'Skatopia': An Interview With the Directors of the Best Skate Film of All Time

There are a lot of skate films out there. Hundreds. Thousands. But none depict the raw, masochistic, innately anarchist nature of the sport and culture like Laurie House and Colin Power’s diabolical 2010 film Skatopia: 88 Acres of Anarchy.

If you haven’t heard of Skatopia, it’s a farm in Ohio’s rural town of Rutland in the United State’s. One writer described it perfectly: a place that’s “a demented mess that ​meets halfway between an anarchistic Mad Max-ian Thunderdome and a utopian skateboard society”. On its 88-acres sit homemade ramps, deep cement bowls and communal living quarters, resourced by a man who’s name has become legend in the skateboard community: Brewce Martin. 

In unorthodox DIY fashion, Martin built a skateboarding paradise, beginning in 1994: an idyllic place surrounded by wildlands, chirping crickets and slow, small town living – but filled with the fervour of raging parties, gun-toters, and car wreckages. 

In the 90s, before the documentary was even an idea, Colin met Brewce at a skatepark in Portland, Oregon, describing him as a “crazy, charismatic guy” living out of his car with a young kid. After taking a shine to Colin, Brewce wrote his number down on a torn paper bag, in sharpie, while boasting of a skateboarding utopia – with crazy parties – that he was in the midst of creating.

Fifteen years later, when Colin and partner, Laurie, were looking for a subject for their next documentary, they remembered his name,. In 2005, they ventured out with their small son to the location that would become subject to one of the best skate films in recent history, right before their annual bowl bash.

A year before Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 featured Skatopia as a hidden level, Jackass’s Bam Margera had also visited the park in an episode of Viva La Bam. But before Colin and Laurie’s documentary, nothing had really touched on the reality of the inner workings of the rambunctious destination.

Laurie and Colin lived there for just under a year, embedding themselves in the community, and to this day are still friends with the man behind the big idea. Through raw, fly-on-the-wall cuts of drunken parties, fights, cars on fire being crashed into rubble, and, of course, skateboarding, the couple captured the good, the bad, and the ugly of the Appalachian skateboarding promiseland. 

And though the park may have changed a little since then, their documentary captured what every skater dreams of. An unkempt utopia that puts one thing above all else: skateboarding.

VICE: So what was your initial impression of Brewce?

Laurie House: I felt like he had glasses on, and he could see resources everywhere he looked. “Oh, that person might buy a sticker, that person is going to contribute $200, that person is going to dig a bowl.” He just saw, in some sense, the world as one vast pool of resources. That's why Skatopia survived: because he had that ability. Which is what we loved about it. He was such a contradiction. It was like this workaholic American dream, slash anarchy. 

Colin Powers:  We were a resource for publicity, of course, to tell his story. We also had a certain amount of available stuff, like money.

Laurie: But most importantly, he could go around saying to every single person in town, and who arrived, that there's a filmmaking crew living there, making a film about him. But also, he would be the first one to admit all of this and chuckle about it. I won't say he's an open book, but he's an open book about some things.

Was Skatopia what you expected?

Laurie: So we showed up in an RV trailer. The hardest part for me was that Brewce liked power. He liked to be the negotiator. We spent a week working really hard, shooting for seventy, eighty hours in a row without sleeping, it was pretty hardcore, but it wasn’t completely unexpected. But then Brewce sits us down. And the first thing he says is: “So I'm gonna own all the footage”.

To us, we've invested our hearts and $5,000, which is like investing a million now. I wasn't used to that hardball. Brewce knew how to yank my chain. Colin was much better with it.

So you were there for a year filming. What was that like?

Laurie: About nine months. We were renting a house and we brought our kid down and he went to the local daycare. We were very embedded.

They tell filmmakers not to get too close to your subjects, you'll lose your perspective, blah, blah, blah. But I feel like if we hadn't moved there, we would have been so clueless about the amazingness of Appalachia. We would have missed so many slow, beautiful moments, many of which did not make it into the movie. 

I think every filmmaker carries a pain with what they left out of their movie. And I think we so wanted to make a documentary of that era, of charging along and telling the story, you give up your top 50 little scenes in moments that don't fit in. 

When I think of being there, I think of so many sweet moments of sitting on the porch and talking about everything for three hours, because that's the way of the culture there. 

Colin: You know, the most common thing you hear from someone showing up for their first party, they're saying, look how incredibly beautiful it is here. Everything's growing. It's lush, it's beautiful. We're out here on this hillside in the evening with the crickets and the fire. It’s surprising for a bunch of hard-nosed skaters who are about to crash a car into a tree to then be waxing on about the full moon.

You said you took your son there. That doesn’t seem like the type of place that’s child friendly?

Laurie:  I think when we brought our little son there, people were really like, “What the fuck?” Brewce had a daughter, who was sometimes there, who was exactly our son's age. Brewce did raise his own son at Skatopia. I mean, our son learned how to curse there. We’d go driving down the road and you hit a bump and he’d go, “What the fuck was that?” but we didn't try to stop him.

