LA Originals

Um...

I'm making this movie because, uh...

Which way you want me to look?

- Right here. - Okay.

I'm basically making this movie

because I have 25 years

of footage and photos of me and Cartoon's...

I guess, uh, journey in life,

and all the movement that we've...

Wait, let me see.

If you ain't got tatted by Cartoon, you ain't got no tat.

If you ain't get shot by Estevan, you got a weak photographer.

You can't tell the story of Estevan without telling the story of Cartoon.

You know Toons, then you know Estev.

They are LA.

Premier representatives of that Los Angeles culture.

Like, the pioneers.

Not just pioneers, I mean, I think they're historians.

Storytellers, they're the image-makers. The chroniclers.

When you say LA tattoo artists, you can't not mention Mister Cartoon.

Nobody does art like Cartoon.

When you look at a Mister Cartoon tattoo, you know that's Mister Cartoon.

Everybody knows Mister Cartoon.

The hip-hop tattoo artist.

Man, you got tatted by Toons, it's, like, a level of respect.

Cartoon, baby.

- My boy Cartoon. - Cartoon.

The world-famous Cartoon.

Everything Cartoon did, Estevan was there.

Estevan brings an authenticity that is matched by none other.

Photographing gang members.

Capturing the whole culture and everything, man.

Lowrider culture, tattoo culture, shots of Skid Row.

Leaving pieces of history behind.

- These vatos... - They showed

that you can do it the right way if you do it the right way.

They take pride in all of that.

They paved the way for a lot of people.

Even if they don't admit it.

We couldn't have done it without these two guys.

It's about courage.

Just be true to who you are, and a lot of people are terrified

of being who they are.

That's one of the reasons they're so successful.

They mean what they say and they say what they mean.

This is our thing, and we wanna bring this out to the world.

LA's globalized.

They've joined forces, and they've been unstoppable ever since.

Coming from a Chicano, Mexican family,

believing in God is standard issue.

I was formerly raised Catholic.

I was told at a young age that I was gifted, I was blessed,

I have a gift from God.

And when you tell a kid that every day

over and over and over,

they start to believe it.

So when my mom would ask me to clean the room,

make my bed, I'd be like,

"I've been gifted from God. I'm not gonna make my bed. Come on."

For me, work is happiness. Yeah, I love to work.

I love doing photography. I love filming.

You know, when you say "work," that means you do something

and you get paid, so, yeah, that means my bills can get paid,

and I can keep moving forward.

- Daddy! - I'm not the best dad

or the best husband,

but I think I'm a good worker,

a good photographer,

and a pretty good friend.

Nobody could say I'd done them wrong. If they do, they're a lying motherfucker.

If you focus,

you could see shit off of your talent.

You could travel the world.

You could go to Europe and shit. Like, we've been all around the world.

You can buy a home for your family.

Art was like I had to scratch an itch.

I would see shit,

I would see a movie poster,

or I would see something that made me wanna draw,

and I would get this kind of anxiety that I had to draw,

I had to draw every day. To let it go.

He was young, very young, like... four.

At that time, he was drawing nostrils, fingernails, earlobes,

you know, things that kids drew with stick figures,

he was drawing, doing very intricate things.

He was my first child, so I just thought I was the greatest mom

because he was so good, you know?

His mom was, "You're the best.

You're amazing. You're the best artist in the world.

You're gonna grow up to be wonderful."

And then, at some point, you just believe it.

When I was a kid, my father met this guy at the line at the bank.

He says, "I'm in karate. I have a business, a karate business."

My dad comes home and he goes,

"I got great news. You're going to martial arts school."

I go, "I don't wanna do that." He goes, "Yeah."

Hey, I'm paying for that...

...you're gonna go.

When he first started, he was real shy, wouldn't talk to anybody.

But maybe about a year after karate,

I would say that he was so confident that he'd walk straight up.

Going to the karate school introduced me

to the world of candy paint

because the grand master of the school was also a custom car painter,

so I learned all those things, you know, the murals, the candy paint,

respect, the flow of life.

All these things kind of went in a circle.

It's crazy.

I'm Estevan Oriol. I'm a photographer and director.

Raised in LA.

I was born in Santa Monica at Saint John's Hospital.

So you got Estevan.

Like, this tall cholo guy,

but then most people don't know he's half Italian.

My mom and dad were married up until I was about three.

And they split up, and it was me and my mom.

To me, my mom was great.

We grew up on welfare, food stamps and Medi-Cal,

but she did her best to make it the best for me.

Any time you have mixed-race children,

they grow up a little bit confused though, "Am I this race or am I this race?"

And at some point, you just gotta choose. He chose the Latino side.

I didn't even know it until years later.

My dad, he was kind of like a hippie.

He didn't give a shit about having a nice car and all that shit,

so that pushed me to strive for more.

That's what gave me my drive.

So after high school, I worked at a snack bar,

I worked on fishing boats,

supermarkets,

liquor store delivery.

I always had, like, one, two, three jobs.

At the time, in the '80s,

it was all about where do you fit in

in hip-hop.

Are you a breaker? Are you a rapper?

Are you a locker? Are you a writer?

And I was like, "I love breakdancing,

and all that shit," but I couldn't hang.

But I could draw.

Cartoon, uh, always had a marker

or a can of spray paint with him all the time.

And wherever we were at, he'd hit up.

'Cause I was hip-hop. I had a b-boy side of me.

It was, like, bombing, 3-Ds, fade.

You know, before the Cartoon that he's known for today,

he was an awesome graffiti writer.

He was from this crew WCA that was kind of legendary

and was really fucking good.

I go to probably late '80s with Cartoon.

He was "Flame" at the time.

I thought I knew everybody. I was like, "Who the fuck is this?"

And he had such a unique style, and was so different.

He hit and run. Like, I'd see a wall, and next day I was like,

"Where did this come from? Who did it?" You know.

I basically do graffiti everywhere I go.

It brought me a rush, like, you can go to jail for this shit.

He put his name, "Flame," on the graffiti piece,

and, so, he was caught, you know, for doing that.

There was something different about him.

We had an idea that someday he was gonna do something,

that he was gonna go somewhere, he was gonna be something in life.

It's like a work of art in there.

We were all proud of this, when he came out in the paper.

I was just searching for my look, you know?

What felt good and what felt real to me.

I went to LA Trade-Tech to learn Sign Graphics,

to understand letters.

Letters have a weight to them.

When I was in school, all the kids knew where the prisons were,

and some of them would get letters from their family members,

and I would look at the envelope

and see these crazy collaged, pinta-style envelopes

and I would think to myself,

"Man, if I could mix that style of artwork with bombing graffiti style,

put them together."

That's where my style was born.

When I hit 19, I moved to Hollywood.

Sunset Boulevard was cracking.

The Whisky, The Roxy.

Hip-hop was new.

Just that scene was fucking off the chain,

and I was working nightclubs for extra money.

And that's where I met all the LA bands.

Ice-T and the Rhyme Syndicate,

the Red Hot Chili Peppers,

Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E.,

Everlast from House of Pain.

That's how I met Muggs.

And then he took me down to the block on Cypress Ave,

and that's where I met B-Real and Sen.

So, this right here is SP 1200.

This is the drum machine that we did um, all the House of Pain's records.

The sample though... For "Jump Around," I made it.

Horn player... came in the studio, played the horn,

and I put it in here, then I detuned it.

When you detune it, it gives it like a crunch.

It spreads it out a little bit. That's why that sounds unique.

First time I met Estevan, he was working the door of a club on 2nd Street

in, like, Little Tokyo.