BURN OUT & FADE AWAY: An interview with Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator director Helen Stickler. By Warren Curry 8/21/03

Mark "Gator" Rogowski

While the decades of the 50s, 60 and 70s have all been suitably admired and revered by subsequent generations, the decade of the 80s is more often than not treated with a certain amount of apprehension. When that bloated era is revisited, it's usually with the intent to ridicule. Looking at Helen Stickler's documentary, Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator, a definitively 80s story, it's not difficult to see why this is. A time fueled by excess, pomp and circumstance, the 80s might be a painful memory to those who lived through it, yet this era of bigger-is-better and too-much-is-never-enough unquestionably produced more than its share of intriguing characters.

One such character is former professional skateboarder Mark "Gator" Rogowski -- once the most famous member of a struggling subculture, now an odd footnote in the brief history of what has become a legitimate pop culture sport. Gator's frantic rise to glory and even quicker fall from grace culminated in the brutal 1991 slaying of a 21-year-old woman, Jessica Bergsten. Rogowski is currently serving 31 years to life in a California prison for this crime.

Stickler's documentary, while it focuses on one particular person and is set in one specific environment, ultimately is a much bigger film than those parameters may imply. Via this tragic tale, the documentary examines the darkest expense of celebrity and our society's fascination with paradoxically building heroes and then reveling in their demise. Perhaps the saddest element of this story is the inability for the viewer to conveniently attach his/her sympathies to any specific figure in the film.

I had the opportunity to speak one-on-one with New York-based Stickler when she was recently in L.A. Palm Pictures will release Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator in New York on August 22, 2003. It will expand to Los Angeles and other cities on August 29.

(Read the review of Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator.)

How did you get involved with the world of skating?

Mostly through friends. I grew up in Lexington, Kentucky and was always involved in the arts. A lot of skateboarders are very creative, artistic -- it's just something that goes along with that subculture. From high school on, I had friends who were skateboarders. I didn't skate myself, but these were my friends who I went to go see bands with and stuff like that. When Gator committed his crime, nobody really understood what had happened and it became kind of an urban legend, and that's when I started being interested in making the movie.

In an odd way, part of why Gator's story is so unique is because it's such a classically structured tragedy.

Well, there are some twists and turns -- the Born Again Christian thing -- but it is an archetypal arc. It's like the Icarus tale -- the boy who flew too close to the sun and his wings burnt off and he fell. I thought (his story) really worked on a lot of different levels. One, it was a character study of one guy and all of the different elements in his own personality -- his need for attention, his need for fame, his undiagnosed bipolar condition, his ability to just trade up everything to get what he wanted and then find out that it wasn't what he wanted at all. I thought it was an interesting portrait of that on a personal level, and I thought it was an interesting way to tell the story of skateboarding in the 80s, because skating is still a really young sport, and in the 80s is when it really exploded. Of course now it is now pop culture. You can't turn on the television without seeing somebody skateboarding to sell you Doritos or the new Avril Lavigne song or whatever.

I also really thought it was a story about the 80s. The 80s is a decade that, for those of us who lived through it, we have so much nostalgia mixed with, not quite regret, but maybe shame. (laughs) People have really mixed emotions about that decade. The 70s has really been done over and over again with this rosy, tinted, pot-fueled haze of nostalgia. The 80s you can't quite feel the same way about. Even though there was a lot of cool stuff -- graphic design exploded for the first time, amazing music, the whole cult of personality, especially in the realm of celebrity, which is what Gator was studying so intently. A lot of stuff happened, but then you also had junk bonds, Reagan, horrible things that happened with the economy. It all came crashing down. There was a seismic shift in the culture -- it went from being Guns 'N Roses to Nirvana. I felt like for somebody like Gator, who was so identified with pop culture, such a part of it and a leader of it, it's interesting to show when our culture shifts what gets left by the wayside.

Speaking of the 80s, you certainly don't shy away from including footage that could be described as almost painful to look at, in reference to the way people dressed and acted. Did you know from the beginning that you wanted to highlight/poke fun at these aspects of 80s culture that seem so foolish in retrospect, or was it just simply a matter of this footage being organic to the story?

It's definitely a part of the story. Part of his arc is that he was tied in with this culture that became really cheesy, so it had to be seen. (laughs) Painful or not, I had to bring it to the light. The more of that type of footage I found, the better. When we were editing, we had a whole bin that said "80s cheese." One of the things I really like about the movie is that it covers 10 years of his life, so you can get a glimpse of him in the beginning when he has his dreadlocks and his outfits that he got at the Salvation Army, which he individualized or put together himself -- cut off the sleeves or put a silk screen on the back. He's got much more of an original, punk rock style in the beginning and a lot of flair. Then toward the end, he's just in the uniform of whatever kind of line of clothing he's trying to sell. You see that just physically, through his fashion choices and everything about him, he's really changed and lost a piece of what made him special. Anybody could go down to the mall and dress just like him, so why is he important for kids to look up to anymore? That's when he lost his place.

