Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #33291 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-10-19
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 82 minutes

Amazon.com
Stoked is a fascinating history of Southern California's skateboarding scene in the late 1980s, a profitable and exciting time for then-rising superstars such as Tony Hawk, Lance Mountain, and Steve Caballero, but a far darker experience for the much-worshipped Mark "Gator" Rogowski. Helen Stickler's film begins with an entertaining overview of skateboarding's renaissance in the '80s, when Rogowski and other talented skaters in and around Los Angeles developed a massive following of boys, who in turn provided a market for flashy, Rogowski-endorsed designer boards and accouterments. For a time, the charismatic, handsome Gator became a wealthy sports celebrity in search of greater pop-star status. When the skating scene shifted from the half-pipe to the street, however, Rogowski's fortunes, sanity, and freedom tragically erode. Stickler's thorough research, smart pacing, and extensive interviews make this a compelling, cautionary tale; a jailhouse phone interview with the now-mid-30s Gator proves both enlightening and spooky. --Tom Keogh

From the Actor
DVD Special Bonus Features:
- Five page interactive timeline
- Rare vintage interview outtakes, skate sessions and demo
- Extended scenes with arresting new material
- Private unseen home movies
- Criminal case documentation
- New short films by director Helen Stickler
- 'Stoked: Uncovered' FUEL television special
- Theatrical trailer
- Weblinks
- Spanish subtitles
- Surround sound

Customer Reviews

Party's over, said the lady.
Like a dark version of Stacy Peralta's excellent documentary "Dog Town and Z-Boys," "Stoked" examines the Southern California skateboarding scene, but it focuses primarily on one tragic figure, Mark "Gator" Rogowski, a skating superstar in the late '80s.

Rogowski had charisma, good looks and talent to burn and he quickly grew wealthy from skate tours and endorsement deals. He had everything he needed to succeed, it seems, except guidance, and when skateboarding styles abruptly shifted gears in the '90s, he found himself adrift, a has-been at 21.

Broke and depressed, he went into a tailspin and "Stoked" follows his sad decline all the way to prison. Despite his cocky demeanor, Rogowski initially comes off as a likeable guy, which makes the mind-boggling crime he eventually committed all the more horrifying.

Director Helen Stickler incorporates interview footage (of Peralta and skaters such as Tony Hawk, Lance Mountain and the hilarious Jason Jessee) with a surprising amount of great skate footage and home video (clips of half-pipe expert Rogowski trying and failing to master street-style skating are particularly sad).

By balancing images from the past with perspectives from the present, Stickler makes "Stoked" into a surprisingly objective study of how gifted people shouldn't handle fame and fortune.

Furnace of Affliction
Helen Stickler's Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator (2002) is an energetic, responsible, and riveting documentary about the tragic life of Mark 'Gator' Rogowski, the Eighties vertical skateboarding champion who violently raped and murdered an ex-lover's close friend after he was abandoned by the sports world and his long-stirring inner demons rose to the fore.

Stickler makes a brief but important mistake when, in the accompanying bonus feature, "Stoked: Uncovered," she questions "how one reconciles someone who has so much greatness in him and so much evil," since nothing in the film or accompanying material supports the hypothesis that Rogowski, who is today serving a life sentence in a California prison after pleading guilty to the crime 1992, was anything but a very talented and increasingly troubled young man who was suffering from an undiagnosed bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and a rapid series of emotionally devastating defeats at the time of the murder. Already brash, self-directed, and handsome at fourteen, Rogowski had literally grown up in the sport's private and public arenas, and known little else but being on object of adulation and fanfare.

While much of the Eighties footage presents Rogowski as a preening, arrogant, and narcissistic teenage rebel manque, he was clearly also highly intelligent, clever, well spoken, industrious, creative, and amazingly charismatic, in Max Weber's use of the term. While none of the factors in Rogowski's life prior to the crime excuse the murder of Jessica Bergsten, there's no evidence that Rogowski was inherently "evil" in any sense of the word, if the word is actually applicable at all. In fact, after his meteoric fall from popularity in the late Eighties, Stoked pragmatically documents how Rogowski became a zealous and sincere "Born Again" Christian who fervently preached the bible to young skateboarders both in person and in print, behavior that his friends and associates responded to only with cynical amusement and disdain.

While it could be argued that Rogowski had evidenced sociopathic tendencies in the years before the crime (an argument that could apply to a small percentage of the skateboarding subculture from the Seventies onward), it could equally be argued that Rogowski, who began skating professionally at fourteen, was a fatherless boy whose athletic popularity was both carefully and carelessly exploited by corporate sponsors, who quickly cast Rogowski aside when trends in skateboarding passed him by, leaving him tragically unable to evolve in his chosen field while only in his early twenties.

Rogowski and the other vertical skating stars were hardly the first people in the history of modern popular culture, from the vaudevillians, the stars of the silent film era, and the Doo Wop singers of the Fifties to momentarily beloved but subsequently typecast television performers, to find themselves confronted with a sudden reversal of popularity and thus of fortune; even a cursory viewing of Stoked reveals that Rogowski's life was already spiraling downward into chaos well before Bergsten's murder.

