skateboard the movie [1978]

 

how the hell have i not seen this flick until last night?!  i was an avid reader of skateboarder magazine in the late 1970s.  i had a banana board [a cheap plastic skateboard that was mass produced & sold everywhere].  i knew who tony alva was.  i even fondly remember seeing the extreme sports movie styled as a documentary go for it [1976] at the drive-ins which featured alva & a few other skateboarders.  but this particular movie?  nope.  

so when i clicked play i didn't know if this pic was a documentary of late '70s skaters & skating culture or a fictive film.  turns out it is the latter but with honest to betsy skating legends like alva & ellen o'neal.  the gist goes like this.  a down-on-his-luck sadsack hollywood agent, played by allen garfield, is in hock to the mob.  he needs a winner.  & at his wits end he finds a group of teen skaters.  one of them even leaped over his parked car.  amazed by these kids prowess on their boards he convenes a pro skating team to compete up & down the pacific seaboard.  hell, even my beloved hometown shows up as a rival skating team.

garfield is not without a kind of neurotic charm.  his charges include skating legends tony alva & ellen o'neal, indeed it is remarkable that the filmmakers included both girls & boys on the same skating team.  i could be quite wrong but i don't recall such teams integrated with both sexes when i was following skating back then.  still, the kids are all right.  even heartthrob leif garrett is in this pic.  but you might not know it for tho garrett gets top billing the real star is garfield, & skating a la '70s style.  

this is a throwback to an era of skating that was transitioning from the carve the bowl, headstands on a board, kind of skating to the skating of vertical walls & wild street skills a la rodney mullen.  even better was the era of the late 1970s captured by the filmmakers which gave me heaps of nostalgia.  indeed, my nostalgia of this era of skating is a kind of soft proof that this is a good work of exploitation cinema.