Will it become Larry Clark's crossover hit?
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Posted: Sun., Jan. 23, 2005, 10:00pm PT

Clark rolls on 'Rockers'

'Park' helmer planning to use non-professional thesps

By MICHAEL FLEMING


Larry Clark has begun shooting the feature "Wassup Rockers."
While photographing the cast of his earlier film "Ken Park" for a magazine, Clark discovered a group of Latino skateboarders from South Central Los Angeles who eschewed the gangbanger lifestyle in favor of their boards and punk rock.

"I got to know them and became fascinated by their lifestyle and the peer pressure they encountered because they didn't like hip-hop, didn't want to be gangsters and weren't into drugs," Clark said. "I'm using kids who've never acted before. It's difficult, but there is a certain realism you get in moments that you wouldn't otherwise."

The film is being produced and financed by Henry Winterstern's Capital Entertainment. Winterstern is producing with Kevin Turin. Sharon Stone is exec producer.

Clark wrote a screenplay for a largely improvised action-adventure in which the kids head to Beverly Hills to skateboard and then find themselves unable to get back home.

"This will likely have an R rating, but I feel it can be a breakthrough for Larry because the story is more accessible to a wider audience than his earlier films," Winterstern said.

They hope to have a rough cut ready for Cannes.

Clark will follow with "Shame," a remake of the Neil Jordan-directed "Mona Lisa," set up with StudioCanal. He is courting Rosario Dawson to star.

"I've written the screenplay with David Reeves, keeping the basic story intact but contemporizing it and setting it in New York," Clark said.

I think Larry Clark is an amazing director, and I'd love to be in one of his movies. His best is Ken Park (8/10 or B+). He really shows how life really is.

I've never heard of him.

What has he done you like so much? The Ken Park movie seems well received, what's the directorial style?

Basically, Larry Clark shows life as it really is.

*SPOILERS FOR KIDS*
In Kids, it shows a young girl and she gets AIDS. After a night of drinking and getting stoned, a guy rapes the girl, without knowing she has AIDS. When he wakes up, he wonders what happens.
*END SPOILERS FOR KIDS*

I'd adore to be in one of his movies. Some people say his movies are pornographic, though I don't think they are. If they were, I wouldn't want to be in one of his films. His films mean something to me, they're some of my favorite realistic movies, they're just brilliant. Like in Bully was some of the sex unneeded? Yes, but he was showing how teenagers actually act, he wasn't making some watered down revenge movie.

Larry Clark makes my skin crawl.

Larry Clark has a complex about making films about naughty children.

It's rather disturbing.

I don't think any of his films are "naughty." Bully (7/10 or B-) was really good, it showed what some teens might done in a situation like that. Kids (8/10 or B+) showed how a lot of rich kids (even including me, just a little) how they act. His films are art, imo.

I didn't call the films naughty.

I called the children naughty.

OMG, he did Kids. I freaking hated that movie. All it did was reinforced a stereotyped dichotomy of suburban vs. urban youth that made little rich kids in the suburb I lived in say "Oh how true. You know that movie was so real they shut down the club it was filmed in because there was sooo much drug use." Meanwhile we just hung out in parking lots doing pot, special k, and having just as much unprotected sex as the urban youth that we failed to make any connection with when watching that movie. It was pretty dumd, uninvolved, and while I am thankful it tried to deal with the topic of AIDS it did it so incompetently that I doubt one 16 year old I knew reconsidered using a condom after watching it. Actually I'm pretty damn sure not one single kid did.

Yeah, Galia, Larry Clark is a no talent perv.

He tries to peddle his child pornography off as a "realistic portrayal of teen life" when anybody that's actually been a teen knows it isin't. Why a 60 year old man is trying to capture a realistic portrayal of teenagers is another story....

I wouldn't go so far as to say Kids was perverted, I just wouldn't exactly say it was the epitome of profundity that so many people believe it was either.

Ironically, I feel the exact same way about Thirteen.

At almost 30 right now, my patience for dramatic teen tantrums is at an all time low. The only thing that's lower is 40-60 year old writers and directors who want to expose them to even more abuse. All these films "expose kid's real behavior" but fail to give us any compelling reason why we should care if little Johnny down the block gets strung out on crack and Xbox. I watched Thirteen and hoped she slipped cutting herself and went right through her wrists.

Kids was only released a few years after I finished with my high-school, and I can tell you that although I'm sure the situation exists somewhere I have never, ever been exposed to anything that intense.

Fact is, people don't like to watch movies about "real life". Little Johnny hanging out behind the bleechers smoking a little weed while he talks about the breasts on the girl in his newest Xbox game is pretty fucking boring to watch... basically dogme movies hehe.

Awwww, you didn't like The Celebration or Dancer in the Dark?

Actually, I agree with you (as usual), not about Thirteen because I haven't seen it, but I didn't watch it because the pho-"reality" of teen life in films usually turns me off. I actually find stuff like Clueless more insightful for goodness sakes. As to kids, its like you say, I was a sophomore in highschool back then and the point is I didn't see anything like it, so it failed to have any resonance with me. Clark made the characters so apathetic, horny, and completely unsympathetic. When Telli's (or whatever his name is) opening monologue is about how many virgins he's slept with and he oggles his best friends mom's breast while she's breast-feeding before proceeding to beat some kid up in the park, and Jennie goes to find him to tell him she got AIDS from him and instead gets doped up and raped by her friend (no less) who is somehow turned on by her completely comotose body (must have been pay back for Telli satring at his mom's boob) in a club after she passes out, you know no one in central Massachusetees is sitting around thinking they need to worry about the same things he is (namely std's). To bad our mandatory Health Education class was so conservative it forgot to inform us that in fact yes, the spread of std's is just as high in suburban areas as urban ones. Then maybe we would have watched that movie bit closer, but I still doubt it, because the characters had not one redeeming quality that would make "real" youth try to relate on even a basic level to these fictional-"reality" ones.

hahaha.

You know it had been awhile since I had seen Kids (like 1996?) but your quick synopsis made me laugh out loud.

Kids has its place, I think you and me agree that somewhere this story may be happening, but the general thing about Kids and Thirteen is that these stories are presented as THIS-COULD-HAPPEN-TO-YOUR-CHILDREN warnings. They are not entertainment or insightful, they are meant to be "cautionary" tales that don't really reflect a reality.

I really would like to sit down with this Clark guy and ask him WHAT about teens (cuz I think every film but one of his has to do with teens/children) interests him so much that he has to make these dark little films, and what he thought the kids in Kids would have developed in to.