I will say that the most embarrassing moment is when we left Skatopia and we came up to New York where Colin had gotten a job. We were at a yard sale and suddenly my son picks up an arrow, holds it in the air and yells, “Is this what we play with when we're drunk.” And all the good citizens up there were just looking at him.

So what was it like living there? What was the community like? You must have seen some things.

Laurie: Well, it’s interesting, because the community in general is pretty accepting of them [the Skatopia residents). 

Colin: We did a bunch of interviews with people outside of Skatopia. It was really good to put it in the context of the sort of libertarian mindset. 

What they do behind their fences is the business attitude that Brewce, and most of the folks who were permanent residents, were raised with. It's really refreshing, it's really a community that, even though we were clearly outsiders – urban, Northeastern, academically trained people – they really welcomed us without hesitation.

We were neighbours, we were renting a farm down the road, and we were made to feel very much a part of the community. Even like 2 or 3 months into our stay. 

We would have neighbours drive up the driveway just to say “hi”. And so those two sides of that coin are fascinating. They’re a really tight-knit community. These organic farmers are his neighbours and they’re doing great work saving exotic plants and organic farming. And they're like, “please, Brewce, stop burning toxic waste”.

Laurie: But of course they still go to the parties.

Do you think your documentary brought Skatopia into the mainstream?

Laurie: Well, Tony Hawk’s game came out before us in his hidden level. But I think we made an effort at being filmmakers in the sense that we tried to capture the good and the bad. You know, that's not a real skate film thing to do. Most skate films glamorise or glorify them. And I mean, maybe we did that with Brewce, too. But I feel like we really tried hard to show the glory of the place, but to not skip over what's really hard about it.

Brewce was an antihero. He had a lot of redeeming qualities. Maybe he did some things we didn’t like, but he was great with kids and he had a big vision. So the film’s about a guy who one minute you want to run away from and then the next minute, you're so glad he's on Earth doing these crazy things.

Have you been back to Skatopia since? Is it the same as it was in the 2000’s?

Laurie: Well, Brewce came up here a few times. But more recently, Brewce ended up doing a stint in jail [Brewce was convicted of assaulting a man in 2021, after trying to run him over with his car in 2017]. I think it was due to this impulse control thing. And his son, Brandon, has had to take more charge there. 

Brandon was raised by Brewce, he knew Brewce better than anyone else. But it's hard to be in Brewce's shadow. It's hard to spread your wings versus being in the shadow. But Brandon’s taken it in an interesting direction where he's very intellectual. He follows a philosophy, or way of life, called the “natural law”. So it really just changed the course in a way one couldn't have predicted. It couldn't bring in as much money, so I think it's not as raging. 

And Brandon is putting on little conferences where people come – a lot of the same people who party and live there and find refuge in that place – to attend these conferences, and they discuss natural law. It’s completely different.

Colin: Brewce just got out of jail a few weeks ago. So who knows what will happen with Skatopia. But if you wanted to stick a shovel in the ground and dig a hole, and pour some concrete, I'm sure that would still be an option there.

Do you still talk to Brewce?

Colin: Yeah, I got a voicemail from him yesterday. Actually, I haven't even listened to it. We can listen to it if you want.

Laurie: Well, he had a head injury. I read that it was super hard for him. He really was a genius – he's also open about this – but as we all know, head injuries can lead to lack of control. And he's had some issues with that. He's a different person, we lost a friend a little bit. Even though we still love him. We lost the Brewce we knew then.

Colin: He lost a bit of his charisma, in particular. And his ability to meet every different kind of person who ends up in Skatopia. He was incredible at reading people and finding some way of relating, no matter where they came from.

What were your biggest takeaways from the film?

Laurie: I think learning to love pretty flawed people. I shouldn't say flawed, I should say people who brought stuff that were hard to me, whether it was a racist guy that I learned to love before I found out he was like that. (Not so much at Skatopia, but I wasn’t able to just sit in my little place and be comfortable. That was uncomfortable: that I loved somebody who was racist. But I got to watch my son learn that grown ups are flawed, but we still love them and respect them as people.

So life became a little less black and white?

Laurie: Definitely.

Colin: And I hope that that's what we conveyed in the film. I mean, that’s what we were really going for, for people to think about it not being black and white. I'm super proud of the film. But I think both Laurie and I have been through periods where we struggled with the debt of this film for almost 10 years. It cost us a fortune. It felt like a failure in many ways. So that was a big challenge. 

But for me, the biggest takeaway is having spent a glorious year of our life, living in a wonderful, rich Appalachian countryside, with our beautiful son. Spending hours together.

And we made lifelong friends. I feel like even though we haven't been back in a number of years, we could show up tomorrow and knock on all the neighbour's doors, and it'd be like we had never left. And when we talk to Brewce, you know, it's like, “How are the neighbours? How is everybody doing? How's the family? How's your mom? How's your grandma?” 

We were embedded and those are lifetime relationships. And that’s wonderful for me.

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