Documentary details the high-flying world of the Bones Brigade
BONES BRIGADE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Stacy Peralta, 2011)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Saturday, November 3
212-924-7771
www.bonesbrigade.com
www.ifccenter.com
Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as skateboarding began to take off on the West Coast, one group of kids became the face of the growing movement. Sponsored by the Powell Peralta company founded by skateboard engineer George Powell and skater Stacy Peralta, the Bones Brigade was led by the core team of Tony Hawk, Mike McGill, Lance Mountain, Rodney Mullen, Steve Caballero, and Tommy Guerrero, who revolutionized the sport with their incredible tricks and long domination of competitions. Peralta, who went on to make such seminal skating films as Dogtown and Z-Boys and Riding Giants (as well as the gang documentary Crips and Bloods: Made in America), tells the oral and visual history of the early days in Bones Brigade: An Autobiography. Incorporating remarkable archival footage — cameras seem to have captured virtually every key moment in the team’s development — the film features the skaters talking about the rivalry among them, the pressure that came with winning so much, their personal struggles, and their intense desire to make Peralta happy. “I loved seeing these guys succeed,” Peralta says at one point. “They were so talented. I loved it more than I loved my own career.” The most fascinating tales are told by Mountain, who felt he was never as good as the others and essentially reexamined his life when he first saw McGill’s incredible McTwist, and Mullen, who had a long battle with his father and has an unusual way of expressing himself. Peralta also talks to such Bones Brigade rivals as Tony Alva and Christian Hosoi as well as such celebrity skaters and skate fans as Shepard Fairey, Ben Harper, and Spike Jonze. And there’s a hysterical look at the team’s extremely silly first full-length film, the legendary cult classic The Search for Animal Chin (which you can download for free here). Like some of the best skateboard moves, Bones Brigade: An Autobiography starts off slowly but picks up speed, racing toward an emotional finish. You don’t have to know anything about skateboarders to get a kick out of this compelling story of a once-in-a-lifetime team whose impact has now spread across several generations. (For our twi-ny talk with Tony Hawk, go here.)