The Z-Boys are back in town

Before there were X Games, before there were skate parks on every corner, miniature Tony Hawk figures in every Happy Meal, there was the myth of the Dogbowl -- an expanse of curved and flowing concrete that drew skateboarders like a mythical Siren. It was small, tight and dangerous -- an empty, kidney-shaped swimming pool at the back of a Santa Monica mansion. During the drought of ‘75, a scruffy band of Venice skateboarders stealthily began skating in empty swimming pools across Beverly Hills and into the Valley. The Dogbowl was one they could glide without worry -- however thrilling -- that the cops or the owners would show up.

On a breezy spring afternoon in Pasadena, the Dogbowl has reemerged, looking blue and shapely, enticing or pernicious depending on your point of view. Black Sabbath blares from speakers, and teenagers in ‘70s garb -- and men dressed as teenagers -- loll, chat, work, flirt. It’s the last official day of shooting on “Lords of Dogtown,” inspired by the true story of the renaissance of Southern California skateboard culture, and the set has the slightly loopy feel of a montage from a happy-go-lucky ‘70s film, all sunlight and breezy and slightly high.

On the rim of the pool lounge the film’s leads: John Robinson (“Elephant”), with flowing blond hair, who plays Stacy Peralta; the behatted Victor Rasuk (“Raising Victor Vargas”), who plays alpha dog showboat and future world champion Tony Alva; and Emile Hirsch (“The Emperor’s Club”), who’s shaved his head and tattooed a zipper down the middle of his skull for his role as the self-destructive renegade Jay Adams. In this scene, they’ve come to hang out with Sid (Michael Angarano), a composite character who’s ill and confined to a wheelchair.

Unlike the other three, Sid is a rich kid, and his dad has let him drain the pool, creating the Dogbowl. They look like they’re just chilling, but it’s actually a constructed tableau.

“I wish we could be in there,” says Catherine Hardwicke, the director, pointing to the bottom of the pool, where she wants to station a crane. A tall, lean, blond Texan in shorts and a sleeveless flowered shirt, Hardwicke was an architect and then a well-known production designer before, at somewhere over age 40, turning into a writer-director with “Thirteen,” a drama about out-of-control teenage girls in a destructive folie a deux.

Around her neck hangs a small, boxy video monitor, which she clutches, and perpetually fingers, as if she’s caressing the image to life. She wants to be both close to the monitor and close to the actors, so this is the solution, and it shows on screen. In “Thirteen,” her visual style was to combine intimacy with the unhinged, hyperkinetic speed of teenage life. In “Lords of Dogtown,” she’s added a kind of hallucinogenic lyricism, as kids skate hanging from the back of buses, off piers, and ‘round and ‘round empty concrete pipes. The propulsive, bittersweet result has given the studio, Sony, hopes for a summer hit with its June release. The crane gets moved to the pit of the pool, and the scene begins. “Just keep hanging and loving life and thinking how bitchin’ we are,” she says in a Texas twang. She wants this take to be silent. “You’re all too tired to talk.” This is supposed to be a moment of connection for the three heroes, whose unexpected success as skateboarders has catapulted them out of the grungy streets of Venice. All the egos and defenses have finally been shelved, and they all remember -- if just for a second -- the love of the sport and the brotherhood that once bound them. The camera swoops in under the rim of the pool, and then zooms up high, directly above them. Hardwicke meticulously repositions the actors between takes so they fit just so into the frame.

As the team moves on the next setup, Hardwicke, who’s less den mother than groovy big sister, keeps everyone going. “Are we getting weary? Do we need Red Bull?” she jocularly calls out.

In her hands, “Lords of Dogtown” is less a paean to extreme sports, a trippy video of flashy skateboard moves, than a tale of kids raising themselves in the dingy beach community. This racially mixed crew of teenagers from mostly broken homes is discovered by the irascible, hard-partying Skip Engblom (Heath Ledger), a Fagin-like owner of a local surf shop, who molds them into the Zephyr Competition Skate Team, better known as the Z-Boys. Their gritty, urban street style of skateboarding captures the public imagination, launching the whole modern skate-punk aesthetic.

With her laid-back assurance and distinct vision, Hardwicke has been able to corral a lot of difficult personalities -- some who have not always gotten along, as the movie well documents. Almost all the original Z-Boys and scenesters have worked on the film in various capacities, and the actors seem to look up to her.

“She’s making a story about a group of alpha males with an abundance of testosterone. She was the ingredient that was needed to neutralize and make all those chemicals hum harmoniously,” says Peralta, who wrote the screenplay and is a friend of Hardwicke’s from an acting class in the ‘80s.