How much footage did you have when you started editing? Also, how did you shape the narrative in regard to determining how much screen time the people you interviewed would receive? For instance -- and perhaps it's just because he's so funny every time we see him -- it seems like Jason Jessee is always popping up.

We had 80 hours of footage. About 15 of that was archival footage and the rest were interviews. Originally, on the phone, I talked to about 60 people and then I interviewed on camera about 40 people, and ended up using about 33 in the film. Some of them are only on there for one shot. We did full-length interviews with everybody, but what it came down to was who was the most articulate or fit what we wanted.

We wanted to have a balance, so there's a lot of Tony Hawk, but then there's a lot of Jason Jessee, because they're like polar opposites of the skateboarding realm. Jason doesn't have the most time as far as like quotes used, but he's on screen more than the others because we didn't cover him up with B-roll as much. The reason why is because when Jason is talking, what he does is I'll ask him a question about Gator and then he turns it around on himself -- through the filter of Jason Jessee. He kind of lives in his own sphere in the film, and when I first shot that interview, it was just really a disjointed, scrambled interview, and I thought, "Well, I don't know if there's anything here that's going to work." Then it ended up helping us out. He creates an identification point for people as they're going through this story that's changing so rapidly over the course of ten years. When you see Jason, you're safe for a second. Tony just ended up being a great interview, because he's very articulate. And then there's a guy named John Hogan who's probably used the most, because he had a lot to say. Some guys came in at the end, and then there's the Gator voiceover which goes away for 40 minutes. We spent a lot of time structuring the film, because there were a lot of challenges to meet to allow the film to show the glory days, show all the different stages of it, and still be a good portrait of skateboarding and of Gator, and also get into this serious crime drama that happened at the end.

There's a subtitle in the film that mentions that prisoners in California jails are not allowed to be interviewed on camera, which explains why we don't see Gator in the present day. But Nick Broomfield interviewed Suge Knight on camera in a California prison for the Biggie & Tupac documentary. What's the story there?

Well, Nick Broomfield went up to a prison in Northern California, and if you just go in, take your camera, get permission through the warden and through the media center to do just a general interview and you happen to come across your inmate, you can pull him aside and interview him. That's exactly what they did. That's why they kind of had to roll up on him. The guy was like, "I'll go talk to him and see if he'll do it," so he just had a warden who was extremely compliant. He was like, "I'll help you out, I'll set this up," and then he was able to do it. It's technically illegal.

I'd already started a journalist/subject relationship with Gator, so for me to kind of use any loophole possible to get an interview with him was just going to get him in trouble for conspiring and not help me. I wouldn't be able to do it because it was already kind of known that I was interviewing him in our personal meetings. The warden in Gator's jail was removed because they were under investigation…there was a big scandal going on in the jail the whole time I was interviewing him. I didn't want to jeopardize Gator any further by doing that.

But the bottom line is that I really am glad I didn't shoot him on camera because it would've been a completely different film, and it would've taken you out of the 80s. People would be looking at him and speculating, "Oh, should he be out?" and trying to figure him out. I really wanted people to look at the past and see his development. That was really what the story was about to me -- the past and not today. His disembodied voice from jail really drives home a more powerful message. He's gone now, he's not a celebrity, he can't be on camera, all the attention that he craved in the past has been taken away from him because of this crime.

The one female that we meet in the film is Gator's former girlfriend, Brandi McClain. When we're first introduced to her, she's reflecting on the 80s and says something to the effect of how great it was to be a skate betty (groupie). Stoked and Dogtown and Z-Boys have painted, with a few exceptions, a picture of skating that is a very male-dominated, boys club culture. Is the world of skating accepting of females on a level other than being a fan club for the male participants?

