Larry's kids
Will Ken Park find a home?

By Johnny Ray Huston

WALKING THROUGH THE lavish lobby of Toronto's InterContinental Hotel, past a gold placard inscribed "Harmony Room," I enter a garden café and immediately recognize some familiar faces. At one table an iconic teen rebel of the '80s discusses his first foray into directing. At another, a fellow actor-turned-director named Robert Duvall is explaining his latest film to a journalist.

It's a humid September day, and the reason I'm in this strange zone of the famous is to interview Larry Clark and Ed Lachman, the codirectors of the new movie Ken Park. Lachman is the Maysles-educated cinematographer behind recent films as varied as Erin Brockovich and Far from Heaven. Lachman's first feature-length effort as a director is also a breakthrough for Clark in at least two respects: it's the first of Clark's films to flout ratings-system censorship codes to present bona fide bone-grappling sex, and it's the first to counter the currents of hostility and dread that seethe through his other motion pictures by adding a new element, true tenderness. Don't let the autoerotic asphyxiation, the "fucks" used as punctuation, and the acts of bloody destruction fool you. Ken Park's teenage heart is sweet.

"Not to be corny, but it really is a labor of love," Clark agrees, after chuckling at my T-shirt, a Chewbacca-and-Rimbaud silk screen by S.F. artist Will Yackulic. "A couple of characters in Ken Park are [based on] friends of mine. I felt a responsibility to them to get it right." Set and shot in Visalia, Calif., Ken Park was initially supposed to be Clark's first film. Harmony Korine crafted the screenplay's deceptively casual story line – which, in fact, is carefully structured to individually introduce a handful of teen protagonists, crosscut between them and their parents, and then bring them together with explosive results – from Clark's journals and artwork. One of the movie's subplots involves a newspaper-derived story about a boy who killed his parents. "Harmony made the parents into grandparents because he was living with his grandmother [when he wrote the script]," Clark says with a laugh. "I thought that was perverse."

Ken Park is Clark's most personal film in terms of subject matter and style. The characters' homes are crammed with photography-studio family portraits on walls and shelves, and in a few of the movie's more poignant moments, Clark and Lachman provide their own versions of that form: breathtaking pictures that reveal the emotional confusion beneath suburban smiling faces. For example, one shot late in the film functions as a high school boy's locked-into-memory vision of a family whose mother and daughter he knows intimately. (The father's expression, unsurprisingly, is perplexed.) "It's so good. I always smile when I see them waving good-bye [in the movie]," Clark says. "They're the perfect American family."

Clark's own youth in Tulsa, Okla., included at least one chance encounter with the family of another art-world name, the writer, painter, and collagist Joe Brainard. "You know, Joe and I were in school together," he says, before using the I Remember author's favorite phrase. "I remember Joe from grade school, and he was in high school with me. I never really talked with him – he was like 'the artist kid' then. But I have this memory of Joe having a brother, and a sleep-over at his house in sixth grade. They had bunk beds."

Such idyllic visions oppose the hometown-based images that made Clark's reputation – Ken Park unites the wrong-turn adult stories found in his famous first monograph, 1974's Tulsa, with his twisted depictions of mythic American perfect childhoods and teenage lusts. After agreeing that his new movie is the closest filmic relative to his photographic work, Clark spots a friend from the corner of his eye. "There's Matt," he says, pointing to Matt Dillon, who is taking a between-interviews smoke break. "Hey Matt, how ya doin' man?" When Dillon asks when he can see Ken Park, the brief conversation that results gives me a chance to consider their influence on each other. Though Dillon has never worked with Clark, his brown-mullet look in movies like 1979's Over the Edge has been replicated by many of Clark's teen-boy models.

"The Tulsa book is done in a cinematic way; it's structured like a film," Clark says, returning to the subject. "It tells a story in pictures without words – you see what happens to everybody over a nine-year period. Ken Park was always going to be like my photographs. The chief difference was working with Ed Lachman and having 40 days to make the film. I'd come off [2000's] Bully, which was initially supposed to be shot in 40 days, and they'd cut me down to 23. A couple of scenes in Bully where the camera is moving so much – that's because there was no time for coverage. I had to make up a way to shoot a scene involving eight people in one hour, when normally it would have taken a whole day."

