TMWSTW is the story of how Steve Rocco changed skating forever. Much like Dogtown did in the late 70’s, Rocco changed the landscape of the prominent skate style and gave the power of the growing industry back to the skaters.
Dogtown brought a new style of freestyle skating to the scene. Much more daring tricks with out of the box thinking soon morphed into Vert, taking all the headlines of the culture. This is around the mid 80’s when Tony Hawk was leading the charge blowing the minds of everyone while making crazy money. The skating industry was controlled by corporations, all the sponsors were strict running business. Follow the guidelines we’ve written and represent us well or get the hell out. Steve Rocco had a different take on his passion.
With an epic case of the “Fuck It’s” Steve made his own company called World Industries with the mind blowing skater Rodney Mullen in the late 80’s. Why should we jump through hoops that some old man in a suit dictates to us? They don’t skate, they have no idea what skating is. How can you respect and listen to someone who has no second thoughts of throwing you aside in the blink of an eye? Taking a hard stance against The Man, they attracted other top skaters who pushed street skating into a viable and massively popular sect of skating. Tons of new innovative talent emerged from this including Jason Lee, Mike Vallely, Daewon Song, and Danny Way (just to name a few).
It’s an amazing story, I loved every second of it. Seeing these big names as kids tearing it up having the time of their lives. All the talent got signature boards for themselves along with most of the profit from sales. This led to 16-17 year olds getting paid something like 6-10,000 dollars a month. It was pandemonium! Steve Rocco is a brilliant business man with no real business education. He didn’t like what was going on and just paved a new road that changed the lives of countless people. Spike Jonez started making skate videos for these guys as his first gig, Big Brother Magazine was started here which went on to spawn Jackass, not to mention all of the skate companies that this venture started in it’s surge and implosion (Blind, Girl, too many to list really).
I’m a sucker for skate films/docus in general, but this one had me from frame one. There is a ton of old fantastic footage and some terrific interviews from a lot of guys who were in the thick of it. Steve Rocco didn’t do it all by himself though and this docu shows that pretty well. World Industries meteoric rise and flame out demise is fascinating and inspiring tale. The collapse is almost like a Greek tragedy. This was released in 2007 but it’s a timeless story, watch it!