Stacy Peralta
Stacy Douglas Peralta (born October 15, 1957 in Venice , California ) is an American director and entrepreneur , as well as a former skateboarder and team surfer . He was a member of the famous Zephyr Skate Team ( Z-Boys ) and is considered a pioneer of the vert style and the development of skateboards. He is the father of the late jazz musician Austin Peralta .
career
Stacy Peralta grew up in a neighborhood called Dogtown in Venice Beach , a shabby town in California , where he tried surfing with friends of his own age in the bay of Pacific Ocean Park . However, this was only made possible to a limited extent by the Zephyr Surf Team , a group of radical surfers. To make up for the time, Peralta started skating with his friends at an early age . One of the heads of the Zephyr Surf Team , Skip Engblom , noticed this movement and soon formed the Zephyr Skate Team , better known as Z-Boys . Together with his teammates, he tried to bring surfing styles to the streets and the Zephyr team first introduced these techniques nationally in 1975 in Del Mar at a competition. The industry soon became aware of this and signed many of the team's skaters, which consequently meant the dissolution of the Zephyr Skate Team .
At 19, Peralta was one of the most famous skateboarders of the time, winning competitions around the world. He was not only the first of his sport to sign a sponsorship contract with a shoe company ( Vans ), but also the first with Tony Alva to design the first official skate shoe as an athlete. He then began to develop new skateboard designs with manufacturers and hit the nerve of the times with his warp tail design. The board became the highest-circulation skateboard of all time, was an international bestseller and brought the manufacturer G&S (Gordon & Smith) big profits. TV and guest appearances in popular series such as Charlie's Angels confirmed his omnipresence in professional skateboarding.
Together with George Powell he founded the soon-to-be-known skateboard company Powell & Peralta . Thanks to the financial backing Peralta was able to found the Bones Brigade as early as 1976 , a skater group for which he selected the best skateboarders of the time and which had a major influence on modern skateboarding. He began shooting his first skateboard demo videos with Craig Stecyk , laying the foundation for many of the careers of today's famous skateboarders. One of the best-known films from this collaboration is certainly The Search For Animal Chin from 1987, which also presented Tony Hawk , among others . The videos he made for Powell & Peralta are still some of the most influential to this day and were partly responsible for the third skateboard boom.
In 1992 Peralta began working full-time as a director and producer for television and left Powell & Peralta. His continued love for the board manifested itself in 2001 in Dogtown & Z-Boys , an autobiographical documentary about the early years of freestyle skateboarding, and Riding Giants , a documentary about big wave and tow-in surfing . Dogtown and Z-Boys won the 2001 Audience Award and Director's Award at the Sundance Film Festival . Peralta also wrote the screenplay for the Hollywood feature film Dogtown Boys (2005), which was, however, rather moderately accepted in the skate scene.
Today he lives with his son in Santa Monica , California and is still in the skate industry. Peralta's experience as a skateboarder and documentary filmmaker flowed into the video game Tony Hawk's Underground , where he played himself.
The 1992 riots in Los Angeles made such a lasting impression on Peralta that 15 years later he was looking for an answer to the question of why there had been civil war-like clashes in his hometown for over 40 years. He directed the documentary Crips and Bloods about the two predominant gangs of the same name in Los Angeles. The gang war between these two gangs has claimed 15,000 lives over the past few decades. In doing so, Peralta turned at least temporarily away from the sports genre and towards the socio-political.
Web links
- Nonfiction Spots biography
- Stacy Peralta in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Interview on the documentary "Bloods and Crips" (TVDigital.de)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Stacy Peralta. In: IMDb.com. Retrieved May 2, 2020 .
- ↑ Tony Hawk's Underground (Video Game 2003) - IMDb. Retrieved May 1, 2020 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Peralta, Stacy |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Peralta, Stacy Douglas (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American director and entrepreneur, former skateboarder and team surfer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 15, 1957 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Venice , California , United States |