SURFER Interview: Stacy Peralta

"Giants" surfer Dave Kalama © Erik Aeder

B>SURFER: And changed the world, as they say. Aside from the whole Dogtown, Zephyr Team thing you went on to be a big success in the skateboard business with Powell Peralta. And then there’s the rumor that you were the first person to produce the first legitimate action sports video.

STACY PERALTA: The years from late 1979 to early 1983 were skateboarding’s dark ages.

All the skateparks from the ‘70s closed. The years from 1975 to 1979 were to skateboarding what the late ‘60s were to the shortboard revolution. There were a lot of experiments and a lot of them failed. Decks were changing dramatically all the time; every month they were getting bigger, wider and longer. The same thing with wheels, ball bearings and trucks. There were a lot of casualties and a lot of people lost a lot of money, especially people who invested in skateboard parks. When skateboarding cycled down it hit pretty hard, but we kept at it and kept at it and finally in 1983 my next-door neighbor, the same guy who sold me the Simon Anderson Thruster, said, “I’d like to make a skateboard video for your company and I will charge you $5,000.” This was just when the VCR revolution was starting to come on. Now I had already made a skateboard video two years prior to that. It was a teeny little thing called Skateboarding in the ‘80s. I think we sold seven of them. But D. David had bigger ideas and it was going to cost us $5,000, and I said okay.

SURFER: D. David Morin? The editor of Action Now magazine in the early 1980s?

STACY PERALTA: Yes. He was a very successful TV commercial actor at the time and did videos as a side project. The first day we were set to shoot, he couldn’t make it because he had a TV commercial to do. So he sent someone in his place to Lance Mountains’ ramp to shoot Lance, Steve Caballero and Mike McGill. I didn’t get along with the guys shooting the film and I fired them after the first day. So from that day forward I got a three-quarter inch camera and a recorder and started doing it myself.

SURFER: How far we have come.

© Friedkin

STACY PERALTA: I also got a little teeny 58/50 tape-to-tape editing system installed in my Hollywood apartment. I started shooting and shooting and I shot about a hundred hours of material. Eight months later we had our first hour-long skateboard video: The Bones Brigade Video Show, which I am told was the first action sports video. In my opinion the difference between an action sports video and a traditional surf movie is that traditional surf movies were usually made by filmmakers, on film, to project in auditoriums up and down the coast. I was not a filmmaker, I was shooting on three-quarter inch video and it wasn’t made for theaters. It was made for home living rooms. I finished it in 1983 and it premiered in the spring of 1984 in the living room of Tony Hawk’s parents.

SURFER: Tony Who?

STACY PERALTA: Ha.

SURFER: Did they make money?

STACY PERALTA: Yes they did. Not a ton. We originally made them as a promotional item but we sold like 30,000. Our distributors worldwide were telling us that we were lifting the tide of skateboarding because one kid would buy one and a hundred kids would see it.

SURFER: So you’re the Godfather of all action sports videos. In some ways that’s cool and in other ways it’s like claiming Reality TV.

Story teller with subjects Laird and Noll. © Friedkin

STACY PERALTA: Totally. I have to say this in a way that doesn’t make me sound like I am blowing my own horn, but from what people tell me two of the 10 videos I’ve made, The Search for Animal Chin and Future Primitive, are on a lot of Top 10 lists of all-time videos. Even Spike Jonez. There was a website that said Animal Chin was his favorite. But having said that don’t blame me for all the guys who followed who have put no context into their videos. I’ve always tried to include some context.

SURFER: So you were trying from the word go to….

STACY PERALTA: To show some of the subversive nature of skateboarding and put a little mind into it and not just show action all the time. Craig Stecyk and I played with this a lot. He was involved in this as well and we wanted to have fun making these things.

SURFER: So all through the ‘80s you were with Powell Peralta and selling skate stuff and making videos. What were you doing in the ‘90s?

STACY PERALTA: I left my skate company in 1991 and started producing and directing television. A mixed bag of stuff for all the networks, but I really did not like doing it. You’re just making product to hit a certain demographic. A certain audience. A certain number. And it’s not pleasing. It’s creatively unsatisfying. You are dealing with a management system that doesn’t reward creativity but rewards delivering eyeballs. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad but if it delivers eyeballs... So I found out about three years later that it wasn’t what I wanted to do and I had to figure out how to get out of doing it and figure out something else that I felt strong about.

SURFER: Was the Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary that story?

STACY PERALTA: Well, before that film I wanted to learn how to write screenplays so I spent four years writing five of them between jobs, but I didn’t get any action on any of them. Dogtown was the first project I did that was made exactly the way I was hoping it would be made.

SURFER: How did Dogtown come about?

STACY PERALTA: I went into Dogtown at the lowest point of my life creatively and career-wise. I wouldn’t call it ‘do or die,’ but if it wouldn’t have worked I don’t know where I would have been today. And I wasn’t going back to television.

SURFER: And, of course Dogtown was huge.

STACY PERALTA: No kidding. Dogtown has sold over a million DVDs and more than 700,000 VHS.

SURFER: Could you ever have imagined that sort of response?

STACY PERALTA: I had no idea. Dogtown was done on the cheap and when I was making it everyone thought it was cool that I was memorializing that period, but… and then when it became such a success…

SURFER: Money changes everything.

STACY PERALTA: I didn’t make any money on Dogtown. Everyone thinks I did, but I didn’t. What Dogtown did is open doors for me to get Riding Giants made. It is never easy to get money to finance a film and everyone says, “Well you did Dogtown. There should be doors opening everywhere.” There were doors that opened for me but that didn’t mean there were people on the other side showering me with cash. I still had to go and do the whole song and dance. I still had to prove that I had a valid idea. I am working in a world that values one-dimensional, high concept ideas and doesn’t always understand the more unique ideas—which is what I thought I had for Riding Giants.

SURFER: What was that idea, in a sentence?