WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 749 - Larry Clark

Episode Date: October 9, 2016

Larry Clark does not consider himself a photographer and he explains to Marc why he doesn't. But that didn't stop a young Marc Maron from being drawn to Larry's raw, unflinching photos and his uncompromising art. Larry talks with Marc about his photography, his experiences in war and in prison, his struggle to get clean, and his films Kids, Bully, Another Day in Paradise, and Wassup Rockers. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Yes, we can deliver that. Uber Eats. Get almost, almost anything. Order now. Product availability may vary by region. See app for details. Lock the gates! all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucking ears what the fucksters what the fuckadelics what's happening i'm mark maron this is my podcast

wtf welcome to it uh Pretty exciting for me today. Oh, by the way, I recorded this yesterday, so I have not watched the debates yet. That was a strange sentence. I don't know if it works mathematically, but maybe I should say it another way. This was recorded before whatever happened last night. So I'll be taking that in with you in terms of what Monday's news looks like. I'll be taking that in as you do today. But I got no comment on it because it hadn't happened yet when I recorded this. happened yet when I recorded this. But today on the show, I was very excited to talk to Larry Clark,

the photographer, artist, and filmmaker, because he looms large in the dark corners of the photographic art world and also in film. And he's a real dude. He's the real deal. He's a real photographer, a real artist who did some uh pretty amazing work so i'll be talking to him in a little while i i enjoyed the film kids which he directed and harmony kareen uh scripted but i really love the film bully i think it's a raw uh visceral uh masterpiece of a movie but but also, you know, Larry's books, Teenage Lust and the first book, Tulsa, which was a basically documentary photographs of him. Not not really him, but his friends, Tulsa, you know, involved in shooting drugs, hanging out, shooting guns, just, you know being being the the the sort of oklahoma criminals

that they all were at that time in the early 70s late 60s and the first time i really came in touch with his work was when i was at boston university and i was uh very into photography i thought that's what i wanted to do with my life i I was a very prolific photographer in high school, a little darkroom rat. And I did a lot of photographs, and I really loved doing it. But I started to realize that the technical side of it was not my bag. There's a lot of chemistry involved, and to control that part of the art, you needed a lot of – it required some experimentation and some know how and some chemistry. And I it was not I didn't like that part.

I like shooting and making the picture and watching it come to life in the fixer or in the developer. I liked watching the image appear. I like to focusing the enlarger and seeing the negative. And but, you know, the terms that when it come down to mixing my own chemicals figuring out papers figuring out percentages of chemicals to get effect and all that stuff wasn't my bag it just I don't have the the discipline uh I didn't focus on that so I let it get away from me but when I was in college I took a uh I was a I had an art history what was it a film criticism minor which involved uh which was part of the art history department and just by a fluke i took a history of photography class with a guy named carl curenza who was also a photographer but was at bu for years and it was within the art history department

it was the history of photography it was a year-long survey class and he started the first semester at the cave paintings and he moved up moved up and the second semester began at the introduction of photography, which I thought was a brilliant way to change my life that class. But during the second half of the class where photography sought to be established as an art form, which was difficult once everybody was able to take pictures. art form, which was difficult once everybody was able to take pictures. And the two schools of thought in my recollection of the class were you had documentary photography and you had art photography. And these were the two contexts under the umbrella of photography as art. Those were the two intentions, the two modes. And they crossed over obviously at some point but there was you know there was a long sort of discussions about whether you can manipulate the image or manipulate the negative and it does it maintain its integrity you can't do that with documentary photographs all these conversations

i imagine have been annihilated now to some degree given that you know digital uh photography and has almost completely eradicated uh you know the process and given everybody a certain amount of control over manipulation and all that but i i don't know i'm not in that circle but you know in those in the you know in that survey class we were introduced to larry clark's tulsa and larry clark's teenage lust and i saw some of those images when I'd go down to New York. And right now, Larry's got a big show. It's an exhibition of his work at the new UTA Artist Space at 670 South Anderson Street here in Los Angeles. It's up until October 29th. I have not gotten down there yet.

I need to get down there because his work is very very visceral very raw very um you can feel it so let me just say this the the now hear this festival is less than three weeks away come hang out with me and my producer brendan mcdonald we're doing a special wtf event on the saturday of the festival but there are more than 30 podcasts live all weekend it's at the anaheim marriott, October 28th through October 30th. Go to nowhearthisfest.com and use the offer code WTF to get 25% off a three-day general admission pass. That's nowhearthisfest.com, offer code WTF.

