Lords of Soaptown: The True Story of Freestyle Walking

Gr 9 Up—In the mid-1990s, MTV News: Unfiltered, the cable channel's interactive media series, solicited potential news stories from viewers via a 1—800 phone number and received a call from a Chicago-area teen, who described his community's efforts to thwart freestyle walking, a sport he and his friends had created. It was like skateboarding but without the board. Intrigued, producers sent cameras to record the teens' story, and what resulted was a video that aired on MTV and went viral, prompting a worldwide craze for the new sport. What the world didn't know at the time was that it was a joke. Director Jason Klamm intersperses interviews with the now-adult perpetrators and their friends and families with clips from Unfiltered and segments with MTV staffers to tell the story of four bored suburban kids who decided to pull a fast one on the media giant. The boys' youthful enthusiasm and playful camaraderie are balanced by their adult selves' incredulity that they got away with it. While their outright mockery of those who took the sport seriously is a bit juvenile, the audience can sense bitterness behind the words, for their prank led to an entrepreneur's legitimate multimillion dollar business designing shoes for freestyle walkers. Most notable, the documentary captures the innocence of a pre-Columbine time, when mischievous troublemakers like these four had permission to roam their school's hallways wearing dark trench coats and toting toy guns to film a video, which will be eye-opening to today's post-Millennials.