, a Nickelodeon project about exotic animals.

He sent off his first screenplay, The Medium of Exchange, a black comedy based on the idea of people as currency. After it was rejected for the third time, he started on another. And another, and another. "The feedback I was getting," he says, "was basically, 'Not only are you not going anywhere with this, but it really sucks.' "

Eight years after walking away from skateboarding, Peralta found himself working in a concrete bunker off the Hollywood Freeway, producing a documentary on showbiz highlights of the seventies for New York's Museum of Television & Radio. There was a family of rats living and—worse—dying in the drop ceiling over his edit bay. "Something went wrong," he remembers telling himself. "I followed my heart. This wasn't how it was supposed to go for me."

Things got worse. In the fall of 1999, as his marriage was heading for divorce, Peralta got a call from a producer who wanted to buy the rights to his piece of the Dogtown story. Spurred by skateboarding's late-nineties reemergence, thanks to the X Games and Tony Hawk's signature video games, the producer had discovered that all roads to the sport's roots led through Peralta.

"I thought, This is just what I need right now," Peralta says. "The part of my life I was proudest of, made into some schlock high school comedy."

Page:

•	Subscribe to Outside and get a FREE Gift!

•	Give the gift of Outside Magazine!

•	Subscribe to Outside Online's free weekly e-mail newsletter featuring gear reviews, fitness advice, galleries, podcasts, and more.