You can go to wtfpod.com to get any of the last few tickets for Carnegie Hall and I've got Chicago coming up and uh Santa Barbara uh USC at Santa Barbara at Campbell Hall it's all there at wtfpod.com Nashville uh Tallahassee there's a lot of dates coming up all the dates in Connecticut and upstate New York next year but they're they're all available at wtfpod.com did i want to share that email yeah here it is uh subject line miles davis jack johnson dear mark as a loyal listener i rarely miss an episode but this week i realized i skipped your labor day conversation with joseph arthur i'm so glad i went back and listened because in the part of your discussion about miles davis you mentioned your love for jack john, which is an album,

which is indeed the soundtrack for a documentary about the first black heavyweight champion of the world, which my father, Larry Geringer, directed. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. Geringer. It's probably Geringer. I called him up to let him know, and he gave me all the details. It was 1970. My dad was a student at Columbia Film School and the documentary was his thesis project the producer he worked for later stole director credit but my dad still got credit at Columbia oh show business he'd already enlisted the great actor Brock Peters to narrate the film but he wanted Miles's trumpet to provide his own version of Johnson's voice see look at that arty jazz thinking it's. In the first recording session, Miles and his band came into the studio. My dad ran his movie, and Miles just played, reacting in real time to what he was seeing on screen. Later, additional cuts from the sessions were added to augment the initial recording,

which is how that five-disc version of the complete sessions that you own came to be. It's one of Miles' most overlooked albums, but a great one, and're mentioning it put a huge smile on my father's face and mine by the way the documentary went on to be nominated for an academy award but lost to a little movie you might have heard of called woodstock thanks again for the mention and let this be a reminder to all your listeners to never skip an episode ah alex geringer i'm hoping I'm saying it right. Thanks. I love that email, buddy. And I love that record. And now I got to see that documentary.

Larry Clark, in this conversation, I think what stands out outside of me not being able to get a word in is his commitment to the craft and what it meant to be a printer and what it meant to have control over that element and what it meant to live in your art. I mean, a lot of people have a lot of feelings about, about Larry's film work, certainly. And I think even less people know about his photography work,

but the self-publishing of the book and the book being an object of art in and of itself. I mean, I, I just, uh, I, I moved in and sort of astounded

when I talked to real artists who were possessed with that spirit of creating art. And sometimes you can't read it as that exactly in the moment, but the more you listen to Larry, you realize that, you know, his vision and his compulsion, you know, outside of drugs was art and living within it. So this is me and the photographer, filmmaker, artist, Larry Clark here in the garage. You can get anything you need with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get snowballs on Uber Eats. But meatballs and mozzarella balls, yes, we can deliver that.

Uber Eats. Get almost almost anything. Order now. Product availability may vary by region. See app for details. Death is in our air. This year's most anticipated series, FX's Shogun, only on Disney+. We live and we die.

We control nothing beyond that. An epic saga based on the global best-selling novel by James Clavel. To show your true heart is to risk your life. When I die here, you'll never leave Japan alive. FX's Shogun, a new original series streaming February 27th exclusively on Disney+. 18 plus subscription required. T's and Cencies apply. So, Larry Clark, in Los Angeles. What a, you're pretty comfortable out here, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I've made a number of films here. Sure. I've made, what's up, Rockers here. Yeah. By the kids from South Central LA. Another Day in Paradise. Another Day in Paradise, Ken Park. The first time I heard of you, I was taken, I took a year-long survey of photography at Boston University.

Yeah. And, you know, for some reason the guy spent the entire first semester starting at the cave paintings and moving up till the introduction of photography and then we got into the difference between documentary and art photography and that was the first time i saw the images from tulsa uh-huh and uh the you know the other book the uh teenage lust teenage lust yeah right second book right but you were shooting because i'm looking at the catalog for the show that opens here in la soon what. So what gallery is that at? The gallery is at UTA Artist Space in L.A. And then you got, there are images in there that go back way before even Tulsa.

Go back, the first images, the first serious images I ever took, there's a couple of pictures from 1961. And how old were you? I was born in 43, so in 61 I was, what, 18? 18, 19. You grew up in Oklahoma. I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and my goal in life was to get out of Oklahoma. Right. And so when I was 18, well, my mother and father had this little mom and pop baby photography business.

Really? Photographing babies. Yeah, right. And my mother was great at photographing babies, right? Yeah. What was the trick? The trick was she was just great at it. Distracting them with a little toy?

With everything, everything, everything. You know, she knew every trick in the book. And did they process the film there? Well, what happened was my father was a traveling salesman. Right. And that's how I met my mother. What is he selling? Books, door-to-door magazines, pres go around the country from town to town and hire crews of young people to go knock on doors and sell these magazines subscriptions.

