HERE'S HOPING FOR HARMONY

Charlotte O'Sullivan / The Independent / September 2003

It sounds like your typical Hollywood cautionary tale. A 19-year-old wunderkind delivers a script to his mentor. Everybody says it's wonderful, but his contract allows him no control over the material. The financiers fall out. The project is put on hold. Years pass. The writer becomes a filmmaker in his own right. Meanwhile, his relationship with the former mentor sours. Worse, the mentor, who has revived the movie, begins to bad-mouth him to the press. This, in a nutshell, is the story of Harmony Korine, the photographer-turned-filmmaker Larry Clark, and their long-gestating project, Ken Park.

Clark calls the film (now complete) a sequel to their notorious collaboration on Kids ("this one's about the parents!"), but he's adamant it's his baby, not Harmony's.

Ken Park, which Clark co-directed with cinematographer Ed Lachman, charts the lives of skateboarders in a small Californian town. Its preoccupations are much the same as those of Clark's second book, Teenage Lust, and hiring Korine to write the script was, apparently, an afterthought.

"While we were waiting for the money for Kids, I told Harmony I had this idea for another film," Clark explains. "There would be one kid sleeping with his girlfriend's mother, another boy abused by his father while his mother just plays it off like there's nothing going on, and a teenage girl whose parents are religious fanatics and who acts out by screwing all the boys in the neighbourhood... I said these are the kids, these are the families - weave them into one film."

Clark claims Korine was originally reluctant to take on the assignment. "With Kids, he knew the characters, he was writing from ground level, but with Ken Park, he said, 'Gee, I don't know these people'." Still, nobody is disputing that Korine did an excellent job. Clark calls his treatment "brilliant". "But these were all my stories," he insists. And he has, it's been reported, made many changes to Korine's script.

Korine, for his part, was so frustrated by his experiences on Ken Park that he vowed never again to work as a hired hand. In one on-line chat he complained, "I was very vulnerable at the time. I had no money, so I signed a really bad contract. No one should have any say-so over the script except for the author," he continued, adding bullishly, "at least regarding myself."

This isn't the first time Korine has distanced himself from Clark. He's told journalists: "I would never have written Kids if someone hadn't paid me to. For me, it was just a job for hire." Nor is he one to back off from a fight, regularly slagging off other directors ("I say terrible things about anyone if I feel like it. If they deserve it, I don't care if they get hurt.") But these days, Clark must seem like small fry.

A fully fledged auteur, Korine's feted at festivals where acolytes hang on his every far-fetched anecdote. Meanwhile everyone, from David Letterman to Werner Herzog, has called him a genius.

Clark suggests that Korine's biggest problem is that he's begun to believe his own publicity. He concedes that there were "some good parts" in Korine's directorial debut, Gummo, but doesn't seem hugely impressed with the film. "That was Harmony trying to find who Harmony is. There was a lot of me in there... but I think Harmony pretending to be one of those lower-class kids is ridiculous. He's a middle-class Jewish kid. He had nothing to do with those kids. And to make fun of retarded girls is kind of lame."

If he's equivocal about Gummo, he is utterly withering about its successor. "julien donkey-boy is an embarrassing mess. There's nothing there. It's probably the worst thing I've seen in my life... If you go to galleries to see what young artists are doing, you see four-minute bad videos in the corner. This was like an hour-and-a-half bad video."

As for Korine himself, last year he abandoned his project Fight, which involved him walking around Manhattan getting into random fights with people. There was talk of a new project with Gus Van Sant and of a film about race wars in Florida ("to be written in Old English"), but we're yet to see them.

While we wait, the whisperings against him are bound to continue. Korine has talked on record about "flirting" with drugs, and Clark says with what one imagines is a well-rehearsed sigh: "He has his drugs, he has his sycophants and I hope he makes it... He's very young. Hopefully, he'll be able to do more work. Hopefully, he won't be a casualty, but he is headed in that direction."

Over to you, Harmony.