They're the "Lords of Dogtown"

Make room for the new boys of summer. You know them..maybe you, or your boyfriend are still like them; long-haired beach kids comfortable on both skateboards and surfboards. In the 1970's, a core posse of friends in Venice, California's low-rent district dubbed "Dogtown" were called the Zepher Team, the "Z-Boys". They combined their fave sports and, during a bad drought, took advantage of all the empty swimming pools in the area by launching the beginning of what has now become extreme skating. These kids invented vertical skateboarding.

Stacey Peralta (played by John Robinson, 19), Jay Adams (Emile Hirsch, 21) and Tony Alva (Victor Rasuk, 21) became "The Man" in their teens; the epitome of cool, all while overcoming tons of personal challenges. Recently, in Culver City, California, we spoke with the young trio of actors, some of whom admit they were more comfortable on a skateboard than others.

All the guys have shed their '70's retro look. All now have relatively short hair and were looking California casual in jeans. Victor Rasuk (Raising Victor Vargas), was in colorful shirt, blonde John Robinson (Elephant) wore a yellow tee with a bicycle decal on it and Emile Hirsch (The Girl Next Door)was in a blue tee. All told us what it was like creating their own "That 70's Show" and surfing and skating with their real life counterparts to train for "Dogtown".

Going '70's skater boi included the "look". Emile, evidently, had a marathon session getting the hair right. "I grew it out long and then I went to this dyer (colorist, I think he means) and he gave me this one like platinum blonde one color look and I left. So the next time I had all this resolve in me and I sat down with the dyer for like three or four hours and I made him re-dye it five times. It was brutal but I was there until I got it to just what I wanted".

Was the long blonde hair a chick magnet? Emile claims girls gave him a glance with the brown locks, but once he was a blonde..."I'm walking down the same sidewalk and it was like a much longer look from them. I'm not kidding". At one pivotal point in the film, Jay shaves his head. "I wanted to save the hair too", says Emile. "My mom wanted it. She was like, 'Give me your hair.' I gave Catherine [Hardwicke] some and then I left it in the trailer and I came back on Monday and someone had stolen the hair!" "Hey", we comment, "your hair is on E-Bay right now!" "Yeah, I hope that they just don't string me up on a voodoo doll."

Once Emile went "skinhead", was it a whole new ballgame? "People would be so intimidated especially when I left the tattoo on and went out to a party. You'd get weird looks from everyone. Big, big macho dudes would be like, 'Oh, excuse me. Excuse me.' It was very strange for me to have people react to me like that".

However, John Robinson admits a downside to his long blonde movie locks. "They had like two thousand dollars' worth of Russian ladies' hair on my head. When I got the hair on, it was funny because I looked into the mirror, I'm like, 'Ok, now I'm Stacey Peralta. I'm not John Robinson.' When you're skating and there's sweat everywhere and you're just like...there's hair in your face. You drop into a pool and your hair goes in your face and you're like, 'Aaaahhhh!' So it's totally different".

Victor Rasuk, who also wore extensions, says it was John getting most of the attention... from the wrong people! "I wasn't worried about being the pretty boy. If anything, I think John had that problem. You know, we took care of any guy who tried to hit on John. It was mostly John that got mistaken for a girl. I didn't think that the hair was going to help me with the ladies, but it actually did, that curly long hair".

All the young actors got up close and personal with the real "Lords", a crew of still feisty dudes now in their '40's. Emile's counterpart Jay Adams, one of the most troubled of the group, now lives in Hawaii. "I went to Hawaii and I hung out with him for a week", says Emile. "Quickly I discovered that he didn't like interviews and so I couldn't just ask him questions. I just observed and was just hanging out with him and then he started talking on his own". What did Emile learn? "He told me some really gnarly stories that he probably wouldn't want me to repeat and probably wouldn't repeat to very many people. He also really stressed that ego was poison. That was a big thing for him. Ego was his poison. He was also really concerned about the relationship with his mother. He wanted it to come across on film. He said, 'Me and my mom were best friends. You've got to get that right.'" Jay's mom is played by still hot-looking Rebecca De Mornay in the movie.