In the next sequence, the actors take turns skating the pool. Two cameras are stationed above, with one actually in the pool. A former pro skateboarder, Lance Mountain, skates right behind the actors, in perfect sync, a camera perched on his shoulder to give the vertiginous perspective of the skater on the board.

The real Tony Alva explains how in this scene the kids are showing off their moves, egging one another on. “I was the first person to ever do like an aerial on a vertical wall, which is where modern skateboarding is at this point,” he says. Jay Adams did a stunt called an “inverted aerial,” and Peralta, “a technical, surf-style lip trick.” Alva, who describes his role as the film’s “authenticity consultant,” has helped Hardwicke with costumes, surf and skate locations, lingo and, obviously, skateboarding.

Today, the 46-year-old Alva is also moonlighting as his on-screen self -- he’s his own character’s stunt double. His long dreadlocks have been stuffed under a springy wig, and he’s dressed in shorts and a tight-fitting T-shirt, the uniform of his youth. In the last week the pool has taken two of the film’s best stunt doubles, leaving one with a broken leg, the other with an injured collarbone.

“At this point, it’s like the-show-must-go-on kind of deal,” says Alva. “This pool is like a Tyrannosaurus rex. It’s big and beautiful in a way, but it’s really, like, vicious, and if you make one mistake, it can really take a bite out of you.” If you’re a civilian that is.

“Like I said, it’s not that dangerous to me,” he adds. “It doesn’t look dangerous. It looks enticing. It looks beautiful. For somebody else to come in here, like Catherine, it’s dangerous. It’s a hazard. It’s a giant, 10-foot hole in the ground. But to us, it’s Kate Moss.”

Over the edge

The $25-million production is in fact shooting today after shutting down for a week, because the pool nearly killed Hardwicke.

It was the weekend before what was supposed to be the last three days of shooting. They’d been up all night, giddily preparing. Hardwicke was standing at the edge of the pool leading a rehearsal, and apparently her right foot just curled over the side. “I was just standing on the ground and seeing trees, and suddenly the next moment I’m just falling. My brain didn’t comprehend I was falling into a hole. I was so disoriented. I didn’t brake with my arm. I just went limp and hit the pool, and hit my head, and blood was just gushing out of my nose. I was knocked out for two minutes. Not moving.” Admittedly, she doesn’t remember much, ‘cause she’s blacked out most of it. People apparently were crying because they thought she was dead.

She woke up in the hospital, where “the doctor was saying, ‘You fractured your orbital bone.’ ” Hardwicke had shot a scene in the movie where a doctor tells Alva’s character that the orbital bone under his eye was fractured in a fight. So hearing the real doctor’s words confused her. “I said, ‘That’s so surreal. Why are you telling me this? We’re not doing this scene.’ ‘Catherine, you’re in the hospital!’ he said.” The director chortles. She’s fine now, apparently unruffled.

She points out that the ambulances had to come to the “Lords” shoots only three times -- tame compared with “Thrashin’,” a cheesy skateboard Romeo and Juliet flick that she production-designed in the ‘80s. “We had 11 kids leave in ambulances! So skateboarding can be dangerous. There’s a scene [in “Lords”] where they’re trying pools for the first time, and they hit their heads. Everybody laughs, but I know how much it hurts. All the skaters, they had no sympathy for me. Even the nice ones. ‘So you know what it feels like.’ I earned my stripes.”

If Hardwicke, who’s a surfer, sounds relaxed about her brush with concrete, everyone who saw the accident sounds wigged out.

“I have seen many gnarly accidents and stuff in my life, and to have that happen to her was really weird,” Alva says. “It was almost like it happened to my little sister. I ended up going in there and cleaning the blood up out of the bottom of the pool, and it was hard to keep myself from totally just crying because I felt it was my fault.

“It’s almost like somebody picked her up and threw her in. She’s like the maternal figure of this whole production. So it was pretty devastating. If I were to compare her to anything, I would compare her to a Superball. She just bounced higher than ever and just came right back.”

Scourge of society

When the Z-Boys were growing up in their ghetto by the sea, they weren’t seen as elite athletes but as stoners and partyers, surfer dudes and “social dropouts,” says Peralta. “There was no future in what we were doing. People would say, ‘Cut your hair and get a job.’ Imagine a 17-year-old today spending the good part of his day on a pogo stick. You’d wonder what he’s going to do with this. That’s how people viewed skateboarding.”

To the Z-Boys, however, “skateboarding [was] just a vehicle they used to express themselves and carry their art,” says Peralta, who went on to create the Powell Peralta skateboard team (with a young Tony Hawk) and more recently has become known for making documentaries such as “Riding Giants.”