And people would buy the magazine subscriptions. And anyway, that's how they made a living. It was very, very big back in the 50s. When you were in Tulsa, were you like, were you reading the beatniks? Were you looking for that kind of life? When I were in Tulsa, were you reading the beatniks? Were you looking for that kind of life? When I was in Tulsa, I didn't know nothing. But did you learn how to shoot at your mom's place? My mother and my father, as I said, he came back when I was 12.

And he got a job at a furniture store selling furniture and then I think selling cars for a year. furniture store uh selling furniture and then i think selling cars yeah for a year and my mother took a job with uh lloyd roberts photography who did baby photography right and they did some door-to-door uh photography where you go into these small towns yeah and knock on doors it's a photographer and a caller the caller knocks on doors yeah and says, oh, you have a new baby. I think her name is Deborah. Could I see her, please? And the husband's away working and the caller talks his way

into the house. And then the photographer, my mother, goes in and makes photographs. And she had a Roloflex with a flash on it and then like a screen, like a little movie screen,

a pull-down screen. And they'd throw a blanket over a coffee table, put the baby on it and then like a screen like a little movie screen a pull-down screen uh and they'd throw a cough uh throw a blanket over a coffee table put the baby on it yeah and have the mother standing at the edge of the table right outside a camera range yeah and set the baby up and uh and make the baby laugh and snap a picture before the baby fell right right and the mother would catch her and then there was a second uh stro, a slave unit pointed at the background, which went off when my mother took the picture with the flash and the rolling and it washed out all the shadow. Right.

So you got this, it looked like a studio portrait photography. Oh, yeah. And so when I was 15, I was forced into the business and I was knocking on doors for my mother and making calls. Yeah. And then when I was 16, or almost 16, I started doing baby photography and driving around with this caller, Frank Sparger, who was quite a character. Ex-con and everything. A real hustler con man type, but a great guy.

So you're learning the whole lingo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I was like 15 and skinny and a real late bloomer. And I stuttered so bad I could hardly talk. And I hated myself. And I had to go knock on doors and talk my way in. And I had to go knock on doors and talk my way in. And then I had to go in and be the photographer and make the babies laugh and set the baby on the coffee table with the blanket and put dolls on my head.

And they'd fall off and I'd go, uh-oh, and make the baby laugh and take the picture, man. And I hated it. And I hated what I was doing. I was forced into working for my parents in the mom and pop business. But you learned how to shoot. But it put a camera in my hand. I didn't learn how to shoot because it was just a rolling and two flashes. Right.

And I never thought photography was anything but photographing babies. I didn't know anything. But I always had a camera, always had a camera in my hand. And if I didn't have a camera, because I would go to my friend's house after after work um uh and shoot amphetamine yeah and when you were 15 i was 15

and almost 16 so i shot amphetamine every day for three years and i graduated from high school when i was 18 and i knew i had to get out of Tulsa. Who started the shooting? Like, when did it go from, like, taking Benzedrine to shooting it? When did that become? Well, after the war, World War II, where they gave all the soldiers speed, amphetamine. After the war, they started making this nasal inhaler called Valo, and it was made by the Pfeiffer Company, which is a famous company. they started making this nasal inhaler called Valo. Yeah.

And it was made by the Pfeiffer Company, which is a famous company. Yeah. They make Viagra and- Pfizer, yeah. Pfizer, right? Yeah. And they made this little nasal inhaler called Valo

for 75 cents. Right. And you opened it up and it was a plastic tube inside. You stuck it up your nose and it cleared up your sinuses. Right. It was full of amphetamine.

So someone discovered that some ex-cons or somebody's older brother, right? And you would twist off the top and break it open, and inside was a piece of cotton soaked in menthol and other shit and amphetamine. and other shit and amphetamine. And we would put the cotton in a little cup or something and add an eyedropper full of water and work it up. And the grease would float to the top. And the grease was pure amphetamine mixed with menthol and stuff. And we would shoot it, you know, inject it, you know.

Did you feel the menthol in your veins? And you would get this incredible rush and this incredible flash. Yeah. And some people would dance across the room, and some people would just open their mouth and, like, fall backwards on the bed. And, you know, all different kinds of reactions. Uh-huh. But I was this hyper kid that stuttered, like, mad.

And I had, like, I mean, I must have had a terrible ADD, right? Right. But then no one knew what that was. So the amphetamine calmed you down? The amphetamine made me, not like my friends, totally calm. I went from this hyperactive kid who couldn't talk to this most calmest person in the world. And I started photographing my friends. When I was 18, I left Oklahoma, luckily.

