Helen Stickler's documentary Stoked challenges the endless-summer skate mythos with a frank look at the life and times of rebel pro skater Mark 'Gator' Rogowski, who, in the early 90s, was an urban legend. He was easily the most out-there of the 1980s pro-skater elite (which also included Tony Hawk, Christian Hosoi and Steve Caballero).
Gator had upped the ante in terms of where the sport was going: more exposure, more sponsorship, more dollars, and inevitably more of a sell-out. He punched cops in the face and got away with it. He hung with Cindy Crawford. He pranced his way through lame ad campaigns with robot dancing. The guy knew no shame. But there was one Gator legend so shocking it stamped over all that.
When the bottom fell out of the vert skating style he'd come up with, Gator just couldn't get the new street skating the kids were into. He hit his early 20s and, feeling past it, became a Jesus freak. Then he beat a girl over the head with a car wheel-lock, handcuffed her body to his bed, raped her for three hours, zipped her up in a surf bag and strangled her.
When Helen Stickler picked up the threads of the Gator story in 1997, no-one really knew for sure what had happened. "There were a lot of rumours and crazy theories and stories and speculation going around. That was what originally sparked my interest," she recalls. The murder victim was rumoured (incorrectly) to be an extra from the Tom Petty video for Free Fallin' directed by Julian Temple, which featured skateboarders. Or was she Gator's girlfriend, as a tabloid news channel suggested? In fact, the victim turned out to be his ex-girlfriend's best buddy, Jessica Merchant. Gator had confessed and then gone back on his story, claiming the whole thing was a kinky sex game taken too far. Might he even be innocent, as die-hard Gator fans hoped?
"There was an eight-month period between his confession and sentencing when Gator would tell influential pro skaters, 'The truth is going to come out, God will show my innocence,'" Stickler explains. "There was even a board company that was going to issue a board that said 'Free Gator' - it had graphics of him behind bars and was making light of the whole thing."
Stickler believes Gator changed his story when faced with the death penalty. "The other thing is his own shame," she says. "This is a guy, who is very involved in his image, he has to be the top guy. Well now he's gone and he's raped somebody, and at the end of his confession he says to the cops, 'I hope this isn't going to get into the newspapers. I don't want there to be any reporting at all.' As if he could request it, you know?"
Gator is exposed as a kid who came from not very much, with a chip on his shoulder and a lot to prove, who made it big time when the skate scene had its first huge commercial wave in the early-80s. Riding too high on success he became a real-life American-dream-turned-American Psycho. Stickler explains, "Once I got into it, I felt it was really a story about 80s pop culture and it had a wider resonance than just one guy's freak-out."
Begun four years before skateboarding old-timer Stacy Peralta's Dogtown And Z-Boys film, Stickler, who doesn't skate, was entering a closed and secretive community. There was suspicion, not least from Gator himself, who was, and still is, serving a prison sentence of 31 years to life. "He just didn't see how he was going to look good if he told everybody what he'd really done," she recalls. "I mean he's never going to look good!"
Stickler's jigsaw puzzle of interviews and unearthed retro footage doesn't hold back on the skate scene's energy. Gator's rise from skate rat to ego monster is hilarious and heinous at the same time. "I love getting arrested. I think I'm one of the most illegal skaters on the circuit too," brags Gator during a promotional interview. The broken voice of the same man today, over a scratchy prison phone line, introduces the film's undertone of doom. "He's got a lot of self-loathing issues that were definitely already in place by the time he killed this girl," Stickler says. Encouraged by unscrupulous marketing to be the baddest and the maddest, Gator's life soon shapes up to be a one-way route to self-destruction, a rollercoaster that comes to a crashing halt with his brutal crime. Watch and learn.
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