I was not there for the roller disco era, and I was not there for the mid-80s skating resurgence, and if we’re being completely honest, I cannot skate. At all. I have tried twice in my life and both times ended in a way I will not be describing in detail. What I do have is a very specific memory of catching Roller Boogie on late night cable during sophomore year, alone in my dorm room at 2am with a bag of Cheetos, watching Linda Blair glide across a Venice Beach boardwalk in a Lurex leotard like she owned every square inch of it, and feeling something I can only describe as irrational fucking jealousy. Not of Linda Blair specifically, but of anyone who ever laced up a pair of quad skates and made it look like that, which is apparently something human beings are capable of doing and I will never be one of them. I watched the whole damn thing, went to bed at 4am, and woke up googling adult skating lessons near campus. There were some, but I didn’t go because I was already failing Sociology and adding a new hobby felt aggressively optimistic. But I thought about it for a solid week, and that is the power of Roller Boogie.
Roller Boogie takes place over one night at Jammer’s, a Venice Beach roller rink being threatened by a real estate developer with the energy of a man who has never once in his life been told to go fuck himself, and the whole thing is as gloriously stupid as that premise sounds. Linda Blair plays Terry Barkley, a Beverly Hills rich girl who is apparently a flute prodigy on her way to Juilliard, which is information the film delivers and then immediately abandons because nobody came here for the flute. What Terry actually wants is to win the roller boogie contest at Jammer’s with Bobby James, a working class Venice Beach skater played by real-life skating champion Jim Bray, in his one and only film role. The plot is tissue thin and completely irrelevant because the real movie is happening in the background, on the boardwalk, in the rink, in every single frame where the Venice Beach roller disco scene shows up as something that was already dying while the cameras were rolling. Skating trainer Barbara Guedel tested over three hundred young skaters before selecting fifty for the film, and you can feel that in every crowd scene, a snapshot of a world that would be completely gone within two years.
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Roller Boogie currently sits at 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, which sounds damning until you look at who actually wrote those reviews. Seven critics, most of them middle-aged men writing years after the film came out, and none of them anywhere near the demographic this film was made for or who gave a single shit about them. Roger Ebert weighed in from the Chicago Sun-Times in 2004 and wrote that “Roller Boogie is no better and no worse than the beach blanket/bikini/bingo/bongo movies” and essentially shrugged. Greg Beebe at the Santa Cruz Sentinel called it “a travesty” in 1979 while also taking the time to body shame Linda Blair. The Razzie book piled on, noting with apparent delight that Jim Bray’s face showed considerable strain when he had to lift her during their routines. Tony Mastroianni at the Cleveland Press wrote in 2003 that “as the subject for a movie, roller disco proves even less fruitful than regular disco,” a statement so spectacularly wrong that one has to assume Tony had never heard of Saturday Night Fever. Nobody asked the teenage girls who made this film a thirteen-million-dollar box office success what they thought of it. Nobody asked them anything. The critics who dismissed Roller Boogie were never the audience for it, and the audience for it never forgot it.
Because here is what those seven critics completely failed to account for: Roller Boogie is an absolutely euphoric sensory experience if you are the person it was made for. The lights strobe across a rink packed wall to wall with people in sequined leotards and satin shorts that have absolutely no business looking that good. The music is a wall-to-wall Casablanca Records disco set that grabs you by the hips and does not let go, and the bodies moving through all of it are young and gorgeous and completely unself-conscious in the way that only people who grew up skating on Venice Beach can pull off. Bringing a notepad and a critical framework to Roller Boogie is like bringing a wine list to a keg party. This is a film about the feeling of a Friday night when you are sixteen and the music is loud and everyone in the room is hot and nothing bad has happened yet. Every girl who ever skated to a disco track with a random hot guy understood this film on a molecular level the second it started. Roller Boogie had no interest in being Chinatown or chasing Oscars and thank god for that, because what it actually is hits so much harder, the best Friday night of your life on a screen, and on those terms it fucking delivers.
Linda Blair had a problem in 1979 and her problem was The Exorcist. Six years after that film made her a household name and a cultural landmark, she was still the possessed girl with the spinning head and puking pea soup and Hollywood had absolutely no idea what to do with her beyond that. Roller Boogie was her shot at something different, her attempt to walk out of the horror genre and into the sunlight, and what she actually pulls off here is worth more credit than she ever got for it. She is funny and physical and genuinely charming in a way that has nothing to do with demonic possession, and watching her learn to skate alongside Jim Bray, there is something completely unforced about her that the critics were too busy being condescending to notice. Blair did most of her own skating for this film and developed bursitis in her hip doing it. She showed up, she worked her ass off, and she delivered a performance that the audience she was making it for understood completely. That the film did not relaunch her career the way she hoped is one of Hollywood’s quieter injustices.
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What nobody talks about when they dismiss Roller Boogie is the production pedigree hiding in plain sight, and frankly the oversight is embarrassing. Dean Cundey shot this film. The same Dean Cundey who had just come off Halloween the year before and would go on to shoot The Thing and Back to the Future, and his eye for kinetic, propulsive movement is all over the skating sequences, which is a large part of why they still hold up and why the Venice Beach footage feels like something genuinely worth preserving. The soundtrack is a Casablanca Records double LP that opens with Cher’s “Hell on Wheels” and includes Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland,” which is an absolutely fierce way to open a dance film and a pretty damn impressive way to stock a soundtrack. Stoney Jackson, who turns up in the supporting cast as Phones, would go on to appear in Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” video three years later, which is the kind of trivia that reframes everything slightly. This was not a film thrown together by people who didn’t care. The people behind the camera knew what the hell they were doing.
Roller Boogie got a brand new Blu-ray release recently, decades after those middle-aged white dudes trashed it, which means someone out there knew the audience for this film never went anywhere. The teenage girls who made it a thirteen million dollar hit in 1979 are in their sixties now, and the film they loved is still out here, still finding new audiences, still making people feel the way I felt at 2am in my dorm room with a bag of Cheetos watching Linda Blair glide across a Venice Beach boardwalk in a Lurex leotard. That’s not nothing. That’s not an accident. The films that actually matter to the people they’re made for have a way of outlasting every condescending shit review ever written about them, and Roller Boogie has been doing that for nearly five decades. The girls got their film, the Venice Beach they loved is gone, and I still can’t skate. But I’ve watched this movie three times since that first night, and I will absolutely watch it again, and the only thing I regret is that I never learned to do it on wheels.