Well, if you want to be in the sport and skate -- in the 70s, as you see in Dogtown, they have one woman (Peggi Oki). In the 70s, there were definitely a lot more women skating, and in the 80s it just disappeared -- I don't know why. There was only one pro skater and it was Diane Desiderio. She and her husband, Primo, had kind of a novelty show that they would do twice a day at SeaWorld, where they would act out with a whole cast of characters, West Side Story on skateboards. Then around '97, this whole young female skateboarding movement started to happen, and the promoters out here started getting the first skateboarding event together just for women, giving them an arena where they could just kind of grow on their own. They definitely took a lot of flack, but they also got a lot of support because a lot of the guys thought it was crazy that women hadn't had a chance to be professional. A lot of guys had girls they skated with just on a casual level, but those girls just couldn't further themselves in the sport. There's still a lot of resistance -- it's definitely a male-dominated sport, but there are a lot of women behind the scenes. There are a lot of women at the magazines, a lot of woman at the manufacturers that sponsor these guys, so there's a place, but it's just not on the ramp or in the swimming pool for the most part. There are a couple of standout skaters now -- Elissa Steamer, the top female street skater, and she's so much better than so many of the guys that she's really carved out a place for herself. She just is one of the top skaters.

Stoked struck me as a sad film, yet I didn't feel bad for any one particular person in the movie. Was that intentional or am I missing the point?

Well, I really wanted to be objective with the film and wanted people to walk away with their own interpretation of Gator and their own judgment of him and their own feelings about the 80s. If you notice, there is no voiceover in the movie -- it's all the characters, I didn't script it at all. I just spent a lot of time listening to what was coming back to me in the interviews, and then I shaped it in the editing room based on that. I let the participants tell and shape the story. I had ideas -- I knew it was about the 80s, I knew it was about something bigger than just Gator, but I really let that be shaped. The feedback I've been getting -- it's obviously a very sad story, but the nostalgia element takes a little bit of the edge off of it, and the fact that I just think (people) feel it's pretty fully realized. You see so much of Gator's life and you get so much information in such a short amount of time that somehow in a very tragic way it all kind of makes sense. You can see it coming 10 minutes into the film -- when there's that shot of him sitting in the lawn chair looking like Tom Cruise in Risky Business and a few months earlier he'd been in that incident in Virginia Beach where he punched the cop, and he's like, "I love getting arrested; I'm the most blatant, outspoken jerk in the industry," and he's smiling and clearly joking…but he's not. He's revealing so much of his personality in that moment. In hindsight, when I dug up that footage 12 years later, it just gave me chills.

I'm a fan of a lot of the music that's heard in the film. Can you talk a bit about the process of selecting it?

The first thing I went to was my old Rodney on the 'Roq cassettes, and we did get to use that one song by The Vidiots in there called "Laurie's Lament," and not a lot of people use that song so it was cool that we were able to get it. The music took a long time to clear. As soon as we got a good first rough cut, I brought it out to California and showed it to Greg Ginn from Black Flag, East Bay Ray from The Dead Kennedys, Brett Gurewitz from Bad Religion and got there support. But then it was the battle of the major publishers and the major labels for a lot of the other stuff. Like Ian Astbury (from The Cult) had given it his okay, and then it (was dealing with) Warner Bros. It's so hard to get a decent rate, because it's a documentary and we really can't pay the full commercial rate. It was expensive -- one of the most expensive parts of the movie. I just had a big long wish list of stuff I wanted to use and then we started cutting stuff in. Originally, on the list, was like Adolescents and Suicidal Tendencies, but that harder-edged stuff didn't really work with the story, so we just had a couple of hard songs in the beginning. After that, it has to become more pop because the times were changing. It was too aggressive to have that music in a story that was about this crime. All together, there were about 20 tracks of music that were pre-existing, and then I have a composer (David Reid) who scored about 50 pieces of music and we used about 35. There's quite a lot of original score in the movie. He worked for like a year on the movie. Whenever I needed something, I just sent him the scene and he just was great -- an amazing, talented guy. Toward the end, the pop music disappears and it's all dramatic score. There wasn't a place to associate a song with any of that heavy emotion.

In the film, we see that Vision Streetwear and corporate America spelled doom for skating in the late 80s. With skating being more popular now than it's ever been, is there still a fear that the sport might see a decline in the future, or is it just too entrenched in popular culture to go away?

On the industry end, it's actually going on right now. I was at a skateboard video premiere about a month ago and all of the industry was there, and everybody was talking about companies that are losing their distribution or laying people off, pro riders who are not getting signed up for another contract renewal. It's definitely happening again. Ed Templeton is talking in the movie about the change that happened in the late 80s/early 90s, and he said that skateboarding is an up and down thing, and if you're that big and things change, you're fucked. Skating is in a much, much stronger position now. You've got Tony Hawk who's out there marketing to kids, which keeps it fresh. Those kids are always going to grow up and buy skateboards for their kids. But the core industry has definitely slowed down. A lot of it's the economy -- when there's no disposable income, and you have to cut back, buying a skateboard for your kid is going to be one of the things that you don't do. They're getting hurt again. When we played at the LA Film Festival, it was packed, standing room only, 550 people, a lot of skaters there, and I think it just hit them twice as hard -- it's like, "Oh God, here it comes again."