John Robinson had a double responsibility to get it right. He plays Stacy Peralta, who directed the documentary on which the film is based and wrote the current film. He got under the guy's skin. "He came out of a family that wasn't as broken as the other guys', and that's kind of what set him apart. He had the support of his parents. In the movie he's kind of the outsider because he's not rambunctious, he's not going crazy. He's kind of composed and he has it together and he's very sensitive and he's always surveying everything and observing everything". But skating meant as much to him, right? "He's having as much fun as they all are, but he was kind of the one stepping back from it all, not going to the parties. At the same time, he was the most competitive. For me, that's what I felt on the set. I was like, 'I gotta be the most competitive here, because that's what sets him apart from everyone else. You didn't realize how intense Stacey was until he started skating".

Victor, who had never stepped on a skateboard before making the film, plays go-getter Tony Alva who formed his own skateboard company and was, perhaps the most commercial of the trio. "My first two weeks that I was here I was being taught by Tony Alva and I was starting to become really cocky. I went down a five foot ramp, I flipped and like, fractured an orbital bone". The injury turned out to be a plus. "I got so much respect from Tony Alva from that and it got around the skateboarding world. It put me out for like two weeks".

All the guys got swept up in the skating world. Victor tells it. "The more I learned how to skate, the more I wanted to do my own stunts. John and Emile as well. And like we found ourselves asking Catherine (Hardwicke, the director), 'Hey, can we do this stunt?' and she would be like 'No, because if you guys get hurt, you guys can't be in this movie.'"

John confides that the "real" "Lords" couldn't have been nicer. "I had such great respect for all these guys and we really felt obligated to tell their story right and to do justice to the documentary and their lives. But they were so nice to us. I mean they supported us 100% on our skating and our acting. At the same time, we felt that pressure 'don't screw it up, man'. Even though they didn't say that to us, we definitely felt that way".

Hirsch grew up skateboarding in Venice so the young actor is sort of the next generation. "I'm good at New School flip tricks and stuff like that on new boards. Old School, is on these tiny little boards and I hadn't really done vertical work either. [As a kid] I was grinding on sidewalks and fences and that kind of stuff. After training, now I can get on a board and skate a pool".

The guys spent three months skating and surfing with Alva as coach. Emile says it wasn't super easy. "Tony would tell you how to do it then it was like 'Just do it. Just f------g do it, dude!' but he was funny and always there for us".

Injuries were inevitable in this rough sport film. Emile wasn't spared. "I had the misfortune of getting what skateboarders call hippers. It's when you fall on your hip again and again and again, just the same spot. It turns into like a blue purple bruise and it's just torture because I had to keep on doing the same move, going around in the pool again. I'd just keep falling on this thing, and I'd be tearing up and getting angry and throwing the board in anger a lot of times".

John Robinson grew up in Portland, Oregon and is still very active as a snowboarder and wakeboarder. "Yeah, I had the balance. I had the board sports down. And I was definitely an adrenaline junkie. So when I came on, I was obsessed with learning to skate. I felt that if we could look like we could skate on film, if I could go and do the moves that they were doing, then my acting would just kind of come with it. I didn't really have to act if I had the skating down. If I was able to have the ego of skating then that would just follow".

Going skater boy came at a cost for John as well. "I sprained my ankle and tore a couple of ligaments in my foot halfway through filming. I had all this acupuncture to bring the pressure down that actually really helped. I went to the ER and they gave me medication, like whatever. And then I go to this other guy and he puts a couple needles in and puts his hands on different areas and does a little stuff and my ankle was feeling better. So I'm like, 'Wow. Ok, western medicine didn't do so well'."

Victor felt that the pool skating stunts were pretty gnarly but surfing played a close and dangerous second. "We surfed right next to Imperial Beach, which is right next to Tijuana, and the current around there just goes everywhere. During the weekend, the contamination levels skyrocket, and that's when we shot. A few of us got really sick."

Emile compared Venice, California today and back in the '70's. "Venice Beach, I grew up there. Occasionally a car would get broken into or there would be some scary, weird bums in the neighborhood. Eventually, I think that my mom kind of got freaked out so we moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was probably a lot more dangerous in Venice back then and there's a lot more money in [the area] now. You could probably get away with a lot more back then. Things might've been a little bit more relaxed. Some of the stuff that Jay said that he did back then, you'd probably go to jail really quick for these days. I think that there is a lot less tolerance for trouble these days".

