Disco Wheelie: Screenwriter’s Coming of Age Captured in Film

By James Hebert

Copley News Service

Once upon a time – a frequently freaky, endlessly embarrassing time known as the 1970s – there were two roller-skating rinks known as Sweetwater and Palisade Gardens.

Those rinks weren’t, however, in Chicago, as the new movie “Roll Bounce” would have it. They were in Southern California and they were among the top haunts for kids of the Disco Era.

Norman Vance Jr. was one of those kids, a rink regular who grew up to write a movie about those places and that time.

The “Roll Bounce” screenwriter, who graduated from high school in 1986, is actually a little young for the film’s late-’70s setting – he was only about 10 at the time.

But in the early ’80s, he and his pals hung out, as the teens in “Roll Bounce” do, at the place they called Palisades in San Diego. And like their counterparts in the movie, they had to skate into unknown territory when their home rink shut its doors.

“It was a very fond part of my life,” says Vance of those days at Palisade Gardens, which closed in 1985 after decades as a San Diego landmark. “I went skating every Saturday, man.

“And suddenly we drove by and it was closed. Nobody knew why. So we all went to Sweetwater every Saturday.”

The Sweetwater rink in National City, Calif., like its Chicago namesake in the movie, had more of an ethnic mix than Palisade Gardens, Vance recalls.

“It was black and Hispanic and white,” he says. “It wasn’t really more upscale, but that side of town was just different.”

Skating wasn’t precisely Vance’s life back then – he also played baseball, becoming a varsity pitcher. But he was serious enough to have his own gear.

“I remember I finally got my own pair of skates,” he says. “Then it was all about the wheels. My dad got me the skates, and they had orange wheels. I said, ‘No, I can’t have the orange wheels, Dad. I want the white wheels.’

“And he said, ‘Well, you better earn some white-wheel money.’”

For all the movie’s evocations of ’70s roller culture – the big hair, the jam dancing, the Chic and Bee Gees tunes – Vance sees it more as a coming-of-age tale than a paean to skating.

“I never saw it as a roller-skating movie,” he says. “The rink was basically a backdrop to a bunch of friends. It’s about moving on – from the loss of a favorite hangout, from the loss of (in the case of one character) a parent, from childhood into the adult world.”

A lot of the moving on that Vance has accomplished came in one flying leap, when he left the corporate world about 10 years ago for a shot at Hollywood.

He had always been good at writing – “sort of BS-ing on paper,” as Vance puts it. After earning a degree in marketing at Southern University in Louisiana, he took a position with Pepsi in Buena Park, Calif.

Restless in his job, he was watching a TV sitcom one day and thought, “I could write this stuff.”

A few trips to the bookstore for “how to write a screenplay” guides, some self-instruction and practice, and suddenly Vance – who had just welcomed a baby son with his wife-to-be – had quit his job.

“It was humongous, man,” he admits. “But God said, step out on faith. That’s exactly what I did.”

A gig writing for Black Entertainment Television’s “Nothin’ But a Woman” led to regular work on the network series “The Parent ‘Hood,”"Moesha” and “Girlfriends.”

Vance shared writing credits earlier this year on the Queen Latifah movie “Beauty Shop,” but “Roll Bounce” – based on a script he began writing six years ago – is his first solo feature-film credit.

Malcolm Lee, who directed “Roll Bounce,” says Vance’s screenplay “had a lot of things that made you smile, just reminiscing about how you might have grown up. Guys hanging out, snappin’ on each other, talking about each other’s mothers – guys who would be unruly, but at the end of the day, they have your back.”

Vance, whose family lives in San Diego (his mother runs a salon), says those tight friends were based on his own crew from the skating days.

Do they know they’re about to show up in a movie?

“They’re all excited. Like: ‘Did you use my name?’”

SIDEBAR

It’s a Beck family tradition: Keep the good times rolling

By James Hebert

Copley News Service

It’s only right that the story of a roller-skating family should begin not with the bride-to-be getting swept off her feet, but instead getting jostled off her wheels.

“I pretty much knocked her down, and that was it,” Jerry Beck says of the high-speed meeting with his wife, Lisa, at the Aquarius Roll-A-Rena in La Mesa, Calif., nearly 20 years ago.

“My wheel came off,” Lisa recalls. “He had to retrieve it.”

It might sound like Hollywood’s cheesiest “meet cute” moment, but you haven’t met cute (in a good way) until you’ve witnessed what came of the ensuing union.

That would be the Beck Family Rollers, a performance troupe led by Jerry and Lisa and featuring their kids Cece, 15; Chad, 13; and Charli, 4. (The eldest, 19-year-old Cameron, is on hiatus.)

With their fealty to four-wheel (or quad) skates and their taste for old-school, synchronized dance numbers, the Becks live the lifestyle that’s a subject of affectionate ’70s nostalgia in the new movie “Roll Bounce.”

Jerry appears in “Roll Bounce” himself, in a sense. In the mid-’80s, he was a DJ at the Sweetwater Skating Center in National City, Calif., around the same time that Norman Vance Jr., the San Diegan who wrote the movie’s screenplay, frequented the rink with his friends.

Although the movie shifts the locale to Chicago and the time to the late ’70s, it preserves the Sweetwater name and Vance’s memories of the place, somewhat embellished for plot purposes. (Sweetwater, now called Skate San Diego, is still open at the same address.)

Growing up in Pittsburgh, Jerry was a self-described “rink rat” from an early age – “I cleaned the rink just so I could skate,” he says. When he moved here with the military in his early 20s, he started DJing at Sweetwater and skating the other rinks around town.

He met Lisa, a San Diego native; they married (on skates, naturally); and “then kids came about. And we were always in the skating scene. So the kids grew up in that scene. It’s more of a way of life.”

The Beck Family Rollers are an offshoot of the Becks’ existing mobile-entertainment and DJ business; they specialize in performing “high-energy dance routines” on wheels at street fairs, parades and school events.

On a recent weeknight at Skateworld in San Diego – 30 years old in October, and the only remaining roller rink in the city of San Diego – Jerry and Lisa put on an impromptu dance routine, doing graceful spins and twists, and keeping in sync with subtle hand signals.

Lisa says the talent comes naturally to their kids – she jokes that Charli “thought she was missing something when she didn’t have wheels on her feet” as a baby.

Although the family is on the road a lot, they frequent Skateworld, whose owner, Gary Stang, is a former pro skater and a onetime stunt double in the 1979 Patrick Swayze film “Skatetown, USA” (among other credits).

“We want to support all the rinks,” says Jerry. “That’s kind of been our focus, to keep roller skating going. We love skating.”

They know some people view quad skating as passe, and roller-skate dancing as hopelessly retro. But they also see people react with sheepish glee to the four-wheeling family and their freewheeling routines.

“People see the quad wheels,” Jerry says, “and they just go, ‘Oh, wow. I haven’t seen those in forever.’”

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