Newport Beach Film Festival 2012: The California You Don’t Know

California. Land of sunny beaches and tanned bodies, palm trees and frighteningly expensive convertibles. Even as you know the legends can’t all be true, still, you like to believe. What you don’t know is the focus of two movies screening at the Newport Beach Film Festival this week, Day at the Pool and Behind the Orange Curtain. While their subject matters and attitudes are as different as can be, both movies challenge the prevailing mythologies.

Ian Douglass and Eric Fulford’s A Day At The Pool — which has been called “the Spinal Tap of skateboarding” and screens again on 12 May at the Santa Cruz Film Festival — begins with a pleasant enough recollection. That is, Dogtown and Z-Boys, Stacey Peralta’s 2001 celebration of the Zephyr skating team, who transformed the sport during the early 1970s. But that nostalgic look-back didn’t tell the whole truth, Day at the Pool submits. What’s been left out is…. Benton.

“There are a lot of good guys that never got recognition, you know,” says Jay Adams. And at first Benton looks like a lot of good guys, whether you saw them in Peralta’s film or not. Like the other surfers and skaters of that time and place, he was young and blond and tanned — at least according to the photos gathered together here. in these images, Benton squints into the sun or launches himself and his board skyward, all too familiar images, especially if you’ve seen that other documentary.

But as the guys begin to think back on how different skaters reaped different benefits from their dedication to the team, they also let slip that Benton’s omission from the now official-seeming history may not have been wholly accidental. In part, suggests Peralta, who shows up as an interview subject here, it had to do with the sheer awesomeness of Benton’s feats. “You see someone do something that doesn’t make any sense at all,” Peralta says. “You say, ‘I can’t possibly be seeing this.'”

In this case, the something is skateboarding in a pool still filled with water (and yes, the revelation is accompanied by “Aqualung”). It was impossible. Perhaps more importantly, it runs counter to what may be the most profound moment in Dogtown and Z-Boys, when the drought drained the pools in Southern California in the mid-’70s. As they began inventing new ways to skate in a pool they called the Dog Bowl, they gained both air and reputation. A Day at the Pool suggests this moment wasn’t actually the most profound the team experienced, that instead, Benton’s underwater trick.

As the guys go on to debate what happened, how it happened, and who stole what moves from Benton, the legend of the Z-Boys begins to break down a bit as well. Maybe those supposedly big-hearted, open-minded kids from Dogtown actively excluded a kid from Hermosa Beach (Peralta: “That’s the way Jeff [Ho] and Skip [Englom] ran it, they wouldn’t allow Benton to get on the team”). Perhaps those all-important urethane wheels had a different origin than Peralta’s film reports. And maybe, Duane Peters suggests, the Hackett Slash isn’t really Dave Hackett’s own (“The motherfucker did the Slash before you did it!”).

As these stories emerge, the interviews get testier and the movie turns more antic. It also indicates the investments that people have in myths, and how it might feel costly to lose them. A similar point is made in Behind the Orange Curtain, though here the stakes could not be more serious.

The curtain in question is named for Orange County, and it hides a terrible addiction problem. Jamison Monroe, a former addict who now runs the rehab center Newport Academy, points out, “There are more rehab centers here than any county in the country.” The broad scope of the problem has several sources, beginning with the fact that prescription drugs are “everywhere.” They’re overprescribed by greedy or careless doctors (the scrips, says DEA Agent Mary McElderry, also often allow for more refills than necessary), and because they’re prescribed, users don’t imagine they’re harmful.

The film assembles a number of interview subjects, in sequences that range from repetitive to harrowing. Parents recall finding their children dead, some survivors embody the damage done to them, after comas and heart attacks. Other interviewees try to dispel specific myths, by way of drawing attention to the denial that too many parents indulge. Monroe remembers his parents complaining that he was associating with a “bad crowd.” But, he points out, “Those guys are hanging out with me. We all hung out together. You are who you hang out with.”

Other recovering addicts recall their own efforts to deceive their families. Todd Zalkins reports, “As addicts, we become highly specialized in our disease. When I’m active in my addiction, I don’t want help.” As their addictions become overwhelming, they move from expensive pills to cheaper drugs, like heroin. They also find too familiar ways to pay for what they need, through theft and prostitution. The film doesn’t outline the political and economic architecture that

“The abuse of prescription drugs in America has been dubbed Pharmageddon,” the film asserts. But more effective than such headlines, a scary musical score, and the montage of toe-tagged corpses on gurneys at the morgue, Behind the Orange Curtain lets individuals talk. Their stories don’t need to be made more sensational.