THE TRUTH ABOUT KIDS

Jack Mathews / Newsday / July 18, 1995

Photojournalist Larry Clark has made a career out of documenting the dark side of teen life. His first film Kids, opening this Friday is darker still.

Given the circumstances, it seemed a good idea to begin this interview with gonzo photographer Larry Clark at last May's Cannes Film Festival with a joke being told about his first movie, Kids. The film had just had its world premiere in competition there, and the next day Clark was still seething over what he took to be a highly confrontational press conference.

For months, Clark had been told to expect some fireworks at Cannes, where the movie's graphic depiction of sex, drugs and violence among a group of aimless young New York teenagers was sure to light the fuse. How could it not? Kids virtually opens and closes with the seduction and deflowering of pubescent girls by a teenage sleaze named Telly - known to his pals as the "virgin surgeon" - and is given its dramatic force by the frantic search of a previous sexual conquest to find him and tell him he's made her HIV positive.

When Clark, a 52-year-old former drug addict and ex-con whose highly regarded photo books have been documenting youths in trouble for 25 years, showed up for his mandatory post-premiere press conference at Cannes, the chip on his shoulder began to teeter with the first question.
"Has youth today... adopted as values only sex, drugs and violence?"
"You seem to be blaming parents..."
"How old are the actors in the sex scenes?"
"Do you really expect an R rating for this?"

Clark, behind dark sunglasses and a salt and pepper beard, his long hair pulled up in a pony tail, took the questions as personal attacks and was immediately defensive.

"Teenage obsession with sex was pretty well documented in Portnoy's Complaint, " said a Washington Post reporter near the end of the press conference. "So, what's the purpose" of making Kids?"
"To make a good movie and entertain you," Clark shot back.
"Yeah?" she answered.
"Yeah!"

Now, for the joke, told less than 24 hours after the press conference to Clark and Kids screenwriter Harmony Korine, under a palm tree in the relaxed setting of an outdoor restaurant: "There's this young woman who has been agonizing for years over how to tell her parents she's a lesbian. After seeing Kids, she gets an idea. She takes her parents to see the movie, then over dinner, says to them: 'Mom, Dad, I don't know how you'll take this, but you know that boy Telly in the movie? He's the man of my dreams!'
"With her parents about to faint, she quickly laughs and adds, 'I'm just kidding. I'm a lesbian.' "

Clark seemed as amused by the idea of people making jokes about the movie as by the joke itself, and Korine, who is 21 but looks closer to 15, immediately began to rewrite it. "Instead of saying, 'The kid is the man of my dreams,' she should just say, 'I'm a lesbian.' They'll go, 'Thank God,' because they'd already be turned off by guys."

Though some people left the Kids screening saying they would never have sex or children again, the real impression left is that teenage boys, lacing their testosterone with drugs, have become more predatory than ever in the age of AIDS. The Washington Post reporter was right, there's nothing new about teenagers being obsessed with sex. What is new, at least among the kids portrayed by Clark, is the notion of boys using virgins for safe sex.

"Some of the kids figured out that safe sex was [having sex with] virgins," Clark said, explaining what he'd learned after months of taking pictures and hanging out with skateboarders in Washington Square Park. "There were these two guys who were bringing girls to the park, rich girls from Uptown, Chinese girls, black girls, all nationalities.

They'd be with this girl from a week to three months, until they got her... then it was on to the next one."

Clark regards himself as "punk rock," or simpatico at least with the fringe kid culture, but says he was still shocked at their cavalier attitude about disease. "When I first started talking to these kids, it was the summer where everybody was handing out condoms. The boys had pockets full of them, and they had the rap down. They had me convinced they were using them.

Then, I got to know them and found out none of them are using condoms." Clark sees Kids as a double cautionary tale. First, to show parents what's going on out there these days and to urge them to give their children information about how to handle situations before they get into them. And second, to dispel any false securities about the use of condoms. "People have to realize that the disease is rampant, and that nobody wants to use rubbers."

You don't have to spend much time with Clark to understand how he was able to insinuate himself into the lives of the thrill-seeking teenagers at Washington Square Park. He's been there himself, though in the streets of Tulsa where he was doing drugs and fighting at age 16, and where he got on a track that nearly destroyed him.

Even while going to art school and starting his career as a photojournalist, he was addicted to drugs, and he had done time in prison (19 months on a conviction for assault with a deadly weapon) and been through two rehab programs by the time he was married and settled down in the Tribeca loft where he still lives.

Clark, who grew up in Tulsa helping his mother in her baby picture business, calls himself "kind of a pioneer" in the modern drug culture, having started out using benzedrine inhalers and amphetamines when drug use by juveniles was a guarded secret of post-World War II American life. His early outlaw years, much of it chronicled in his critically praised 1971 photo book Tulsa, provided the inspiration for Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy and indirectly led him to making Kids.

"I always wanted to make the teenage movie I felt America never made," Clark says, in the Kids production notes. "I guess I had been angling towards it forever, even when I didn't know how to get into film or do a film."

