by Thom Fowler
Sometimes you have to take what you've got and just make it work for you. Jason Lee tells me that he got his first skateboard when he was five years old. I got a skateboard when I was five, too, and it didn't mean anything. It was a cheap, plastic thing that broke after a week and I never picked up the sport anytime after. Jason's early introduction to skating didn't become the center of his life until many years later, around the tenth grade.
School was interesting enough before his sophomore year, but when he got into skating full time, his grades dropped. It's not like the football coach was wringing his hands over losing the star quarterback, and after a year or so of hating the 7 a.m. wake-up routine, he stopped going altogether. He had a feeling that skating could take him someplace. Lots of people around 1986 - 87 were able to go "Pro" - be sponsored by a company and skate in competitions and exhibitions, and when Lee got the opportunity, he ran with it.
Life in suburban Huntington Beach was even less interesting than high school. Being a skater in the late '80s meant you were also something of a skate punk. The scene was a lot smaller than it is now and had a culture as identifiable as surfer culture or the goth scene. It took place more on the street, and an enterprising magazine, THRASHER, gathered the bits and pieces to hold up a mirror to the skate world and be the lifestyle mag of choice for all the young wannabes picking up a board for the first time. I didn't even know skating was that big anymore. I always associate the sport with high school, but Lee tells me, "Skating now is bigger than it's ever been. Everyone has their own company, their own shoes." And then it occurs to me that Tony Hawk is an institution and lots of people who don't skate at least play that Tony Hawk video game.
I just don't see too many people shredding the streets the way they did "back in the day." In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I'm from, skaters would hang out at the BART stations, skate in a warehouse area known as "The Banks" or Justin Herman Plaza, where they still go and get chased away. In L.A., people would skate "all up and down Wilshire. Huntington High was also a good place to skate," Lee tells me. And then as I'm working on this article, I see two lackadaisical guys doing rail slides in Century Plaza in L.A. So I guess there is still a little bit of that Curb Dog mentality in the skate world. (The Curb Dogs were an East Bay skate crew in the late '80s, kind of like the Lookout Records of skateboarding.) The Century Plaza is going to be torn down soon, so if you've got a skateboard, show up and get a few good licks in before a big square skater-unfriendly building goes up. I take no responsibility for your actions. Please do not harm innocent passers-by.
Skating was "very much an escape" from the monotony of suburbia for Jason. "[There] was no real movement toward anything outside of the boundaries." With no real passion for school, he learned what he needed to learn on his skateboard and has no regrets. "I learned the importance of pursuing what one believes in. I didn't believe in school, therefore I didn't pursue it the way I did skating."
Following his star has paid off and the only reason I'm writing about him is because he somehow squeezed through where so many others have fallen off. Skater superstar Christian Hosoi turned to selling methamphetamines after the sponsors stopped coming around and the kids lost interest. Lee's skate career, on the other hand, while over, has gotten more widespread attention than when he was skating professionally. A Jason Lee-design skateboard recently sold on eBay for $1,600. (It went up to two grand but the high bidder retracted his bid.) "I've been in touch with the guy who bought it, he's a big collector," says Lee.
Sometime after high school, Lee took a trip to Sweden that made him acutely aware of the uninspired drudgery of the suburbs. He compared the architecture and the civic life of the cities in Sweden to Huntington Beach and realized there was more to life. He's been on a one-way trip out of Stucco-ville ever since, if not literally, than at least metaphorically away from the apparent lack of creativity and mindlessness of the mall set. Lee is still outspoken about his feelings. "The suburbs lack art and people watch far too much TV and agree too much with the way things should be. This, my friend, is called the middle-class, the status quo."
He even sees L.A. as lacking a certain excitement at the street level. You've got Hollywood and the entertainment industry in L.A. and all that is really great for people everywhere else, but when you live here and work in the industry and you get off a set or tear down craft services (the food table) you want to go out and do something. You've just spent 12 hours with the person that will end up occupying a two-inch by two-inch photograph in US WEEKLY and the last thing you want to think about is fame and glamour.
The Jason Lee Art Foundation opened a downtown gallery that Jason hopes to develop into a nexus for established and emerging artists and make Los Angeles "a little more interesting." "We want it to get huge and show really good shit," he says. Lee seems dedicated to this new venture that is quickly taking root and is glad to even be in a position to step into something, like acting, that he didn't have much experience with. "That's what's cool, that I get the opportunity to do this."
