Babes in the hood

ArtForum, May, 1995 by Paul Schrader

I always wanted to make the teenage movie that America never made," says Larry Clark, and from the first frames of Kids, feature-length film about a day in the intertwined lives of a handful of New York street teens, you'll think he may have do it.

Kids opens on a next-to-naked teenage couple locked in a deep kiss, interrupted only by the young-looking seducer's insistent rap aimed at talking his even-younger-looking partner out of her virginity. Unnerving in its studied predatoriness, his coaxing prevails. A brutally-too-few moments after the slam-bam confirmation, Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), a.k.a. "the Virgin Surgeon," hits the streets, high on his conquest and boasting of his taste for "little baby girls."

It's Telly's single-minded quest for virgin flesh that drives the narrative of Kids, which tracks him and his loose network of friends through 24 hours of roving exploits up and down the island of Manhattan. When Jenny (Chloe Sevigny), one of Telly's previous conquests, discovers she is HIV positive, and Telly's the only guy she's slept with, the film's inexorable logic is cemented. From here Kids unfolds with a race-against-the-clock urgency, as Jenny roams from haunt to haunt in a dazed quest to bring the bad news to the unsuspecting protagonist. Telly, true to character, is by now hot on the trail of an even younger prospect (played by the painfully fresh-faced Yakira Peguero).

Shot by cinematographer Eric Edwards of My Own Private idaho fame (Gus Van Sant is Clark's executive producer), Kids feels like a documentary; the surprise is that it's scripted throughout (by Harmony Korine, a street-credentialed then-19-year-old whom Clark hooked up with in Washington Square Park). Much of Kids' considerable art, in fact, lies in the mesmerizingly vivid performances - are they acting or simply "hanging"? - that Clark coaxes from his largely unschooled actors.

Amid industry speculation as to how Clark's matter-of-fact depiction of teenage sexuality and drug use will play out with Disney, parent company for Kids' distributor, Miramax (Disney is fervently anti-NC-17, a rating Clark's film seems likely to receive), a midnight sneak preview at the Sundance Film Festival turned Kids into an instant cult classic. The buzz since then has steadily grown louder. Whether the movie opens in mid July, as Miramax promises, or becomes mired in a ratings dispute, Clark has more than matched the gritty intimacy he made his signature in his now-classic books of photographs, Tulsa, 1971, Teenage Lust, 1983, 1992, 1992, and The Perfect Childhood, 1993 (still unavailable in the U.S.). in fact, it seems he may have found in film his perfect vehicle.

Clark's photographic work numbers among its longtime fans the filmmaker Paul Schrader, whose scripts include Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, 1976, and Raging Bull, 1980. Schrader has also directed (as well as written) such movies as American Gigolo, 1980, and Light Sleeper, 1992. This March, he and Clark sat down at Schrader's New York office. They talked about Kids, and how Clark came to make it.

PAUL SCHRADER: You've been working for about twenty-five years now. LARRY CLARK: Yeah. Longer. PS: How has your work changed? LC: Well, I think it changed a lot structurally. The first book is very formal in a way. PS: But when you began, your work was almost a hobby - taking photographs of people you knew. It's after the success of Tulsa that it becomes an occupation. You see that there's interest and that there can be a second book. LC: When I started Tulsa I was working for my mother, who was a baby photographer, going door to door "kidnapping" - doing baby photography. I left Oklahoma when I was 18 and I went to art school, or, actually, to a commercial-photography school in Milwaukee that was in the basement of an art school, and I started hanging out with the artists, who were like beatnik kids. I think my parents had sent me with the hope - it was never articulated - that I would come back and take over the family business. But I realized I could use photography for something other than baby photographs, and I started going back to Oklahoma and photographing my friends. I vaguely wanted to be a writer, and I wasn't a writer, but I wanted to be a storyteller somehow. When I did the early Tulsa photographs I saw them as a film, but I wasn't a filmmaker. PS: There are clips of film in Tulsa, either eight or sixteen millimeter. LC: Sixteen millimeter, in the middle section. In 1968 there was so much going on in Oklahoma, it was so complicated and there was so much action, I knew it had to be a film. I actually borrowed a movie camera and shot some footage, but doing it all by myself didn't work. That's when I decided to go back with just a Leica. PS: Was that documentary footage, or was it worked out beforehand? LC: I was just there and I had the camera and I would raise it and start working. But it wasn't practical, so I went back with the Leica. I was really waiting for the photographs to happen. I didn't know how they would happen or when they would happen, but I was certainly ready when they happened. That's why the last section of Tulsa, the '71 section, is so on - it's because [snaps fingers] I was really there. PS: Two things strike me as I look through your books: one, they become more autobiographical, and two, they become more montagelike. There is a progressive, intentional desire to be part of the story rather than an observer. In Teenage Lust you included written biographical material and photos of yourself. I'm not sure if there are photos of yourself in Tulsa. LC: Yes, at the end of the book. Just one. But I've never been a distant observer, it's always been autobiographical. I was just one of the people, one of the guys. I happened to have a camera because my parents had this babyphotography business. When I was out with friends, shooting drugs, I would have my equipment with me, because I would be coming from or going to work. I think Tulsa worked so well because it was a natural thing. I was part of the scene, with no motive to cap on my friends or anything. PS: When I first saw it I bought two copies, which I unfortunately gave away. LC: Yeah, everybody did that. PS: So, you're moving along as a photographer including more and more of your life - photos in jail, photos of drugs, photos of sex, correspondence. You're building up to an autobiographical body of work through these books. And then along comes Kids. Where does Kids stand in that progression? LC: Well, I always wanted to make the teenage movie that I felt America never made - the great American teenage movie, like the great American novel. When I was a kid, the teenage movies were like City across the River and Amboy Dukes. I would see those movies and I would say, Those kids don't look like kids, they're all like older people, like grown-ups. In the teenage movies I do like - Over the Edge, say - they actually used kids. I guess I've been angling toward that forever. When you asked how my work has changed, I mentioned structure: Tulsa is very formally laid out, but then the books get more complicated, with the collages and the letters - more filmlike, I think.