Inside Action Entertainment

Surfing and skating appear in films and TV show from 'Charlie's Angles: Full Throttle' to 'Laguna Beach.' So what's it like trying to take cliquey sports into mainstream media? I checked in with a few filmmakers to find out.

Movies Your Mom Would Like

When film editor Paul Crowder and director Stacy Peralta set out to make Peralta's passion project, 'Dogtown and Z-Boys,' Crowder knew he had to avoid making what's known in surfing circles as "surf pornography." The term denotes the typical action-packed, 'extreme' sport DVDs filled only with pros pulling risky tricks and jumps that hard-core enthusiasts eat up -- and that make little sense to anyone else. These types of films are beautiful to look at, expertly created and highly artistic. But they're also rife with insider lingo and typically don't have a storyline to speak of, or any way for the non-hard-core to connect to them.

So when films and TV shows that are meant for everyone -- not just the SoCal skate rat, but for people like your mom -- it's a special case, with varying results. Trying to make films about these niche-y sports that would be just as exciting for people who maybe have never seen a skate ramp and for those who can name every trick, athlete, or location, is a unique skill that more Hollywood pros are wading into.

Among some of the recent biggie flicks and TV show to feature action sports, three of the biggest docu-features on the subjects to hit screens in recent years were 'Step Into Liquid,' 'Dogtown,' and 'Riding Giants,' which Peralta directed and Crowder also edited. While each movie was unique, each brought a glimpse of the lifestyle, culture and history to the rest of us who don't live the life of a surfer or skater. I caught up with couple of people involved with these films to find out what separates action sport flicks niche-y from the mega-plex.

Step into the Lifestyle

I saw 'Step into Liquid' in a movie theater in LA with two of my friends from school. I'd been teaching them how to surf every Friday in Malibu, where they rented huge foam longboards and paddled out each week to see what they could catch. One guy was Norwegian, the other was German-American. For me, much of the movie was like surfing 101, with athletes I knew by sight, waves I had been to and a world that felt like home -- and yet I was drooling/cracking up/wide-eyed at every scene. And the guys, who'd spent all of three months under the SoCal sun, were riveted too, and amped to get back to the 'Bu, asap.

And that was exactly the point of the movie. Ray Willenberg Jr., the executive producer of 'Step Into Liquid,' echoed Crowder when he said, "We wanted to get away from the surfer DVD -- and that's what a lot of guys have, the dvd that only surfers love. And we wanted to get mom and dad interested in that ... the spectrum [of surfing] is much wider. We knew there were a lot more people that could enjoy the film."

"The surfer DVD," he explained, "is all about cool looking surfing in an area -- hard riding, but nothing of the unusual. [Along with] Vietnam, Costa Rica, [etc.] we included Cheboygan [Michigan] -- we wanted to show people that there was a variety to surfing, that is could be family style."

Skating & Surfing for the Non-Skater or -Surfer

Similar to Willenberg, Crowder and Peralta also wanted a film about rough-and-tumble, bad-ass skaters that the most straight-laced, uncoordinated non-skater could appreciate. Crowder, who was a skater when he was growing up, began surfing at his local LA break around when he began work on 'Dogtown.' He explained the mission when he and Peralta began the project.

"The whole thing was to stay away from that whole type of surf cinema -- what's called 'surf pornography,' -- but ['Dogtown'] was telling stories about a sport. But you don't want to tell stories only to the people who do that sport. You need to give some sense of why they go out there, and what it means, we wanted to do our best to make them understand."

"[There's this surfer attitude,]" he continued, "if you haven't done it, you can't understand. We wanted to get away from that."

Surf Style for the Mega Plex

While all these filmmakers set out to infuse action-packed, story-less insider films with filmmaking lessons from mainstream movies, they also infused their mainstream flicks with some bad-ass surf attitude. For Willenberg's 'Liquid,' this meant featuring the famous waves and surfers who represent the absolute highest form of surfing to its hard-core enthusiasts. There may have been Michigan Lakes, but there were also waves that, in surfer dictionaries, are like sacred places: Fiji's famed Tavarua, Tahiti's Teahupoo and Hawaii's Pipeline.

"I wanted to share the lifestyle," Willenberg said. "Like in Hawaii, people asked, 'did you step into liquid today?;' People felt [we] changed the world ... I think the film touches you."

For Crowder and Peralta, this meant being resourceful with the footage they had to work with, and taking an unconventional approach to production style and artistic flavor. "Stacy thought it was important that ['Dogtown'] was very organic," Crowder said, so what was wonderful about the fact that that was a period piece, was that lots of was on Super 8 [(an older camera style)], and the footage had lots of junk on it. So we decided that we would keep that junky look, and make it all look like that, ... and so we wanted to keep it on that raw [style]."

"Also," he added, "they [the original Dogtown skaters] were busting rules, so we felt like we had free reign to do that. If I wanna let the film blowout, if [actor] Sean Penn makes a mistake [in the narration], ... like [he] delivered this line [wrong, but we kept it]: That was the driving art. That philosophy, the freedom it gave us, [drove the movie]. We had a constant goldmine of footage that was scratched up, and in fact we'd scratch it more."

Surftown, USA?

After a string of movies like 'Dogtown' and 'Liquid,' along with 'Blue Crush,' surfing and skating are popping up on TV from snippets in 'Laguna' to entire shows like 'Beyond the Break.' While skating and surfing have seen huge growth nationwide in the mainstream business market, media's been slower to catch on. The fresh filmmaking philosophy of people like Peralta, Crowder and Willenberg could signal a short-lived media trend, like the faux-hawk I'm growing out as quickly as possible. But it could also be a cue to a lot of other people.

"I'm a little more aware that the sports, anyway, [are more visible,]" Crowder said, "and of how much of that is coming from us. But 'Riding Giants' -- I see it on TV anyway, it plays at least two times a month on cable, and 'Step Into Liquid,' and the 'Billabong Odyssey' -- I see it a lot more in the commercials, and it does seem to be popping up -- it's just part of [media now]."

"I see [the trend] a lot more in the commercials," he continued. "And documentaries have taken a boom since around the time of 'Dogtown.' ... And people are going to see them, there seems to be a new audience for docs, and I'd like to think what Stacy and I did with 'Dogtown' was make them a little bit hipper, a little bit cooler, and the sports seem to be getting a more mainstream, a more acceptable thing -- I mean, there's guys surfing in lakes now."