Lachman is reknowned for his chameleon-like stylistic expertise; though both are set in suburbia, his two most recent projects – Ken Park and Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven – are radically different in look and approach. "I didn't want to ghettoize [Ken Park's] subject matter," Lachman says. "I didn't want to assume that because we're dealing with emotional reality, 'Oh, it should be shot like a documentary, handheld with available light, Dogme-style.' That aesthetic has been so overused. I thought why not codify it as an observation of what's beautiful about suburban angst – because there is a beauty to it – and not fetishize it or romanticize it. I wanted to use the visual language of Hollywood, bathed in warm light, and have it undercut the film's world."

Sporting a wide-brimmed black fedora and matching blazer, Lachman has a soft-spoken demeanor that complements Clark's more rugged persona. Even dressed in an Italian suit, Clark conveys a laid-back classic American masculinity that's warm; his voice is gravelly, but the gravel contains an energy that is, well, youthful. Both codirectors cite the "heightened realism" of post-World War II black-and-white Eastern European film as a stylistic reference point for Ken Park. But when I mention one of the movie's most striking shots – which captures rain-spattered, resplendent nighttime blues through a cop car window at night – Lachman lowers his voice and confesses, "I love Wong Kar-wai."

Of course, Ken Park's reputation thus far hasn't stemmed from its family portraits or European influences. Most articles about the movie have focused on the sexual content, which forsakes NC-17 concepts of erotic titillation for direct, confrontational presentations of sex. One scene bears the imprint of screenwriter Korine's sense of humor. It exposes the highly personal jerk-off habits of one character, a private routine that utilizes the terrycloth sash of a bathrobe and the grunts and groans of televised pro sports. The elaborate setup is overtly jokey, but the sequence candidly presents a common private reality of teen suburban life that movies scarcely refer to, let alone depict. Traces of Todd Solondz's lemon-sucking Happiness may be present in Ken Park's money shot, yet Clark and Lachman's movie isn't relentlessly sour and misanthropic; if the film's underside-of-suburbia theme is overfamiliar, the angles it views that theme from are new.

Clark keeps his eyes hidden behind a pair of sunglasses throughout the interview, briefly lowering his head to peek out from behind the dark shades just once: when I ask him about his approach to filming male and female naked bodies in Ken Park. "The acting is so good, it's such an emotionally honest film, that I wanted to make it visually honest," he says. "I wanted to show everything. You can show full-frontal female nudity and no one says anything – you get an R. But with male nudity, forget it. Women have said, 'Larry, you're sexist; you show the women; we want to see penises,' and I've said, 'Wait until Ken Park.' "

Knowingly or not, this answer is disingenuous, considering Clark's celluloid lens isn't as straight-identified as the man himself; his photography and his films have gazed at – some would say ogled – by boys as often as by girls, and by men as often as by women. Ken Park climaxes with a sex scene that's essentially a visual love letter to three of the film's characters. One of those characters is played by Clark's current girlfriend, Tiffany Limos, but the camera's eye is as attentive to the men's asses as it is to Limos's beauty. There's a crucial difference in tone, though. Pairing its closing credits with the inimitable herky-jerky sounds of the Shaggs' "Who Are Parents?" (e.g., "Parents are the ones who really care"), Ken Park gradually jettisons the creepy nihilistic hatefucks of Kids and Bully for clumsy affection, ultimately attaining a state of grace.

Limos's presence doubtlessly would have opened up the sex discussion, as the 22-year-old actor and creative consultant hasn't been shy voicing opinions about her 59-year-old boyfriend's work. In a recent New York Observer profile, she claims to have told Clark the following: "You always have guys that are sexist, and you have racist stupid shit about Hispanic people and ethnic people, and the guys in [your] films always get the upper hand. You need to understand the world's fucking changed. Women work and run their own businesses...you can fuck a guy and leave him!" According to the Observer article, Limos – who claims to have first watched porn at the age of five – hopes to make a gold statue of Clark's penis once she's become a millionaire, an idea that hilariously combines the aesthetics of Yoko Ono and Cynthia Plastercaster. She's also completed a screenplay that Clark plans to film. "I don't want to talk about it," he says, when asked for details. "But it's a good one."

Ken Park's own future remains in doubt. Named after an ill-fated freckle-faced skateboarder whose story frames those of the movie's other teens, it's going to have a tough time finding a theatrical home in the United States. As of now, the movie has yet to be picked up for national distribution; one local film programmer – a Clark fan – has told me that it sounds "undistributable" in its current graphic form. Clark remains confident that his latest movie will find an audience, though. "Kids who are too young to get into the theater will see Ken Park on video and DVD," he says. "It will be seen."