Opening a gallery and a grant foundation has put him in knee-deep in the art world, a place where you can find as much "coffee shop art" as you can compelling talent and vision. Jason is very much at the helm and is hands-on about the artists he wants to feature. With all the publicity, he's been getting a lot of e-mail, phone calls and faxes from people who want to apply for a grant. "It's tricky to decide, because I really decide based on my tastes and based on how much I'd be able to do for them. A lot of people have obscure and abstract ideas of what art is. The definition of art has definitely become murky."
The foundation gallery is currently open by appointment only. There are plans to move the gallery into a larger space and keep regular hours for the public to come in and see the artists on show. The foundation has been getting the support from important people in the art world and several magazines have come forward to get involved in the project, which Jason finds "amazing." Kevin Smith is a recent customer, having bought two of the Helnwein paintings from the first art show at the gallery.
When it comes to Kevin Smith, you can't underestimate his role in Lee's current success. Jason describes his weirdest Hollywood moment as "When Kevin [Smith] put me in MALLRATS. Technically speaking, that shouldn't have happened. Quite the little oddity -- a skater just jumping into movies who didn't know what the hell he was doing."
Acting wasn't something Lee ever thought he'd get into, but like skating, once he got the opportunity he just rolled with it. And it came along at a good time. "After MALLRATS, I knew I'd keep acting, but I knew the skating was pretty much on its last leg. If I didn't get into acting I have no idea what I would've done."
"I met friends that were actors and thought maybe I should try it out." So he auditioned for the part in MALLRATS and was hired without a callback. He still doesn't take acting lessons, he just shows up and "does it." When I asked him how he got into the creepy role he plays in DRAWING FLIES, he said, "I just tried to understand the character the best I could." Unlike many trained actors, he doesn't see a divide between trained and untrained actors. "Acting is actually pretty easy and need not be taken so seriously," Lee says. The acting-school actors, like Piper Perabo and Mira Sorvino, take a lot of time crafting their characters so that, as Perabo says, "You don't even see the person underneath the character." Lee has been fortunate to get roles that play off his natural presence and still avoid being typecast - a trap that befalls many personality actors. Where is Pauly Shore now?
Lee went on to work in three more of Kevin Smith's View Askew productions, taking on the roles of Banky for CHASING AMY and a smooth-talking demon in DOGMA, and reprising both the Brodie and Banky roles in JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK.
If he isn't working or looking for work, he is adding new vinyl to his extensive record collection, picking up a new camera, taking photographs, watching movies, going to museums or just spending time with his girlfriend, Beth, a photographer who he met through friends a year or so ago.
60's-era jazz is a favorite musical obsession and his former company, Stereo Skateboards, incorporated the flavor of the era in their designs, but when I talked to him, he was listening to "Songs for a Blue Guitar" by The Red House Painters, the San Francisco-based band fronted by Mark Kozalek, who starred alongside Lee in ALMOST FAMOUS.
Success for Jason is "when I'm doing what I really want to be doing" and he has so far managed to make a living doing what interests him. Lee's "fame" hasn't done much to change him. It has opened up a lot of doors but he doesn't feel famous and he doesn't really go for the "Hollywood" scene. What he really wants out of his career right now is to be "recognized for doing something that I hope people feel is good, and solid, and honest, and even fun." The recent fiasco at the DREAMCATCHER panel at Comic-Con, where the boisterous crowd repeatedly asked Lee to do Brodie while practically ignoring the film's director, Tim Olyphant, is evidence that the legions of Brodie fans just don't want Lee to move on, but he doesn't feel hindered by the devotion. "I welcome the MALLRATS lovers. They have something to get into, you know?" Being in MALLRATS has also made Lee seem like more of a comics person than he is. "I watched Spider-Man cartoons, but other than that, I just skated," he says.
You can get an eyeful of Jason Lee in STEALING HARVARD, directed by Kid In The Hall Bruce McCulloch and co-starring Tom Green, which hits theatres nationwide September 13. In January and February, he's got two films coming out, A GUY THING and DREAMCATCHER. He's been "taking meetings," as they say, for a script he's been working on for several years that he "can't talk about just yet." And outside of that, "anything's possible." It looks like we'll be going with Jason's flow for a little while yet.
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