Skateboarding started as a subculture, and now it's mainstream. Does a subculture lose its validity when it becomes mainstream?

I kind of feel that with skating it still has its core element. In the industry, they refer to it as "core." We've got the regular skating and the "core" skating. It used to all just be core. But Tony Hawk is not core. He's the top athlete now, he's the number one guy. There's no Michael Jordan, there's nobody else -- it's Tony Hawk. And to the mainstream he's valid, but to the core they dismiss him. Well, they admire him -- he's a great skater and he's made all this money. It's split off into different sections now, but the core is always going to be there and it stays really true to its roots.

If Gator had become famous a decade later, would his life have turned out differently?

Let me think about that for a second…You know, it may have. There are pros today who are just as deluded (laughs), just as shortsighted as he was, but they don't get the opportunity to be mega stars. The thing back then is that there were a dozen guys that were standout guys and then there were 6 of them that were going to become international superstars and he was one of them. Today, there are like 200 really good guys and there's 50 of them who are standouts and 30 of them are going to be international superstars. And then there's Tony who is in his own world. You can't get to that height today. There are definitely the same personality types in the sport, but because it was smaller then, it was really heaped upon his shoulders and just a few others, which is why he ultimately couldn't handle it.

The story of Gator draws an interesting parallel with young athletes, actors, celebrities who get so much at a young age. Our society obviously creates an environment for these people to succeed in an enormous way, but there's a lot of pressure that goes along with that. Ultimately, is this damaging? Are we just putting too much pressure on these kids and not allowing them to mature at their own pace and enjoy their childhood?

I think with the right kind of guidance it can be a great thing. A perfect example is Tony Hawk. He was showing extreme promise by the age of 7 -- his brother used to be an editor and writer for Surfer and Skateboarder magazine, his mom was a business teacher, and his dad started the National Skateboarding Association for his son and his son's friends to grow the sport. Tony's a perfect example of a kid who had the support of his entire family and his team manager, Stacey Peralta, and a whole community around him to make sure that he stayed grounded and knew the difference between right and wrong. If a kid has that support, I think it's okay. They can turn out to be great -- it can be the greatest blessing in the world. But for somebody like Gator and other skateboarders who came from broken homes, who pretty much got into skateboarding because they didn't want to be at home, they don't have the guidance. That's the big difference.

I do think it is something that's crazy about our society -- the way we value youth and pour all this money into it. It's like we're trying to buy this perishable currency. It's tangible for such a short time. Anyone who's in that situation needs to understand, or have somebody older and wiser tell them, that this is not going to last forever. You've got to try and look 5 years ahead, even though it's hard to look 5 minutes ahead when there are this many demands. I can only imagine what that kind of life is like -- the phone starts ringing at 7:00 in the morning, all day long people want something from you, you've gotten this huge check so you are obligated. It's a lot of pressure.

What's especially dangerous, as Stacey Peralta points out in your film, is the inflated, false sense of self-worth you get from that.

It's hard for them. But is it false? If people are sweating them, it's our culture that has made it important.

That's a great point. My final, two-part question: Do young skaters coming up know who Gator is? If not, is it a goal of your movie to thrust him back into the skating consciousness?

I don't really see my movie as being for young people to begin with. I think it's a very adult story -- it's a young movie, but I don't mean 12 or 13. I think it's 14 and up. The first part of the question -- do they know who he is? Some of them do, a lot of them do. I'd say the ones who are really into skating, read the magazines and want to know about the history, they know who he is; also, because he's been an urban legend for so long. But the majority of them don't.

I wasn't trying to push him back into the spotlight -- I was really just trying to tell the story. Initially, I saw it being more for the Gen-X generation because it's an 80s story and speaks so much about that time. Being part of that Reagan and flash, 80s, new wave, punk rock culture and seeing how it changed so rapidly and had to evolve into something else. As I put the film together, I think it's got a lot of intelligence to it and it's for a broader audience. I was aware that kids were going to watch it so I tried to be very, very responsible in how I handled Gator. I didn't want to shy away from what he had done, and make it clear that he had done something really, really horribly bad and was where he needed to be because of it. I was aware that I was showing all of this great footage of him when he was younger. I didn't want people to think, "Oh, he's a great skater, maybe he should've gotten off." We tend to think that way about athletes.

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