Pipe Dreams: Stacy Peralta's New Documentary

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Outside Magazine May 2004

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Pipe Dreams (cont.)


	Stacey Peralta at Mar Vista Elementary School, Los Angeles, California (Sam Jones)

IF ALL THE ACCLAIM is going to his head, Peralta isn't showing it: He maintains a low-key, posse-free modus operandi. During a five-hour afternoon interview that takes us up and down the beach and back to the site of the old Zephyr Surf Shop, he never once pulls out a cell phone. He drives a Toyota Sequoia, lives modestly in Santa Monica with his girlfriend of three years, Fox Searchlight Pictures executive Stephanie Allen, and shares custody of his 13-year-old son, Austin. And he hasn't forgotten his decade out in the cold.

"Yeah, it's nice," he says over lunch at the swanky beachside hotel Shutters, staring at the blown-out afternoon surf. "You go to Sundance for ten days, you're pampered, and you get to feel good about yourself. Then it's back to the hellfire of Hollywood for the rest of the year."

The hellfire is more than the sum of his past struggles and the travails of industry sleaze. It's also about leaving documentaries behind and taking on features. "I could stick with what I'm doing, strip-mine it, and make a lot of money," he says, "but it's time to move on to other things."

Of course, before anyone's going to give Peralta $40 million for his own projects, he's going to have to prove two things: one, that he can cross over from documentaries, a leap few directors have made; and two, that he can transcend the long, inglorious tradition of bad surf films: North Shore, Point Break, and—the horror—In God's Hands. But the one man who's come closest to getting the surf genre right thinks he can.

"Stacy is the best documentarian out there today," says John Milius, who directed the 1978 surf bomb turned DVD hit Big Wednesday and wrote film's most memorable depiction of the surfer's obsessive mind-set, Robert Duvall's "Charlie don't surf" scene in Apocalypse Now. "It doesn't matter whether it's about surfing or skateboarding," Milius continues, "or that those things are trendy right now. It's about kids having a moment of grace in the sun, rock stars trespassing in an empty pool with the cops on the way—demigods for an afternoon. And there's a sadness, because that moment goes away. And everybody can relate."

"With Stacy's strengths, he's got a better chance at doing something great than people who came from rock videos or commercials," Milius argues, alluding to such directing talents as Adaptation's Spike Jonze (who grew up with the Bones Brigade videos) and Fight Club's David Fincher, both of whom have done just fine.

Maybe. If Peralta succeeds, it will be because of his willingness to dive beneath the Hollywood surface, to sift through the debris on the seafloor. But this much is certain: Once again, Stacy Peralta is about to find out who he is.

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