“Skating, to me, is life,” says Shannon Grays, as he shows off his custom roller skates. The son of Phelicia Wright, a self-proclaimed “rink rat”, Grays’ enthusiasm towards skating shines brightly through his big brown eyes. For Phelicia, her five children, and many other African Americans, roller skating is not just a passion. It is a profound cultural connector.
These deep generational ties are brought to light in the new documentary United Skates, which explores the attempts to conserve skating as an art form. Brimming with history and anchored by stories of skaters’ struggles across America, from North Carolina to Chicago to Los Angeles, the film uses a microscope to examine a bigger issue: dwindling black cultural spaces.
“If it’s a popular rink or if it’s a thriving rink, it’s because they have a strong African American skate community,” says Pete, a Los Angeles custom skate designer. Journalist Maulah Allah says: “For many black people, being on four wheels is like black-eyed peas and greens on New Year’s Eve.” For these skaters, rinks are edifices where creativity and physical activity collide with acrobatic moves and audacious stunts.
Roller skating has been plagued by the threat of rezoning, by municipalities who prefer the revenue from retail stores and by land developers who want higher prices for the space. In the film, one protester mentions that the US loses about three skating rinks a month. The situation is made worse by over-policing and rink owners who do not welcome African American skaters, barring them with anodyne and arbitrary rules.
“On the white nights, there’s no security, police, nothing. But on the black nights, [there are] cops at the door, security all around, and all we’re doing is going in a circle over a hundred times,” says Wright.
United Skates is executive produced by John Legend, and portrays a patchwork of black skaters’ pride and plight, largely by design of first-time film-making duo Tina Brown and Dyana Winkler. “We happened to pick an incredibly challenging subject matter where there was a huge community – a community that was not our own,” Winkler told the Guardian. “Finding a story within a community that spans an entire country with histories coming out of different cities [with] different music [and] different skate styles and also five generations of history and a current struggle.”
Winkler found the stitching of these grand elements one of their biggest challenges. “How do you shape that into a 90-minute film that makes you fall in love with it, fall in love with the main characters, understand enough of it [so] that you care, understand the issues underneath it, and walk away feeling inspired?” she says.
The pair were not skaters and were not familiar with the skating subculture. They’d been filming skaters in Central Park when they were invited to a national skate party. “We jumped on a bus from [New York’s] Port Authority and went overnight to Richmond, Virginia, and walked into the rink with them at midnight and walked into this world,” says Brown. “We basically just followed a thread and we pulled at it and it revealed the skate world.”
This thread not only led them to a story of discrimination, but also a celebration of hip-hop: in the film, they try to tell the story of how an underground genre emerged as well. Retold through pioneers like Salt-N-Pepa, Coolio and Naughty by Nature’s Vin Rock, the documentary recounts stories of rap legends like Queen Latifah and NWA as they toured the country by roller rink.
According to Brown and Winkler, what happened behind the camera was just as dramatic as what happened on screen. The pair worked side jobs and applied for “every grant you can think of” to bring United Skates to life. “No matter how much we explained the situation, showed the footage that we had, we just kept hearing: ‘Wow, we love this, come back when you have more.’
“We just had to keep our heads down, know that what we were doing we were doing with integrity and we were doing the best that we could and hope that … people would believe in us the way that we believe in ourselves.
The documentary took about five years, from inception to its premiere at the Tribeca film festival. Brown and Winkler actually lived with their subjects during the process of filming. The immersion pays off as they disappear into the stories of the characters on show.
During production, both Winkler and Brown stressed they were sensitive to the feedback from skaters – and even considered pulling the film.
Brown says: “After walking away from this story and having the skaters pull us back in, we decided to cut a little teaser and show it to a thousand or so skaters. Basically, let them decide: should we just walk away? We were ready to do that. Once we showed that teaser, we got a standing ovation! The doors of homes and rinks opened up across the country, and for us, that was a big moment. That was when we knew we weren’t making this film as outsiders, we were making it with the community and by their side.”
In the end, Winkler and Brown credit the strength of the skating world as the reason they didn’t abandon the project. “Roller skating brought me the love of my life. It brought me a sense of community, a sense of culture,” says Reggie Brown, a North Carolina skater. Buddy “Love” Alexander, the former owner of Chicago rink Rich City Skate, later shares a similar sentiment. “This [the skating rink] is where we can let our hair down.”
United Skates premieres on HBO on 18 February
