Tf classic: Kids
We look back at the most controversial movie of the ’90s.
May 2015. The achinglyhip NY streetwear label Supreme is launching its capsule collection to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Larry Clark’s controversial cult classic Kids. Outside Supreme’s flagship store in Manhattan’s Lafayette Street, scores of style-savvy cinephiles queue up for limited edition T-shirts and skateboard decks emblazoned with stills from the film. Kids might have rattled cages upon its release in 1995 but it retains a cachet of cool two decades later.
The launch of the Kids capsule collection is just the start of a week-long celebration throughout New York – the movie will screen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Angelika Film Center (the location of the film’s premiere in 1995). And lest anyone should think that the ‘Larry Clark For Supreme’ launch is a cash-in, it should be pointed out that the strictly limited edition pieces commemorate a long-standing alliance between Clark and Supreme. Indeed, this very store, a popularised hangout for skaters, doubled as an unofficial clubhouse for the cast of Kids during filming in the summer of 1994.
“I’ve had a long relationship with Supreme,” Clark recalls, turning his mind back 20 years. “It was our hang-out during filming and it was where I met most of the kids – Harold [ Hunter], Javier [ Nunez]. And if we didn’t meet there, we’d meet in Washington Square and then walk over to Supreme to hang out.”
Kids was conceived in 1992 when renowned photographer Larry Clark, then best known for his books documenting drug abuse and disaffected youth – Tulsa and Teenage Lust – developed a fascination with a group of skateboarders he discovered in New York’s Washington Square Park.
“I’d been looking for a way to portray adolescence on screen and the most visually exciting teens were the skaters,” he says. “They were so fucking angry. If they didn’t have skating, they would have been dead.”
Newly sober, Clark had been considering the transition from photography to film and was seduced by the effervescent group who were to inspire his foray into moviemaking. At the age of 50, however, Clark realised that his chances of infiltrating the world of Manhattan’s streetwise skaters were almost non-existent. “I wanted the film to feel like the audience was eavesdropping on a scene that they could never be part of,” he says.
A bonding session about camera equipment with fellow photographer Tobin Yelland became his entry point into their
world. “Larry was always lurking around and nobody really knew what his deal was, because he was 50 at the time, and always had a camera,” says Leo Fitzpatrick, who plays Telly. “Now, kids don’t trust adults, especially adults with cameras. But he would hang out with this young photographer named Tobin Yelland, who said ‘no, he’s okay, he’s with me’. Larry was hanging out with the best skateboarders – all these amazing guys I idolised. So I broke my skateboard, we all go back to his house and he gives me a board. Like, ‘Here you go, kid’. I was 14 at the time. I was like, ‘that guy is cool.’”
As he began to establish friendships within the group, one bond would be especially fundamental in what happened next. Harmony Korine was a 19-year-old aspiring filmmaker who had moved to New York from Nashville to enrol in film school.
“I met Larry when I was skateboarding in the park,” Korine recalls. “He started taking photographs and we talked about movies and that progressed to talking about making this movie,
Kids. I used to carry VHS copies of films I’d made in high school and hand them out to people I recognised. I didn’t really know who he was but when I asked people about him they all told me he was famous. So I gave him a VHS and he called me and asked if I’d be able to write the script as he wanted the film to be from the inside out. I said I would, and that was what happened. I went back to my grandmother’s basement in Queens, where I was living, and wrote it in a week.”
With a script written in which an AIDS storyline becomes the device that propels the action (Korine describes AIDS as “the Jaws of our film”) and a modest budget in place courtesy of producer Cary Woods, Clark set about finding a group of teens who could portray the gritty realism of Korine’s screenplay. A flyer sought “13-19 year old real NYC kids of all colours and backgrounds – no acting experience necessary”.
