For one night in October, the Santa Monica Pier is turning its parking deck into a drive-in theater and its midway into a 1970s time capsule. Locals' Night, the Pier's recurring free community series, lands on Thursday, October 15, with a program built around the 50th anniversary of Dogtown and the Z-Boys — the scrappy crew of Westside surfers-turned-skaters whose low-slung, wave-born style rewired skateboarding and, with it, a slice of American youth culture.
The centerpiece is a drive-in screening of Stacy Peralta's 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, the film that reintroduced the Zephyr Competition Team to a generation that had never heard of Jeff Ho's surf shop. Before the movie rolls, original Z-Boy Tony Alva — one of the most consequential figures the sport has produced — spins a live vinyl DJ set. Admission is free and open to all ages, though drive-in, chair-seating, and skate-ramp access all require advance reservations through the event's Eventbrite page.
The night runs from 3:30 to 10 p.m. and is dense with things to do before the film. The skate ramp is open from 3:30 to 7:30 p.m. for those who reserve a slot and sign a waiver in advance. Books & Cookies hosts musical storytime at 3:30 and 4:30 p.m. inside the Merry-Go-Round Building. A classic-car meet with DJ Cee Rock runs from 4 to 8 p.m. Cheer squads from St. Monica and SAMOHI take the main stage at 5 p.m., salsa lessons with Courtney Parisi begin behind Marisol at 6 p.m., and Chino Espinoza y Los Dueños del Son play at 7 p.m. ahead of the screening. Cycotic Youth closes the evening at 9 p.m.
The Pier is also using the occasion to mark the 100th anniversary of Route 66, whose western terminus sits at the Pier — a fitting pairing, since the Z-Boys' story is inseparable from the stretch of coast where the highway meets the Pacific.
To understand why a city would throw a party for a skate crew half a century on, it helps to go back to a surfboard shop in Santa Monica. Jeff Ho, Skip Engblom, and Craig Stecyk opened Jeff Ho Surfboards and Zephyr Productions, a surfboard manufacturing outfit and shop in Santa Monica. Engblom reportedly chose the name Zephyr for a practical reason — he wanted to be the last listing in the phone book. The shop assembled a surf team of local kids to represent the brand in competitions, and 14-year-old Nathan Pratt, who had learned to shape boards as an apprentice under Ho, Engblom, and Stecyk, was the first member. Others followed: Stacy Peralta, Jay Adams, Tony Alva, and a dozen or so others who surfed the Cove, the post-industrial break at the ruins of Pacific Ocean Park.
What set the Zephyr team apart was drought. When the water got scarce in the mid-1970s and pools drained across Los Angeles, the Z-Boys took their surfing instincts to concrete — carving walls and banks with a low, aggressive, horizontal style that looked nothing like the upright freestyle skating of the era. Their breakthrough came at the Bahne/Cadillac National Skateboard Championships at Del Mar in 1975, where they placed on the podium in three of six divisions and effectively announced that skateboarding's future belonged to the surf-inspired, aerial-driven approach they had been refining in empty pools and on sloping asphalt. The Del Mar Nationals are widely treated as a turning point in the sport's evolution, and the Z-Boys' influence fed directly into the vert and transition skating that followed.
The shop closed in December 1976, and the building at 2003–2011 Main Street was later designated a Santa Monica city landmark in 2007. But the mythology only grew. Peralta, who had been a Z-Boy himself, co-wrote and directed Dogtown and Z-Boys with Stecyk, producing a 91-minute documentary narrated by Sean Penn and built largely from Stecyk's own 1970s footage. The film premiered in 2001, won Peralta the Documentary Directing Award at Sundance, and cost about $400,000 to make while grossing roughly $1.5 million. It spawned the 2005 feature Lords of Dogtown, and it cemented the Z-Boys as founding fathers of a global culture.
Alva, for his part, went on to become one of the first skaters to land a frontside air, and in 1977 became the first professional skateboarder to launch and run his own company, Alva Skates. That a Z-Boy is now the one spinning records on the Pier deck is a neat full-circle for a night built on nostalgia.
The Pier frames Locals' Night as "a curated series for locals, by locals," held on the third Thursday of each month from September through May. This season's edition arrives during a period of disruption at the Pier's front door: the old Ocean Avenue entrance is closed while crews remove the remnants of the 1939 bridge that carried traffic onto the deck for most of a century, part of a construction project the City expects to finish in December 2027. Visitors this fall reach the Pier via a temporary pedestrian bridge about 30 feet south of the former entrance.
Organizers are steering guests away from driving where possible. The Pier encourages arriving by rideshare, Metro, Big Blue Bus, or bike; the walk from the Downtown Santa Monica Expo Station takes about ten minutes, and bicycles are allowed on the Pier. Drive-in ticket holders should note the parking-deck entry window, which runs only from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. — miss it and the drive-in option is gone.
The event is presented by Pacific Park and Playland Arcade, and made possible by the Santa Monica Pier Corp., the nonprofit that operates the Pier and, notably, is not fully funded by the City of Santa Monica. Jim Harris, the Pier's executive director and historian, has said the Z-Boys' influence remains visible in skateboarding and Southern California culture around the world. LA Weekly put it more bluntly: "The Z-Boys defined the language, made the idols, built the myths."
Fifty years after a handful of Santa Monica kids started skating like they were still surfing, the Pier is betting that one free night of vinyl, lowriders, salsa, and a movie about them can still draw a crowd the way the Z-Boys once did.