Later this year will see the release of Mid90s, Jonah Hill’s directing debut, which looks to be the tale of a boy finding a new family, bolstering the genre’s usual tropes with now-nostalgic visions of CD jewel cases and Ren & Stimpy T-shirts.
Minding the Gap, which earned a Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Filmmaking at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, finds director Bing Liu delving deeper into the emotional turmoil that causes people to start skateboarding in the first place.
Skate Kitchen, from The Wolfpack director Crystal Moselle, flips the genders to examine the challenges of being a woman skater while also navigating the intimacies and conflicts of female friendship. In the new films Skate Kitchen and Minding the Gap, those central ideas of connection and self-determination surface in new ways. “Coming-of-age stories work really well with skateboarding. “I’m watching it and I’m just like, not much has changed,” says Eli Morgan Gesner, the cofounder of the Zoo York brand and a longtime chronicler of skate culture. In the five decades since its release, its themes of finding identity and place within a community have become essential DNA strands for the dozens of skate films that have followed, from the silliness of Thrashin’ to the rawness of Kids to the devotion of Lords of Dogtown. Skaterdater won the Grand Prix for Best Short Film at Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar, making it both the first film about skateboarding and probably the most acclaimed. “It seemed to be the perfect symbol of the story that I wanted to tell, which was about the evolution of these young boys using the skateboard as a symbol of masculinity and evolving into a girlfriend as a symbol of masculinity.”įrom the silliness of Thrashin’ to the rawness of Kids to the devotion of Lords of Dogtown “At that point in time in the boys’ lives, skateboarding was a symbol of masculinity, it was a symbol of novelness, of innovative-ness,” he says. Though Backlar thought Skaterdater would impress audiences with the camera techniques they’d developed, he hoped it would also convey a broader idea. For the film he cast seven members of Torrance’s Imperial Skateboarding Club, all of them between the ages of 12 and 15, and none of whom had any acting experience. When producer Marshal Backlar began work on Skaterdater with writer/director Noel Black, skateboarding was still in its infancy, not far from being considered an annoying kids’ activity. Two new girls see the skaters and two more of the boys can’t look away. In the final scene, the boy has ditched his jacket for a sweater and walks off with the girl as the skaters pass in the opposite direction. The other skaters leave the boy, but the girl on the bike is there for him. The boy competes for control of the group with another boy and loses. The pair go on a few chaste dates before the skate crew finds them at a pond and laughs at him like he’s a chump. The boy becomes transfixed by a mermaid fountain that shoots water out of its nipples-OK, that part’s weird-and then he crashes into the girl on the bike. The boy locks eyes with a girl on a bicycle a couple of times. A barefoot boy rides a wooden plank attached to four wheels down the streets of Southern California’s South Bay, leading a pack of kids in matching jackets. The plot of the 1965 short film Skaterdater is simple, but packs a lot into its 18 dialogue-free minutes.
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