“When Harmony wrote the script, he based a lot of the characters on real people and real events,” says Clark. “He was friends with people such as Justin [ Pierce] and Harold, so when it came to casting the film, we struggled to find people who were right, so in most cases we used the people who the characters were based on. I didn’t want it to be a documentary, so we needed a hook – a maiden tied to the railway tracks.” He pauses, pondering. “So I came up with the idea of this girl who contracted HIV from a single sexual experience and her story tied everything together and created a feature [ film] instead of a documentary. Also, these stories and these events took place over three-four years in real life, and we crammed them all together into a 24-hour period. That provided the wild rollercoaster aspect that the movie became.”
Skateboarder Harold Hunter was already a star within the scene before Kids. Dubbed “the mayor of Manhattan”, due to everyone knowing who he was, his vibrant, effervescent personality was perfect for the screen. Likewise with Justin Pierce. Although British by birth, this free spirit had firmly ingratiated himself within the New York skate scene, and he was the only choice to play Casper. Leo Fitzpatrick claims that he was the third choice to play Telly and that Clark fought to cast him because of his unconventional looks and voice – the very factors that put the studio off. The casting of the girls proved to be more of a dilemma.
“Casting Jennie was a problem because she didn’t exist,” Clark explains. “We weren’t sure what we were looking for because she was made up. We had cast this actress Mia Kirshner but it really wasn’t working out so at the last minute we called Chloë Sevigny and asker her to play Jennie. This was on a Friday and we were due to start shooting the following Tuesday and she said she wanted to think about it over the weekend. She went home to Connecticut and talked it over with her family and she said yes,
‘it was summer camp; we were tasting freedom for the first time’ leo fitzpatrick
so she played Jennie, instead of the smaller role she had originally been cast in.”
Another last minute addition to the cast was the film’s other breakout star, Rosario Dawson. The then 15-year-old was sitting outside her house trying to attract the attention of a film crew who were shooting a commercial for Vibe magazine nearby. Harmony and Larry were passing, spotted her, and immediately asked her to be in the film. “I had never met her but she was exactly what I’d written as the character of Ruby,” Korine recalls. They gave Rosario’s parents a copy of the script and they liked it and agreed to their daughter featuring, stipulating only that she did not smoke in the film.
Having assembled a principal cast, workshops were held in the Supreme and Zoo York stores for actors to learn their lines, rehearse and generally just hang out in order to take in the organised chaos that was going on around them.
“It was basically summer camp,” laughs Fitzpatrick. “None of us thought it would turn into anything, that it would become a real movie. We were a bunch of 16-year-olds and a lot of us were tasting freedom for the first time. We were allowed advances on our pay cheques so we’d get $40 here and there and blow it. At the end of the month, when we wrapped the movie, none of us got a pay cheque because we’d all had our money in advances while we were shooting.”
The first day of shooting was intended to be the street scene introducing the entire clique but treacherous weather conditions meant it had to be postponed. Clark instead shot the film’s opening sequence, an unsettling sex scene in which Fitzpatrick’s character, Telly, the self-proclaimed “virgin surgeon” (due to his proclivities for having sex with virgins), deflowers a 13-year-old girl. He then describes the experience in graphic, unflinching detail to his friend.
“The first day of shooting was supposed to be me and Justin [ Pierce] walking down the street talking, to get us used to the cameras, and used to the dialogue and so on, but it rained,” Fitzpatrick recalls. “So the first scene you see in the film is the first day I ever acted in my life! When you start out like that, everything after seems easy. That was my best performance, because it was the surest I could be; I wasn’t overthinking it. It was just something to do that summer. I never thought the movie would even come out.”
Filming continued for the following month around Manhattan before Clark took the final edit to Harvey Weinstein, having inked a distribution deal with Miramax, regarded the leading company for taking chances with risky, independent voices. But the graphic depictions
‘watc hing grown-ups flip out was fun’
harmony korine
of teen sex, drug-taking, rape and violence alarmed Miramax, who could not release an NC-17 rated film due to their association with Disney. Clark refused to make cuts to the film so it was released unrated, drastically limiting the number of cinemas that would screen it – something which still irks him to this day.
