Also this issue: Over The Edge Dangerous sex and second thoughts at the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. By Sam Adams -Sam Adams Fest Shorts Reviews for the first week.

July 10-16, 2003

cover story

First Sight

You can always go downtown: Ken Park& #8217;s James Bullard meets his girlfriend’s mom.

Larry Clark On Making "Images You Can't See Anywhere Else."

by Sam Adams

Ken Park would be one of PIGLFF’s most controversial movies even if the closest thing in it to a homosexual encounter didn’t involve a drunken father and his sleeping son. Co-directed by Larry Clark (Kids, Bully) and veteran cinematographer Ed Lachman (Far From Heaven, The Limey), the movie takes place in the teenage wasteland of suburban California, opening with the self-videotaped suicide of the titular character, who blows his brains out in the middle of a skateboard park. Welcome, my friends, to the show that never ends.

Asked why they booked the film, festival Artistic Director Ray Murray says simply, "Because we could." That in itself is nothing to sneeze at; just last week, two screenings in a suburb of Sydney were raided by local police, and with its explicit sex, including an onscreen ejaculation, there’s no guarantee that Ken Park will return to Philadelphia, even as an art-house release.

Co-director Clark has never shied away from controversy. Miramax’s Weinstein brothers had to form a separate entity just to distribute Clark’s Kids, since their contract with Disney, who’d just acquired the company, prevented them from releasing unrated films. Even before he was a filmmaker, Clark was a photographer known for such collections as Tulsa, which detailed the life of teenage speed freaks, many of them Clark’s friends, and Teenage Lust, a harrowing series of portraits of teenage runaways. To anyone familiar with Clark’s work, the near-unrelenting bleakness of Ken Park comes as no surprise.

The stories that make up Ken Park are drawn from people Clark knew, he says, and his desire to make the movie goes back even before 1995’s Kids. "These are the stories that pushed me into making film. These were stories I knew were true, true American stories. They’re based on real people, real events, but they were things I couldn’t document as a photographer. The only way I knew how to do it was as a film."

Ken Park’s explicitness was always part of the plan, which is the main reason it took a decade to get it financed. "Every roadblock was put in front of this film," Clark says. "But one day I just said, ŒI’m not going to die and not have made this film.’"

Lachman, whom Clark met at a gallery opening, had initially encouraged Clark to turn to filmmaking, though the two had a years-long falling out that Clark declines to discuss. In fact, he declines to discuss their working relationship at all. "Wow, that’s a tough one," he says. "Can I not answer that?" (Lachman is shooting in Prague and was unavailable for comment.) But at some point, somehow, the two settled their differences, both co-directing and co-shooting Ken Park at the end of a nine-month burst of activity that also saw the shooting of Clark’s Bully and Teenage Caveman.

A self-described "Eisenhower kid," Clark admits that he’ll always be fighting the repression of his youth. "When I started making images, it was about seeing things you couldn’t see anywhere else. I think today that some of it’s still about that." Ken Park has its share of unduplicated imagery, including a brutal scene where a desperately unhappy teen masturbates to a Kournikova-esque tennis player while strangling himself with the sash of his grandmother’s bathrobe. The film stops short of showing actual intercourse, but not by much, climaxing with a scene in which Clark’s then-21-year-old girlfriend, Tiffany Limos, gets up close and personal with the nether regions of two of her male co-stars.

This is bound to strike many as, not to put too fine a point on it, icky. But Clark sees the scene as redemptive, not salacious, and says audiences have been agreeing with him. "I was told that if you shot certain things, certain images, it’s automatically pornography. I said, maybe it’s classified that way, but it’s not. If it’s part of life, things that humans do, and it’s in the context of the story, and it’s done the right way, it’s not pornography. I had this idea, and thought it was kind of a radical one, that at the end of the film, after all the abuse that’s in the film, I wanted to have three kids come together and have sex, and it would be maybe the most innocent, the purest, maybe the most natural way, as opposed to what you’ve seen in the film. People come out and say, ŒThat last scene wasn’t porn, it wasn’t dirty.’ I think we pulled it off, and that makes me feel real good."

As for the movie’s chances for wider distribution, Clark remains optimistic. "We were told by the people who gave us the money that the film was unreleasable without being cut," he says. "But we knew if we could show it one time, people would get it."

Ken Park screens Sat., July 12, 9:45 p.m., Ritz Five.