Clark said he was photographing skateboarders at Washington Square Park, with the idea of using them as actors in another film he was considering making, when he met Korine, a high school kid with an aggressive curiosity and an encyclopedic knowledge about film and photography. Korine told Clark about a 30-minute screenplay he'd written, about a man who takes his son to a prostitute on his 13th birthday and talks him through the act, and at the end of their conversation, handed Clark a videotape of a short movie he'd made.
"I said, 'Well, this kid is pretty interesting,' " Clark recalled.
"A year later, I get this idea for this movie about a kid whose idea of safe sex is [having sex with] virgins. One of the virgins would come up pregnant, or HIV positive, and spend the movie searching for him to confront him. I thought the story had to be written from the inside and thought of Harmony... I read the thirty-minute screenplay he had written in high school and asked him if he wanted to write this."

As the story - or the soon-to-be-legend - goes, Korine wrote the screenplay for Kids in three weeks, and the movie is a virtual verbatim enactment of that draft. "It was very organic," Korine said, showing a quick feel for Hollywood argot. "I knew these kids, they were all my friends, and most of what I wrote was based on them. Not the actual events, but who they are, how they talk... I've been an observer to all these things."

Most of the kids in the movie are kids from the neighborhood. But the press kit prepared by Miramax Films takes care to provide the actors' ages at the time they performed, lest audiences think laws were broken. Beyond its colorfully explicit language, the movie contains scenes of 11and 12-year-olds smoking dope, a ferocious gang beating, and three lingering simulated sex acts, one involving a girl who looks about 13 (the press kit says she was 17).

"I think the biggest problem with it is that it looks too real," Clark said. "I thought my job was to make it look real. People forget they're watching a movie."

Clark may be too close to his subject, certainly to the milieu he's depicting, to see Kids as most other parents will. He talks about events in the movie as if we have all had parallel experiences, and need only recast them for the times. Take the movie's most graphically revolting scene, that of a boy having sex with a girl passed out at a party.

"Back in the Fifties, the only way you could get laid is to get the girl drunk," he said. " That was totally OK, that was the only way when you were a kid. It's horrible, and the best thing that ever happened is that now you teach your kids that if a girl says no, it's no. But that's the way it was for us."

The truth Clark is trying to express in the movie is that not enough parents are getting that message to their children. As Korine says, political correctness is a non-issue on the street. Girls are still being used for sex, whether they're cooperating or not, and boys still rack up their reputations as so many notches on their gunbelts. This has always been a tough message for parents, and Clark, who says he grew up fascinated with books and movies dealing with juvenile delinquency, makes it tougher than ever.

The material was too strong for anyone when it was written in 1993. Studios loved the script, Clark said, but wouldn't touch the subject. And after first agreeing to make it, Miramax' Weinstein brothers - co-chairmen Harvey and Robert - got a rare case of cold feet and pulled out, admitting later they were loath to test their new relationship with Disney. After the film was completed last year, with money raised by independent producer Cary Woods, the Weinsteins came back and bought it for a reported $3.5 million.

Then, they had to figure out what to do with a movie that was certain to offend most parents and probably be rated off-limits to their children. The Sundance screening in January answered one question; critics would embrace it as an audacious piece of filmmaking. But what about that rating?

At that tense press conference in Cannes, Clark said he set out to make an R-rated movie (he had, in fact, agreed to it in his contract) and that he thought he had. Further, he declared, he wouldn't cut a single frame to satisfy the censors. Well, he hasn't, and the movie has been predictably rated NC-17, a decision upheld on appeal last week by a panel of the Motion Picture Association of America. So, to get his movie into theaters without eviscerating it, Miramax' Weinsteins had to buy it back from themselves - reimburse Disney, in effect, for the $3.5 million - and create a separate company, Excalibur Films, to release it unrated.

"Parents should have the option of taking their kids to see it," says Eammon Bowles, the chief operating officer of the one-shot Excalibur Films. "Talk about the responsibility of parents. In Kids, they are notable by their absence."

In any case, Kids is about to descend on American audiences Friday in New York and next week in 15 other markets. If it does well, Bowles said it will continue to roll out in other markets and will have 200 or more prints in theaters within a few weeks.

As for Clark, rejoined for lunch near his loft on a rainy day two weeks before Kids' opening, he's far more relaxed than he was at Cannes. He hasn't had to cut the film, and if others still see a storm rising over it, he sees only a silver lining.

"I can't imagine anybody not liking the movie, I just can't," he says, with calm assurance. "With that first Tulsa book, I was really concerned about the reaction because there had never been anything like it. It was very personal, nobody knew that world, nobody knew me. I had no idea how people would take to that. But I knew it was good, I knew it was truthful and honest, and that that's all I could do. I've done the same thing with Kids. People may not like the subject, but I know I've made a good movie."

Clark and the media clearly have to get used to each other. He is a guerrilla artist with the temperament to match, and though he can be extraordinarily genial in one-on-one situations, you get the impression his demons have been subdued but not eliminated. And that continuing struggle is probably the strength of his art. He has not only been where the kids in his movie are, he's been where they are headed, and with 9- and 12-year-old children of his own, he is motivated to make himself heard.

Whether Kids will find a large audience or not, he's already preparing for his second picture, which will be about the relationships between parents and children (Korine is again writing the script), and a third, which he says may be set in that tough Tulsa of his youth. He says he still takes still pictures, but he is taking well to his new career.

"Yeah, I like it," he says. "I'm a filmmaker now. I did good. And I'll do good again."