“You could have a movie like Basic Instinct, where you had Michael Douglas fucking Sharon Stone while she’s stabbing him, and that got an R. They wouldn’t give Kids an R. They gave it an X. We went out unrated because they said kids and sex, kids and drugs, kids and violence, kids and language, was too much.” Weinstein was forced to buy the film back from Miramax and set up a separate company from Disney, Shining Excalibur Film, to distribute it.
Kids was unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995. In an effort to create a buzz and stir up debate as to whether the film was a documentary or not, the cast didn’t attend, though that did not lessen the impact of the film’s premiere. Its content alone ensured that it was the focal point of the festival, with its stark, bleak depiction of America’s adolescent underbelly laid bare before the world with brutal honesty, making headlines around the world.
The New York Times described Kids as “a wakeup call to the modern world” but many critics reacted with shock and outrage that such a frank portrayal of teenage sexuality be made at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Arguments sparked on how much was too much, and what was and wasn’t acceptable – Clark’s lingering shots of teenagers triggered a child-porn debate that was addressed by Bill Clinton in a speech at the White House, while a multi-million dollar Calvin Klein ad campaign was cancelled.
“I was surprised that the movie caused such a ruckus and that many people were that upset,” says Korine. “I really enjoyed that. Watching all the grown-ups flip out was the most fun for me.” He wasn’t the only one. Fitzpatrick also found the controversy somewhat thrilling.
“Everything about Kids seemed highly normal to me,” he shrugs. “It was just the first time that it had ever been seen on screen. I think everyone involved wanted a reaction. Most of the kids in there had been ignored their entire lives, so it was exciting for them.”
While many of us we know what happened to Clark, Korine, Sevigny and Fitzpatrick after Kids (see p107), some of the others weren’t as lucky. Pierce, who played Casper, hanged himself in a Las Vegas hotel room in 2000, and Harold Hunter died from a drug-induced heart attack in 2006.
The sad plight of Kids’ lost boys and other members of the cast is the subject of The Kids – a documentary by Hamilton Hugo, himself a member of the cast best remembered for the scene in Washington Square Park where he gives a tutorial on how to roll a blunt.
His film is due in 2016, but Hugo is keen to point out that it is not a behind-the-scenes look at Kids. “This is not some Hollywood glamour story,” he stresses. “This film is for the community that inspired Larry Clark’s Kids, and that community is a global community. We’re dealing with the people who were there but we’re also reflecting the global community.”
Subscribing to the theory of controversy as currency, Kids pulled in $8 million at the US box office and $20 million worldwide, recouping its $1.5 million budget many times over. Its influence continues to permeate pop culture, whether it
is in films such as Thirteen and Elephant, the work of photographers such as Terry Richardson and Ryan McGinley, or the overtly sexual rebranding of child stars such as Miley Cyrus.
It also continues to find a new audience with subsequent generations discovering it and embracing it despite it being of a completely different era. Pre-smartphones, internet and social media, social activity was determined via the underground ’zine scene and flyer distribution. Even New York itself was changing – it’s subsequent gentrification meaning that Kids also captured the city growing up.
“I have absolutely no idea why, because it was such a different time, but the film really still resonates with young kids today,” says Fitzpatrick. “People still talk to me about it all the time. So many people have told me that that was the film that made them want to move to New York despite it being this really dark, cautionary tale!”
“The movie could never be made now,” says Korine. “There was a wildness to it; it was a real, pure street culture. None of us had done anything before Kids. We were all amateurs. Larry was already a great artist but he’d never directed a movie before, I’d never written anything and the cast had never acted. It really was what we were – a bunch of kids who used to hang around Washington Square.”
From its look to its grungy soundtrack, its lo-fi aesthetic to its attitude, Kids remains a benchmark in independent cinema which doesn’t so much smell like teen spirit as bottle it in every frame.