“It was like stepping back thirty years,” says Tony Alva. “It was pretty incredible.”
THE ORIGINAL ZEPHYR SHOP served as a second home – a focal point of social gathering -- to the local Dogtown kids. The store sold surfboards and a number of other surfrelated items but in the evening turned host to local bands and was the place to be if you cared about all things surf and skate. As one can imagine, the Venice shop was every bit as eclectic as its owners and patrons. “We also found the Zephyr Shop location in San Pedro,” says Gorak. “We needed a street quiet enough where we could close down and film. It had to have a block of commercial buildings, where we could add windows and signage to fit our story.”
THE DOGBOWL location, a grand, perfect kidney-shaped pool that would be the final skating hurrah for the kids, proved to be one of the most difficult locations to find. The original site in Santa Monica/Pacific Palisades is now nothing but a pile of rubble. In the end, a 50’ long, 25’ wide, 10’ deep Dogbowl was custom built at a house in Pasadena. “We actually found the original one and it had been destroyed about a year ago,” says Bemis. “We had to get satellite images from a helicopter to find all of the pools in the area that were big enough to work for us. We found a guide to where all the swimming pools were in L.A. County. There turned out to be about 30,000 of them. Then we drove to some of the locations and flyered the houses and knocked on doors until we found the house we would use. The owners had a pool they wanted to get rid of. We realized we could use an existing wall, and the property in the backyard was perfect. So we enlarged it by 1 ½ times and we were there for three months. Afterwards, we demolished it.”
“They were revolutionary style-setters … snowboarding, rollerboarding, skysurfing, even surfing now – it all comes from what Jay and Tony were doing 20 years ago. So many people are trying to be hardcore now, but those guys didn’t even have to try. It just came to them naturally.” – Kevin Thatcher, publisher of Thrasher, 1999
LORDS OF DOGTOWN was shot entirely on location in Southern California in 56 days. And it was 56 days of a walk – or more appropriately, a skate -- down memory lane for the original members who were involved in the filming. “I walked into the Del Mar contest set,” says Stacy Peralta, “and there’s hippies everywhere, and hay bales and all of the kids looked like we did in the seventies. It was a really emotional thing to experience because I’m not only seeing a time zone that I remember vividly come to life, but I’m seeing a person play my life and my best friend’s lives. I don’t even know how to make sense of it. You’re just inundated with these images. You don’t know if you’re stepping into a dream or if it’s a reality. It was a very Twilight Zone experience!”
The movie has also helped re-establish some friendships that had fallen away years ago in the heat of competition, such as the one between Peralta and Alva. “I loved [Tony] as a kid and hated him for the same reason,” says Peralta. “Because he was so good. Nowadays we can look at each other as adults and just be cool with each other. There’s been a lot of nice resolve with these guys. There’s nothing to win or lose now.”
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