Slomo
On the San Diego boardwalk, a skater pursues spiritual awakening
“Most people don't have epiphanies, they change gradually,” filmmaker Josh Izenberg explains. “But Slomo did suddenly drop everything and become a different person.”
Slomo – aka Dr John Kitchin – is a fixture on the San Diego boardwalk, where he can be seen skating up and down, often one leg. Most people probably think he’s crazy, Josh admits.
But Slomo (2013) introduces us to a fascinating and complex figure, who walked away from his medical career to devote his life to skating. Sailing along in his unusual stance, he found his spiritual awakening.
I hugely admire people who make big changes in their life. Stasis is so comfortable.
“Everyone has the capacity to dream up and believe anything he wants to,” Slomo says in the film, which is true. But daydreaming is an easy form of escapism. Committing to change takes courage, and often involves sacrifice.
Capturing – or at least alluding to – this trade-off elevates an “inspirational” story beyond the glib and formulaic.
It’s easy to love stories about people who attain something better for themselves. But these stories resonate so much more when we see what they gave up in the process.
I spoke to Josh over Zoom from his home in California. You can see more of his work on his website.
Why did you want to tell this story?
When I moved to San Francisco in 2008, I had big ambitions to do creative work of some sort. But once the great recession hit, you took what job you could find and stuck with it for a while, at least here in the US.
I wound up at an ad agency, but I had this creative energy, and I was looking for something.
Not only a creative project to work on, but I think there was a subconscious need to have a more profound experience. I was looking for some wisdom.
Around that time, my dad was walking along the boardwalk in San Diego and he ran into John Kitchin, aka Slomo, skating by. They had gone to med school together, but they hadn't seen each other in decades.
And so they caught up, and my dad was surprised to see this guy he knew as a buttoned-up neurologist skating on one leg out on the boardwalk.
When I looked him up, I found there was an online aspect to his mythology – he’s made music and he’s written these manifestos about the zone, and spirituality.
Something just clicked. We got on the telephone and we talked for a long time. I think more than an hour went by – I was just listening and I was totally engaged.
I thought, if he can keep my attention with his thoughts and philosophy on the phone for an hour, it’s probably going to be documentary worthy.
I had no expectations for what the film was going to be, I just was looking for an experience. I think that translated to the final product, and I think that's why this film – of all the things I've worked on – touched a cultural nerve and had staying power.
What was the biggest challenge?
I had never made a film before, but I was really lucky. I teamed up early on with a talented editor called Traci Loth, and a producer named Amanda Micheli, who was quite experienced.
They really helped me shape this into a story. I knew how to go hang out with Slomo, and get the camera going, and talk to him.
But I didn’t know I don't about layers, about revealing new components and deepening his story – the things that you do to bring an audience in.
We were able to take hours of talking to Slomo and turn it into something that had a narrative arc.
On the production side, being a newbie, it was really hard to figure out how to film him while he was skating.
Despite the fact that he goes by the name Slomo, he's moving very quickly. We knew we wanted the cinematic experience to be smooth, and graceful, and balletic, and follow his trajectory down the boardwalk.
We tried all these different things. We had a steady cam and we ran after him, which didn't work. It was too laborious. Then we tried to rig up a bicycle where the cinematographer, Wynn Padula, was on the back of the bike, filming backwards.
After trying all these things, I found out Wynn was actually a decent rollerblader.
So Wynn was rollerblading behind Slomo with a small glidecam, and then I had a longboard skateboard, and I was behind both of them with the audio equipment. We had this little caravan going along the boardwalk.
Is there anything you would do differently if you made the film again?
Technically, I'd probably bring in all sorts of different tools that we didn't have access to. I’d have drones, and gimbals, and all this stuff, but honestly, I don't know if we’d have made a better film.
I think I benefited from my naivety. I would've overthought it – before going down to visit him, I would've plotted out, ok, what's the beginning, middle, and end of this story?
But I think he responded to me because we were just hanging out. I was sitting there picking his brain, playing the role of pupil and he was sort of the guru, or sage.
I let that play out, and asked the questions I wanted to ask.
Oftentimes now I'm thinking about the edit while I’m engaging with someone. Where will this fit in? There’s no way I can use that.
Sometimes it's good to just shut that off and ask the questions that I'm genuinely curious about, with no regard to how they're gonna fit into the film. I’d like to find a way to do that again.
What are you most proud of?
It’s really rewarding to me how impactful the film has been on people's lives over the past ten years. Less so now, but early on, and for quite a while, I would get messages from people who saw the film and literally changed their life in some way.
That was really profound, but it kind of warped my perspective. I think I thought that all my films would have the same impact, and that's not exactly what happened.
I’m interested in stories that have the power to impact people's lives, but I'm allergic to things that are really schmaltzy and cheesy, and I watch out for that. I think you need the darker components too.
There's a scene in the film where he says to us, “These are the good old days.” He was saying, you’re going to get older, and you're going to lose a lot as you get older, no matter what happens. It’s a little bit sad.
How did this film change you?
Just the act of making the film set my life on a new course. It convinced me to quit my own job, and gave me the courage to pursue being a documentary filmmaker.
Slomo dropped a lot of wisdom on me in, during the course of making the film. There's a Hindu school of thought – I might butcher this a little bit – but there are different phases of your life, and you're supposed to do different things during those different phases.
When you're young, you're the student. When you're in the middle of your life, you're in the world of material possessions. And then in the later stage, you’re in a more spiritual pursuit.
I was trying to get to the end part in the middle; I wanted to be like Slomo, but I was only in my 30s.
I think he gave me permission to get into the muck, and the materialism, and the day-to-day stuff we’ve got to do in the middle part of life, which I am right now.
I'd love to say I just walk around and think about the meaning of the universe, but I don't. I'm hustling, I'm trying to pay my bills, I'm trying to raise a small child and all that other stuff.
The film also showed me how universal certain themes are. So many of us feel like we’re in a bit of a rat race.
I don’t remember if this is in the film, but Slomo told me that he's the guy who broke out of the rat race, and he’s running for the woods across the field, like in a war film.
Everybody's cheering – are they going to shoot him? Or is he going to get into the woods and break away?
We all want to see that person escape, you know? Because he gives us hope that maybe one day, we'll get to escape too.
I’ve read the last lines of this interview about 100 times, and it still lights something up deep inside me. Perhaps if we’re not going to make a break for it, the best we can do is make sure those who do hear our cheers as loudly as possible.
Big thanks to Josh, and, as ever, to you for reading.