With a taste for the fast life that includes loose chicks, vintage hot rods, and above all, a big thirst for a good time, my job was a simple one: capture their life on film and stay clear of the battle.
At the beginning of 2011, documentary filmmaker Mark Stewart decided to follow seven skateboarders who were moving to Los Angeles from different cities in America and Europe to pursue their dreams of professional skateboarding. However, after promising starts, all seven of Mark’s subjects staggered off their intended course with mixed results, predominantly down darker career paths.
They were places I passed by daily and pretty much fantasized about. The only problem was that they just weren’t skateable. They were somehow barely out of reach—a slight flaw in the architecture—but soon I began to scheme about how to fix those flaws.
When I moved to Santa Cruz in the mid-'60s it was a skateboarder's utopia. It was a destination that any discerning skater had to make a trip to. No cops. No hassles. Just skating and rad vibes, the way it was supposed to be. Not to mention the most righteous terrain on the planet. It seemed like it would last forever, but like any society built on a single premise, Santa Cruz started to decay, and what was once a skateboarder's paradise became a filthy beach ghetto. It's still all about the skating and not much else. That's probably why the city fell apart in the first place...—Terkin Von Knobske
America was going through a major change in mind state in the '50s and '60s; people were going through a change in the way that they looked at society and the way that they thought about things. Humans are inventors, we can create something out of nothing, and that is exactly how skateboarding was born.—Chad Muska
Basically, we ended up building jump ramps and taking them to various things when our original idea was to do some stunt-like mega obstacles. But of course the police and security of the world made those big ideas impossible, and now we have this. WHOOPS!—Ed Templeton