Wait, when you left, had you shot Tulsa? No, no, no. You came back. I'd taken a few pictures of my friends with my mother's Roloflex. And you'll see two of those pictures in the show my first two serious photographs because I always had my camera so and I was in the secret world because it wasn't supposed to be drugs back then I said Eisenhower was president it was supposed to be mom's apple pie and white picket finches there

was no drugs there was no alcohol there was no child abuse there was no mother and father yeah alcoholics, drug addicts. There was nothing, you know. But at that point, you'd already come in contact with a few hustlers, and you knew there was a racket. Listen, man, I knew everything, you know. And I was hip to rhythm and blues. And, you know, there was a black station in Tulsa. A guy named Frank Berry would come on the radio

like at 11 o'clock at night and play Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Jimmy Reed, you know, Light and Slim. Yeah. Everything. So when I was like 12 years old, I'm like under the covers at night with a radio listening to all this music, man, and just falling in love with this music. So I was hip to like rhythm and blues and all those guys, you know.

And when I was about 12, I read this book by Louis Armstrong called Satchmo, which was his first autobiography written, you know, like 50, 60 years ago. 60 years ago um uh 60 years ago i guess yeah and uh and i read it um and it was all about him growing up like in new orleans and like the red lights uh district yeah and like um um black women chasing black men down the street with a razor slicing and slicing them yeah yeah and stuff and I was just fascinated by this, and I knew there was another world out there, and that book just changed my life, Satchmo by Laurie Armstrong, man.

So where do you go when you're 18? So anyway, so luckily, my mother was ambitious, and there was this association called the Professional Photographers of America, the PPA, PP of A. And it was just all these corny portrait photographers that had these portrait studios where families of kids would come in

and they would take pictures of them and retouch every line out of their face and then hand color them. Oh, the hand colored ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you see some of them now even like the old pictures will be posted where it's some girl in high school all dressed up and retouched and colored holding a rifle right with the rosy faces yeah yeah yeah and um uh so they said so

the gerhard barker uh gave a talk he he was from mil and he came through town and he gave this talk. He was a really charismatic guy. Yeah. And he had this school in Milwaukee. So he talked him into, it was a photography school, commercial cornball photography school

in the basement of an art school. And the art school tolerated it because it basement of an art school. Yeah. And the art school tolerated it because it brought money into the school. Yeah. So they sent me to this school thinking I was going to come back and take over the family business, right? Or babies. I was already like a drug addict and was hip to the music

and smoking weed and shooting every drug because by the time I was 18, you know, I hadn't slept for three years. So this is what, 1960 something? This is like 58, 59, 60, 61. So you head out to Milwaukee? And I headed to Milwaukee to this cornball little photography school with all these corny little students. But Gerhard Barker was this hip teacher. And so I started hanging out immediately with all the art school students.

Right. With the sculptors and painters. And my first girlfriend in Milwaukee, my first real girlfriend ever, steady real girlfriend, was this girl named Shirley Lewis, who was a painter. And then- Changed your life. Changed my life. And then I had another girlfriend there at the same time. They didn't know about each other called chris hotfid who's passed away now with the cancer unfortunately uh and she was a very good painter

are you still are you still slamming speed at this point only a couple of times because i was in milwaukee and i wanted to get away from that whole scene right and then they quit making velo and all my friends in tulsa had um going on be criminals, and they already were, like we all were. Dope. They went on to the penitentiary, and all the girls became prostitutes. Really? And they quit making Valo and amphetamine available for a few years. And then methadrine hit.

Dezoxin, which was pure amphetamine on these little yellow pills that you could soak in water and crush them down and pull up a shot of pure methadrine. And that's what Andy Warhol and all of his people were taking back in the 60s, 67, 68. So that hit the streets then? So that was all over the place and it was a pharmaceutical. You had to get a prescription from a doctor, right? Right.

So I go to Milwaukee and I hang out with all the painters and sculptors and then all my friends were painters and sculptors and I room with a friend, a great painter, Ed Jankowski.

So I realized that a camera was something uh that you could use other than to make these baby pictures because it never occurred to me right i can use my camera uh as a tool for my expression right as an artist right did you had you seen like did the teacher show you like the americans or any of that stuff dorothea lang did you had you seen like did the teacher show you like the Americans or any of that stuff? Dorothea Lange? Did you get taken any of that in? No, no, no. I learned about Edward Weston. Yeah, sure.