The genesis of “Lords” was a 1999 article in Spin magazine about the Zephyr skateboard team that operated out of Engblom’s surf shop. Producers circled to buy the life-story rights of the principals, Alva, Adams and Peralta, but the latter wouldn’t sell his unless he could be involved with the writing of the script. Of all the skaters, Peralta was always the most sober-minded -- the only one who wore a watch and had a job all the time he was skating.

Peralta’s gambit worked; producer John Linson, who had teamed with his father, veteran producer Art Linson (“Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” “The Untouchables”), agreed to let him write.

In the meantime, Peralta also decided to make a documentary of his experience, the riveting and well-received “Dogtown and Z-Boys.” He wanted to save the team’s real memories, whatever Hollywood did with their story.

“I don’t want to sound lofty, but the documentary was an immense help to the studio because they could see visually what the movie was going to look like, what the characters looked like, what the music looked like,” he says. It was one thing to write about kids surfing in the debris off the then-decrepit Santa Monica Pier and another to viscerally experience them dodging the concrete pylons.

It didn’t hurt that Sony Pictures Entertainment Chairman Amy Pascal grew up in L.A. in the ‘70s going to parties with the actual skateboarders. “It’s familiar territory. We were surfer-skateboard groupies,” she says with a laugh. When production president Matt Tolmach brought the project in, “there was no question we were going to make this movie.” Rocker Fred Durst was originally going to direct, and then, more seriously, “Panic Room” director David Fincher. Hardwicke, who lives in Venice, had heard about the film. “I was so jealous,” she says. “A lot of my friends were working on the movie, and I wished I could do it so badly.” Peralta recommended her for the job, and when she came on, she revamped the script. “I put more girls in,” she says, and fleshed out their home lives. She added a pivotal character in Alva’s sister, Kathy Alva, who dated Peralta briefly before settling into a relationship with Adams.

“One of the most interesting things [was] the whole socioeconomic situation,” she says, “and the fact that they kept telling me once they became stars they would kind of leave their homegirls and go for Malibu babes. They’d go and get tons of great liquor and fancy cars. As their status changed, some of the girls were left behind.”

She also did a massive amount of her own research, hanging with each of the real skaters and even flying to Hawaii to see Jay Adams, who, after stints in rehab and prison, settled there. “He’s such an enigma today. He’s covered in tattoos and looks pretty intimidating, but you still love and feel his charisma, even knowing all the stuff he’s gone through,” says Hardwicke.

Almost all the original Z-Boys have cameos in the film, as do the real Engblom and Craig Stecyk, who contributed significantly to their later fame by meticulously photographing their exploits. Hardwicke asked Peralta and Alva to double themselves for a scene re-creating the Del Mar skateboarding contest, when the Z-Boy’s street style debuted, in what was then a kind of genteel, polite quasi-sport.

“It was like ‘The Twilight Zone’ on steroids,” says Peralta. “I went to the set and it looked identical to the world I remembered. I felt all the feelings. There’s this pack of blond-haired kids, and there’s one that looks like me. It was too much. I almost had to walk out. It brought up a lot of very deep feelings.

“On the flip side, it was beautiful. It was a wonderful, psychotic, transcendental moment. How did this even happen, where I’d be standing in my own lifetime to see this? Especially when we were living that experience, we were so condemned for doing what we did, for being what we were.”

Into the bowl

Back at the Dogbowl, the day unwinds with deceptive languor as more and more kids arrive. They’re waiting to shoot footage for a credit sequence. There are girls from the other scenes, one of the injured stunt doubles who has been driven from the hospital to the set by his mother, “skactors” -- what the production calls real-life skaters who also do some acting. The air is thick with teenage pheromones.

Finally, it’s Alva’s turn to ride the concrete wave. He says he’s in better shape now than when he was younger -- and he still makes his living from skateboarding, although now he has to warm up before he starts really rolling.

Still, when Alva takes zooming around the belly of the pool, a hush falls over the set -- people just stand around and watch. The actors have all worked hard enough to become proficient at skating, but Alva moves with the grace and control of a gymnast and the aggressiveness of a street cat.

Hardwicke jokes that it was hard to get the real Z-Boys to do cameos because they didn’t want to be “shown up by Tony.”

Still, the curves of the Dogbowl can be an unforgiving mistress. Alva takes a tumble, his legs flying up to the sky.

He get up and shakes it off.

“Even Michael Jordan falls.”

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On the Web

To see the trailer from “Lords of Dogtown,” visit calendarlive.com/dogtown.