John agrees. "Obviously (it's) completely different, especially the area that we were living in is so commercialized now. I talked to those guys about it and all the streets that are now like these booming stores, Gap, whatever, were boarded up [in the '70's] and it was just totally shut downtown. It was their playground – nobody was around. They could kind of do what they wanted. A totally different world."

In their own worlds, the actors are into different things; music tastes vary. "I'm into so many different types of music", says Victor. "I've gotten into Jimi Hendrix so much now and Lenny Kravitz, because he's like, pretty much the Jimi Hendrix of today. I like Ben Harper. I like Dave Mathews. But, growing up my idol was Notorious B.I.G., I was part of that whole West Coast, East Coast thing as a young kid from New York City.

The film's soundtrack really got to Emile. "I love a lot of '70's rock now. I love Led Zeppelin but we couldn't get them to give us some of the songs. I wrote Robert Plant like a three page letter on why he should give us 'A Whole Lotta Love' even though he's never given it to any movie ever and he wanted $10 million. That's like a hypothetical that means you'll never get it". John also likes the soundtrack as well as local Portland artists. "I was really into Neil Young and Elliot Smith, who's a Portland artist. Sublime. I have like every type of music".

Although quite young, all three guys have had to struggle. They all tell tales of auditions from hell. Emile's was quite recent. "I had a really awful audition with Robert De Niro and Leonardo Di Caprio for a new movie. Leo's supposed to play my dad, but he's only like 30 and I'm 20. So it was weird and then my character is supposed to breakdown crying. I couldn't do it. I had just wrapped 'Dogtown' the day before. I was just unwinding from that and it was awful. I was so bummed out. Here I was like an idiot with two great actors looking like a buffoon. I was so bummed that I couldn't hardly look Bob De Niro in the eye."

John has a similar tale of bad timing. The 19-year-old still has to finish high school. "I just almost screwed up an audition like two days ago. I was going in for a Clint Eastwood movie and I had like three papers to write last week. I had no time to prepare. He works so fast that his auditions are like, you go in, you go out. I walked in and I was like, 'I can't do this right now. I don't want to screw this up for you guys.' That's the one I feel most bad about, obviously. I'm going to go back in two weeks. It's so hard because I'm finishing school. And right now I'm barely going to graduate. With that and studying for a role – especially a Clint Eastwood movie – it's like impossible. So we'll see."

Victor regrets trying out for something he wasn't really hot for. "I went in on a movie where I didn't really want to but my agents and managers were like 'You need to go in on it'. I kept my mouth shut and went in anyway, and I gave a terrible audition and after I smacked myself in the face, because the word gets around. I think I was consciously terrible. Now, if I didn't want to go in, I just wouldn't go in. You just have to have your lines memorized. I didn't have my lines memorized. When the actress said her lines, I'd look down, and say partially the line and work my way up to looking at her...awful."

Although they play the ultimate team of buddies, a couple of the guys had some close encounters of the female kind. John had to play a love scene with "Thirteen's" Nikki Reed. "It was hard because Nikki, I know her as a friend, obviously, and we had to do that scene for like five hours. This was like this little tiny scene – it was obviously easy to do, but five hours of kissing somebody that you don't think of that way, I gotta say it's kind of awkward". Talk about awkward, Emile had the hots for his "mom"! "Oh, I love Rebecca De Mornay. I saw And God Created Woman two nights ago and I was just glued to the screen. I don't know. Is it weird that I'm attracted to my mom? I guess it's just natural".

After playing close friends in the film, we wondered if the three hot young actors still hang out. Victor says "yes". "I did stay in contact with Emile Hirsch and John Robinson. You hear stories about actors being egotistical and very pompous, and when I went on this film we all, pretty much, in our careers, were in the same spot. We weren't as established as, I guess, Heath [Ledger] was. When we came on, it was a productive, constructive environment. And any time any of us took any accidents or any spills, we were all supportive. Anything we did off screen, it really showed on screen. And yes, we are still friends. Emile still lives in Venice, so we still skate in Venice, and we surf. Actually, I have my wetsuit at Emile's house, I think or actually Catherine's house." And the skater boys roll on.

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Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.