Though there is no doubt that Rogowski often made foolish personal and business decisions during the peak years of his fame, there were also repeated signs that he was greatly in need of several kinds of professional help, as well as the firm guidance of a dedicated, selfless, and financially disinterested mentor. Nothing underscores this more than an incident which took place in Germany in 1990, when Rogowski, apparently in a drunken stupor, leapt from the top of a "construction crane" and landed on a fence, severely lacerating himself; the next morning, awakening in a hospital bandaged, drugged, and sutured, he had no memory of his desperate action, which was suicidal, whether consciously so or otherwise. If this event precipitated an intervention by employers, friends, or family, Stickler does not include the related material in the film; sadly, the incident in Germany is absent from the timeline of pivotal events in Rogowski's life, suggesting that the episode is as little comprehended today as it was in 1990.

There were other warning signs: famous within the worldwide skateboarding arena as Mark 'Gator' Rogowski, he changed his name to 'Mark Anthony' while at the height of his popularity, and his fervent, potentially desperate, but enduring conversion to fundamentalist Christianity also suggests a crisis of identity--and conscience. Additionally, while touring Australia, he is widely believed to have publicly struck a persistent young fan in a fit of rage, an incident that caused significant damage to his already stricken reputation. Stoked suggests that Rogowski, as a errant taboo breaker, had been a willful source of mischievous entertainment for so many people for so long a period that a certain portion of his associates found his personal disintegration and has-been status a form of continued entertainment-in addition to a well deserved comeuppance.

The fact that Rogowski turned himself in to authorities of his own volition after the murder, which was simultaneously an act of displacement, a crime of passion, and a eruptive manifestation of a psychotic breakdown, also supports the theory of his fundamental decency. Though California law prevented Stickler from filming Rogowski, he appears in Stoked as a disembodied voice, hauntingly, hypnotically, and grimly discussing the events of his past in an eerily monochromatic tone. At no point does he lay the blame for the events of his life on anyone's shoulders but his own.

Like Dogtown And Z-Boys (2002), Stoked is a fascinating examination of a dynamic American subculture that has remained stubbornly misunderstood by the general public, a misunderstanding that the skateboarding community has both decried and perversely acerbated. Stickler treats her specific subject with intelligent objectivity, which insures that Stoked never becomes a for-or-against polemic. Rogowski's is an quintessentially American tragedy, and one that could easily have been lost to wider history without Stickler's exhaustive contribution. Like the boyish Icarus, the vertical skaters of the Eighties attempted to liberate themselves from the forces of gravity and propel their bodies into space; they succeeded, however temporarily, making Black Flag's 'Rise Above' a fitting anthem for their obsessive, poorly appreciated, and frequently heroic efforts.

Chilling.....
There are plenty of "rise and fall" stories out there ---some fact, some fiction--- but this documentary is one of the best told of such stories. One of the most chilling, too.

The story of pro skateboarder Mark "Gator" Rogowski is told in this docu through the mouths of his friends, love interests, and business associates. Add the wealth of video footage of his glory days and news footage of his fall from grace, and we have a complete look at a subculture that encountered unlikely and unexpected success.

One of the main reasons that this documentary works so well is that Helen Stickler was able to show a viewer who knows zilch about the pro skateboarding scene (i.e. Me!)a clear picture of the smash success the industry underwent in the 1980s, and the various image changes it underwent in a rapid amount of time.

Through interviews with Rogowski's fellow skaters, we learn how these young enthusiastic skateboarders became counter-culture icons with rough-around-the-edge attitudes overnight, how commercial success made them rich, and how many of them were not prepared for such a radical lifestyle change. While the "fame element" put many of the skateboarders in this flick in a dangerous line of fire via delusions of grandeur, Gator seemed most ill equipped to handle the baggage that goes along with being in the public eye.

You see so many different faces of Mark Rogowski, from law-scoffing bad boy to an enthusiastic rock-star celeb on MTV to the arrogant know-it-all of the skateboarding world. His fall from fame is tough to watch, especially because pieces of it are caught on tape, namely his attempt to shift from showcasing his talent on traditional competition ramps to the raw "new wave" of street-style skateboarding.

While we've heard similar stories, the intensity of Rogowski's personal demons combined with the sudden skateboarding industry boom makes this story stand out. His battles with his professional image, alcoholism, and childhood traumas short-circuit him, and he desperately grasps onto an extreme school of Christianity to grab a balance. The end result of his born-again stance seems to have done more harm than good, as people in his church told him his problems were purely Satan's doing, and discouraged him from seeking counseling. Sadly, his depression and rage toward his ex-fiance results in him taking the life of an innocent woman who had just befriended him.

In the end, it's hard to feel empathy for Mark Rogowski, yet his tragic fall sinks into your gut. The film does much more than tell his story; it clearly illustrates the potential hazards of being cast into the public eye so quickly, and the delusions that fame can bring. Many of Rogowski's fellow skaters add great insight into the subject, especially Steve Caballero and Stacy Peralta, who seem to really keep the "fame baggage" in perspective.

This is a tough film to watch, but it is a must-see.