Virgin Blacktop is a 2018 documentary about nine wildly diverse kids who created their own community and rituals via skateboarding.
Naturally, even as skateboarding lies at the heart of writer/director Charlie Samuels‘ insightful new documentary Virgin Blacktop, it’s not about skateboarding. Sure, we learn much about the sport and those early emerging years where boards evolved as well as the ways people rode them, yet it is the people we meet and the impact their small community had on each other that resonants the most. This is a powerful journey on small wheels you won’t soon forget.
Stitching together old Super8 footage and loads of grainy, faded color photographs, Samuels retells the story of the Wizards, a group of kids from Nyack, just north of New York City in the 1970s, who came together as a team to transform the local tennis and basketball courts into makeshift freestyle skateboard parks. There, they would draw growing crowds of fans, perform tricks and eventually win contests as they took their show on the road. They were local superstars bound for glory.
Of course, life happens, trends fade and time marches on. Samuels, who grew up to be a professional photographer, fondly remembers those days and for a long number of years, hunted down old pictures and film and finally got the guys together to bask in the faded limelight and tell their side of what happened then and after, interviewing the crew – now all in their fifties – about their blacktop memories and how it influenced their futures, some rich, some challenging, some cut too soon.
What works best about Samuels’ film is its honesty, digging into the past with a kind of emotional rawness that travels us along a series of divergent paths, tracking the boys from weekends fawning over Skateboarder magazine to adulthood where the Wizards’ bond holds fast even as each have gone on to very different fates. It’s impossible not to draw a line to our own pasts and the friendships that defined our youth, watching the years pass as the gang drift apart and reunite only a few times from then to now.
All the while, Samuels gives his film tremendous style, avoiding the obvious ‘extreme’ flourishes marketers took to using in the 90s at its height, instead tracking his story along the timeline with a visual flair that captures the era very well, mixing in music and imagery that hooks from the start. It’s genuinely compelling. These men, defined by their friendships and love of the sport still ride, these latter years drawing them even closer to their past. There’s a clear and heady kinship among these skaters and while Samuels wisely makes no attempt to give this any deeper meaning or larger sense of impact, by the film’s end, when a circle comes ’round, this deeply affecting moment feels incredibly earned. You might have no interest in skateboarding or maybe as a kid gave it a try and never felt what they did, but you’ll no doubt feel some commaradire with the Wizards, no matter your age. Theirs is a story of life.
Virgin Blacktop is currently in its festival run, to be released in 2019