Found

Why skaters heart Spike

By Justin Juul

Most of the kids you see tooling around the streets on skateboards these days don’t know this, but there was once a time when spotting a professional skateboarder in a movie or on television was about as likely as finding a hundred bucks on the ground. But that was a long time ago. Skateboarding’s popularity has boomed a thousand-fold over last ten years and skate-related media coverage is now ubiquitous. It’s great for money-minded professional skateboarders and for large corporations, but skateboarding’s mainstream presence just seems strange to people like me who have been skating their entire lives. On one hand you have the MTV extreme sport stuff—the Rob and Big show, The Life of Ryan, the X-games, etc. And on the other you have contrived docu-dramas, like Larry Clark’s Kids, that treat skate-culture as a symptom of urban decline. It’s interesting stuff, but none of it has anything to do with skateboarding. Thank god for Spike Jonze, the patron saint of real skateboarders and the only real “skate director” out there.

If you’re unfamiliar with Jonze’s work outside of Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and his upcoming reinterpretation of Where the Wild Things Are, that’s probably because you don’t skate. His best films—*Video Days*, Mouse, Goldfish, and Las Nueve Vidas De Paco— can’t be found at any Blockbuster in the world. That’s because Jonze never confuses his mainstream career with his passion for skateboarding, and he never makes “skate-movies” that portray the subculture as anything other than a bunch of dudes jumping down stairs and acting like idiots.

Jonze, in short, has never sold out. While most of his contemporaries have cashed in on their ties to skate-culture—using their underground cred to sell shoes, secure movie deals or to appear hip, culturally relevant and subversive— Jonze has stayed true to his roots. He never exploits skateboarding by using it as a vehicle for social critique and he never caters to the extreme sports crowd by whoring his skatespertise to ESPN (he might occasionally work for hire, but he’ll keep skating out of the picture). Instead, Jonze makes indie films and then reinvests his time and money to help skateboarding stay fresh. He co-owns one of the most successful skate companies in the industry under the umbrella Girl Distribution, writes and takes photos for magazines like Thrasher and Slap, and directs skate flicks on the side.

So, if you want to understand the moral decline of the nuclear family through the eyes of half-naked teenagers who happen to skate, go check out something at the art house. Or, if you want to live vicariously through a spoiled extreme athlete, just turn on MTV. But if you want to know what it’s like to be a real skateboarder, come check out the screening of Jonze’s latest film, Fully Flared, at The Mezzanine Wednesday, which, as you’re reading this, might be tonight. There are some explosions and goofy skits in there, but it’s really just a movie about a bunch of dudes jumping down stairs and acting stupid. Which, if you happen to be a real skateboarder, is the only portrayal of skate culture that ever rings true. Anything else is a soda pop commercial.

topics: directors, san francisco, san francisco film society

03.25.2008