Sundance Film Festival

Stacy Peralta is walking up just as Angus Hudson—the DP on The Broken—is putting on his coat to leave. In one of those uniquely Sundance moments, Hudson lingers to tell Peralta that they met before, when Peralta was half of the legendary skateboard company Powell-Peralta and Hudson was a 14-year-old skate rat. On the Hobie team in London, Hudson is saying. Peralta remembers the team. “That was my first job as a cinematographer,” Hudson adds, “they strapped a POV camera on me,” and Peralta laughs. “Me too,” he says and turns to me, “A lot of filmmakers started out as skaters,” he says. “There’s a story in that.”

Peralta who made the popular Dogtown and Z-Boys about the 1970s Zephyr skating team and opened Sundance 2004 with the surfing documentary Riding Giants, is back with a documentary that takes on a parallel culture. Peralta has in the past documented the skate and surf culture he grew up in; he had nowhere near the easy access to the South Central LA world of Made in America.

“We shot in two locations, one was a secure location—a gas station in neutral territory, where everyone would be comfortable enough to talk,” he says. Those sequences were shot with a Varicam, while the second unit shot with an inconspicuous Panasonic DVX100 in the field—DP Tony Hardman, a sound person, a still photographer, a PA and Peralta. “Every neighborhood has what’s called a ‘shot caller’, a kingpin,” Peralta says. “We’d meet that character, establish a relationship, and he’d put the word out to let us work. We had to do this neighborhood after neighborhood, because it’s so Balkanized, each with their own history, own mythology.”

“Our country needs to hear these young men. They deserve to have their voices heard,” he says. “There’s a tremendous amount of life there and I felt it had to be directly from their perspective. What do they dream about? What do they want out of life? It blows away your view of what a gang member is. The reason I made this film is because if white teenagers were forming gangs and arming themselves and killing each other we would consider it a national emergency. But for four decades a different value has been put on their lives.”

Which hints at the other important part of Peralta’s documentary. Through archival footage and still photographs he follows those four decades of history (with hints of older history) and the rise of gang culture from the days when black boys rejected by the Boy Scouts of America started coming together on the streets.

“I was a very tough film to online because it’s very editing intensive,” Peralta says. They did an offline on Avid Xpress, what Peralta calls “the radio cut” largely sound bytes puzzled together to frame up the story. Editor T.J. Mahar cut on the Nitris with support at the Post Group (“they really specialize now in independent films and are vertically integrated to that end”).

“We also did a lot of Adobe After Effects [through Blind Propaganda].” That means morphs of gang members faces from teenagers in the Watts riots to elders today. It meant historical photographs turned into moving images. “I found a kid who could do it in his bedroom,” Peralta recalls, “I’d email the picture, he’d send the shot back and it was done. By any means necessary,” he says now that documentaries have to have the look pacing, feel and cadence of commercial films.

“I wouldn’t have made this if I didn’t think it was a tragedy,” Peralta says. “I think it gives people a far better understanding of it and as a result a far better understanding of our country. These guys are saying, ‘when you tell me my life is of no value how can you respect your country?’ One of the older gang members said—in what is being used as the iconic moment from the film—‘if you took these kids and cut them open you would see a stamp inside that said Made in America.’”