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Stacy Peralta (born October 15, 1957) is an American director and entrepreneur. He has previously been a professional skateboarder and team surfer as one of the original Z-Boys.
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Early life
Peralta was born in Los Angeles, California. At age 11, he began competing with the Z-Boys, a group sponsored by the surf shop "Jeff Ho Surfboards and Zephyr Productions". His second sponsor was "Gordon and Smith".
Gaining Notoriety
In 1975, at the age of 17, he entered the Del Mar Ocean Festival Contest. This was his first major competition, a contest with two board skate categories, slalom and freestyle. Peralta placed sixth or eighth in the freestyle category. Following Del Mar, Peralta worked with Chris Dawson and Tom Waller to master the conventional maneuvers required of competitive freestyle skating. Within eight months of his first competition, he became the number three skateboard freestyler at the World Skateboard Championship.[1] He even showcased his talent in the popular television show Charlie's Angels.
Innovation and Success
Peralta can lay claim to the invention of the frontside flip to fakie, although this was on the rolled-over lip of skatepark bowls—it took the young Alan Losi to take it to the coping at the Upland Pipeline skatepark. To help skaters ride this maneuver in, Stacy came up with a device called a "lapper" which was essentially a tough polyethylene flap that bolted to the front of the board's rear truck. These are rarely seen nowadays.
At the age of 19, Peralta became the highest-ranked professional skateboarder. Soon after, he joined with manufacturer George Powell to form the Powell-Peralta skate gear company. With the financial backing of Powell-Peralta, Peralta formed the seminal Bones Brigade, a skate team composed of some the best skaters at the time, many of whom revolutionized modern skateboarding. He also began directing and producing the first skating demo videos for skaters such as Tony Hawk.
Stacy Peralta is also credited in the 1985 movie Real Genius with Val Kilmer, William Atherton and Gabriel Jarret. Stacy played commander of a fictional space vehicle delivering a deadly laser toward an unsuspecting criminal during the film's opening scene.
Behind the Camera
In 1992, Peralta left Powell-Peralta to direct and produce for television full-time. His still-lingering love of the board manifested itself in the film, Dogtown and Z-Boys, a documentary film regarding the legendary skateboard team known as the Z-Boys, and Riding Giants, a 2004 documentary of the history of modern big wave surfing and tow-in surfing. Dogtown won an award at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. Peralta also wrote the screenplay for the dramatic retelling of the Dogtown days in Lords of Dogtown (2005). His most recently released film, Crips and Bloods: Made in America (2008),[2] focuses on gang violence in south-central Los Angeles. Showing his typical historical flair, he provides an insight into the origins of the infamous Crips and Bloods with a look at the social injustice of 1950s and 60s L.A.
In 2008, Peralta directed a series of television commercials for Burger King in which the Inuit people of Greenland, Transylvanians of Romania and Hmong of Thailand, known as "Whopper virgins" in the ads, were offered their first taste of a fast food hamburger and asked to compare the Whopper to McDonald's Big Mac. Peralta subsequently came under attack for what some deemed exploitation of native peoples.[3][4]
Peralta's experience as an entrepreneur and skate demo filmmaker was adapted for the video game Tony Hawk's Underground; Peralta played himself in the game.
Divorced in the 1990s, he has one son, Austin Peralta, he remarried again in 2001 to Gemma Vizor, together they have one child, called Willow.
References
- ^ C.R. Stecyk III, snowBoarder, "Who's Hot!-Stacy Peralta (Fall 1975) and "Fisheyed Freaks and Long Dogs with Short Tales", (June 1976)
- ^ Crips and Bloods: Made in America at IMDb
- ^ http://www.cpbgroup.com/awards/2009/wb/bkvirgins.html
- ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2008/dec/04/advertising-food
External links
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