The Village East theatre had only one film on a recent Monday night. Both inside and outside the theatre, a large and animated crowd was present. Outside the movie, some people were skating, while others were smoking cigarettes and marijuana. Wine was being served to moviegoers inside in tiny plastic glasses by someone.
The theater’s usual blockbuster posters were swapped out for a collection of blurry pictures from “Play Dead,” director William Strobeck’s third full-length skate video.
People who had not arrived early were standing in the aisles when the movie began. A boisterous party filled the century-old movie theatre for almost an hour. People were sipping wine as skateboarders were smoking inside.
Tyshawn Jones, a skateboarding legend, executed a kickflip over the tracks of the 145th Street subway station in the film’s last sequence. The audience’s screams nearly caused the structure to tremble.
Strobeck was hanging out in the East Village’s Tompkins Square Park a few days after his return from a vacation to Japan. He was jet-lagged and was sporting a faded purple hoodie from his new skate business, Violet, as well as a low-profile Yankees cap. Skaters performed tricks all around him on the roughly a dozen uneven ramps at the asphalt baseball field.
Strobeck has contributed to a change in the way the skating community views New York and the entire East Coast. New York skateboarding is prevalent in his Supreme videos, but “Play Dead” is the only one filmed entirely on the East Coast.
If they so want, people in New York City are able to pursue careers. People who work in a variety of industries, such as skateboarding or fashion, may attest to this. Beatrice Domond, a skateboarding celebrity who is also quite well-known online, is the first woman to be sponsored by the clothing line Supreme.
In the early 1990s, Strobeck, who learned to skateboard on the East Coast, performed at the Everson Art Museum in Syracuse, New York. Skateboarders were welcome to use the museum’s outside ledges and steps, which demonstrated the museum’s forward-thinking attitude toward the sport.
Strobeck’s mother frequently drove him from their Cicero home to Syracuse. He would spend days there, staying with pals and receiving complimentary meals from a friend who worked at a nearby Subway. He left school in the tenth grade to spend more time with the “derelicts” (homeless people) at the neighborhood museum, skateboard, and attend concerts in Syracuse’s burgeoning hard-core music scene.
