Albuquerque Journal from Albuquerque, New Mexico • Page 19

YOUTH EXPRESS B3 Friday, August 18, 1995 Albuquerque Journal Director hopes real kids gg will get to see the film SouTHvyEST Style Starts Here! Kl Largest Selection In New Mexico, Kj jgj Handcrafted In Albuquerque. 1 ft SAVE I 1 1 0-25 ffflf on i SELECTED I BBS items jMiMi 1 1 Dp; living Room jfe Bedroom i i Room fera ACCESSORIES Jj7 I fe Come In 3 ggm Today! ffm Jftr fff3 fPPff 90 DAYS Same As Cash JssssJ Jl iK! MJS I 6 MONTHS FREE WJt AjJ Islgj' Interest WAC 55 jK; Down Payment lhnpuEBL0 wmem 7 MFG. Outlet ig Up Pueblo West 52 L.OMAS NE (NW CORNER OF SAN MATEO LOMAS) "iiffiji: I 268-4240 iP3 STORE HOURS: Mon-Thu 10-6 Fri-Sat 10-5 Sunday you miss the trick 100,000 times to make it once. But every time he would miss the trick, which was a thousand times in a row, he would scream and cuss and throw the skateboard. I said, God! That kid!" So where did you find this other kid, Harmony Korine, who wrote iti "I met this kid in Washington Square Park sitting on the fountain who started talking to me.

I told him I was gonna make a film, and I knew one guy in the film business, Ed Lachman, who's a cinematographer. So this kid, who's in his last week of high school, said, 'Oh, I know Ed Lachman. We worked together on "Light I swear to God, he started telling me stories about the movie and it turned out that when he was 16, he was like the lowest ranking production assistant. "He knows everything about film. I thought I was talking to like the next Martin Scorsese, man.

And then as I get up to leave, I shake his hand and he reaches in his backpack and pulls out a VHS of a 10-minute short he'd made in high school, with his name and phone number on it. "So over the next year I'd see him in the park a few times. And when I thought about I said, I wonder if that kid can really write. So I gave him the treatment and I told him the outline of the film I wanted and he said, 'I've been waiting all my life to write And he went out, and I swear to God, in three weeks he wrote it. He lived with his grandmother in Queens and went out there and just knocked it out." Does the movie represent a large number of kids in Manhattan? "It's a much bigger segment than I could ever convince you to believe.

The skateboarders are a smaller segment but there's a lot of girls that come in sweatin' skaters. 'Sweatin' boys' means they're thinking about them, they like them. On Friday and Saturday nights in Washington Square Park, I would see all these girls, you know, little 14-year-old, 15-year-old girls come down to the park, and they could be like rich girls from Uptown, the children of doctors and lawyers. "What they do is what everybody who's a teen-ager does: They say like they're sleeping over at Sally's house. Then Sally has a cover story, so if her mother does check, there's a cover story that makes perfect sense and then there's another cover story and through this labyrinth of cover stories, these kids are out Friday and Saturday nights in New York City, young teenagers, who can stay out all night and do whatever they want to do.

So it's their world; there are no parents." I must have looked depressed at this news. "Yeah, I know," Clark said. "I mean I have kids and I'm gonna sit my son down and I'm gonna tell him everything. You see all this stuff in The New York Times every couple of weeks about a bunch of kids, nice kids, and something happens and a kid gets killed or maimed and everybody gets busted and goes to jail. It's not the guy who stabs him; everybody goes, right? I'm gonna sit down with my son at the appropriate time, and tell him that at some point he's going to be at a party and there's going to be a gang-bang going on, he might be drunk or whatever.

The peer pressure is going to be for him to jump in, but what he does is, he leaves. This is gonna be in his head, and he's gonna have his choice." He might learn some of that lesson just watching this movie. "Like I say." from PAGE B1 "In what way? You mean as a character? Or as physically unattractive?" As a character. "As a character, yeah. Well, you know, guys into sex, that's all they think about," Clark, said.

"You don't really see him drink much in the movie. You don't see him smoking dope with the kids. I mean, he's just on the girls all the time." When Tully was trying to seduce these girls there was a kind of joy in his face. "And in real life he was totally the opposite," he siad. "He was like the last person in the world to play Hilly.

He told me: 'I aint no lover. I haven't had much But I was drawn to him because of his voice; his voice was just amazing. It was just an incredible voice which drove everybody crazy. He's not the Hollywood generic white-bread kid that you see in every movie. I wanted to cast him just to be different." So, how did you find out about this lifestyle? "I decided that I wanted to photograph skateboarders.

It took 12-year-old kids to figure that the whole city is like a concrete playground. They dont need gas money and they can go anywhere and they're treated like Hell's Angels; the cops hate 'em, the business people everybody hates skateboarders. And another seductive thing is, there's no parents. "I bought my son a skateboard and I started skating so I could keep up with the skaters and still hold a camera. I was thinking that I wanted to make a film, and use skateboarders as actors and somehow bring this world down because it was so incredible to me; how these kids had this culture that was totally different.

"I would talk to them and they would talk about condoms and sex. They knew everything about safe sex backwards and forwards and always used condoms, so they said. After about six months, the kids forgot that I was grown up. And I found out that no one's using condoms. It's all bull.

And there were a couple of guys who had figured out how to do safe sex without condoms and that was only with virgins. "So I would see them come around with these girls, you know, these young like 13-, 14-, 15-year-old girls, with braces on their teeth or whatever, and they would be with that girl until they devirginized her, they'd say. That's the term now." Two of the most striking scenes in the movie are bull sessions, one with boys, one with girls, talking about their sex lives. They're like those scenes in Spike Lee's "Jungle Fever" where the Black women are rapping about men, except that these are children some hardly into puberty and the frankness of their language masks astonishing ignorance and a poverty of imagination. Some people seeing the film assumed it was a documentary.

The words seem so spontaneous and the delivery is so unforced. "I'll show you the screenplay," Clark said. "It's written word for word. Every pause, every comma. It's incredible.

And the actors I'd been looking for kids that might be good actors, because street kids in New York are all actors. It's amazing; they're such extroverts, not shy around grown-ups, always in your face. Leo, who plays Tully, I met at a skate contest when he was 14 and I was drawn to him because he was the loudest kid. I mean, when you skate and you practice tricks, mm HURRY IN FOR THE BEST This is our special way to say "Thank You" to our customers for shopping at JCPenney. Certificates issued for purchases on Friday, Aug.

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