Adams. Yeah. Luckily, there was one of the students that was hip and he showed me Walker Evans. Right. Who is my favorite photographer of all time. I can see it. Who influenced Robert Frank and everybody, right? Walker Evans was the,

him and Dorothea did the Dust Bowl shots. Right, right, right. And Walker Evans did a ton of other stuff. Right. So I saw Dorothea Lange's pictures and I saw all the photographers that worked for the government, right? Because Roosevelt started this program

and sent photographers out around America to photograph the conditions of the Dust Bowl. Who were those old ones? What was the ones before that? Like Sullivan, was that his name? He did the Indian photographs, the big Indian photographs? Oh, no, no. His name was not Sullivan. It's a famous name, but I'm blanking.

Yeah, me too. He worked for the government, I think, right? Anyway, yeah. He was a great photographer. He photographed all the government, I think, right? Anyway, yeah. He was a great photographer. He photographed all the Indians. He photographed Geronimo and all those people. A great photographer. And he had a big box camera on a tripod.

He was making like 8x10 photographs, so 4x5 or something. Big plates. Big, big plates. So you're looking at all that stuff. So I'm looking at that. like eight by ten photographs so four by five or something big plates big big plates and um so you're looking at all that stuff so i'm looking at that and i hadn't seen robert frank but uh i had seen um uh some photographs by robert frank imitators and there was a ton of them right right so i saw a couple of those um and i saw uh w eugene sm Eugene Smith who worked for Life magazine right and back then Life magazine had great photographers working for them and writing great stories and I like I liked Gene Smith the best yeah and he worked

for life and he would do these assignments and he would go out and spend a month or two or three photographing uh uh something uh some people and he did a famous series called the country doctor and he did one about i remember seeing that yeah uh he did one great one about a black nurse in the South. Documentary style. He was like a midwife, a documentary style. But he was this great dramatic printer where he printed dark and then he brought up the highlights and the faces with ferrocyanide, which was a bleach.

Did you learn how to print in Milwaukee? In Milwaukee, what I did for two years in school was all I did was practice and take pictures. I took more pictures by the thousands than anybody else in the class. Once you got the vision that you could express yourself. Yeah. I mixed all my own chemicals. I learned how to mix my developer, hypo, everything.

I mixed all my chemicals. I tried out every kind of film known to man. What'd you land on usually? Tri-X. Yeah. Tri-X F400? Yes, which was the fastest film made, black and white, grainy. Yep.

And two blocks from the school, the art school, which isn't there anymore, Leighton School of Art, it was called, L-A-Y-T-O-N. And they tore it down, and it was on the drive, and the lake was behind it. This beautiful, beautiful, way ahead of its time, contemporary building that they tore down because they were going to put a highway through it that never happened, right?

Yeah. So it was torn down for nothing. Yeah. And it was a beautiful building. But two blocks from the building was this movie theater, and they showed art movies. And in Oklahoma, I'd only seen like John Wayne movies. Sure. And Mark Hudson and Doris Day.

Yeah. And John Ford. Right, right. And I'd never seen a foreign film in my life. But they showed all these foreign films. Yeah. And I'd never seen a foreign film in my life. But they showed all these foreign films. And I went in one day when I was 18.

Yeah. And then I went back for two years and saw every film they showed. And I saw all of Bergman, all of Godard, all of Truffaut.

Right. All of everybody, all the French greats, auteurs. Auteurs, yeah. And then in 1962, there was a film showing and uh and it said shadows yeah and i went in and it was john cassavetes first film right in black and white and there was and there'd never been anything like it nothing had never been a film made like it in ever in the history of cinema. And I saw it in 62 when it came out in this art theater

on a big screen, right, or on the screen, right? And it changed my life. Cassavetes changed my life because I walked out and I said, shit, man, someone sees the way I see. Somebody else sees the way I see. Somebody else sees the way I see. And it validated the way that I saw. Right. And I went back to Oklahoma.

Did it plant the seed that you were going to maybe do film at some point? I always wanted to make film. I always wanted to be a storyteller. I always wanted to be a writer. I always wanted to be a filmmaker. I always wanted to be a sculptor. I always wanted to be a storyteller i always wanted to be a writer yeah i always wanted to be a filmmaker i always wanted to be a sculptor i always wanted to be a painter i always wanted to be anything but a photographer but i had a camera it was the only tool i had so i so i saved my money and i bought a 35 millimeter um um a camera um um conica no no no not not a reflex camera yeah uh where the mirrors crash together and make a sound um uh but uh but a little like a sp which um um which was a rain finder camera

yeah and um you have um um uh you don't look through the lens. You look through a little rectangular a little rectangular on the side which is calibrated to see through the lens but you're not looking through the lens. Right. And so when you click the shutter it's very silent. Yeah.

You know, it hardly makes any noise at all. And so I went back to Tulsa and I couldn't afford a Leica, which was also a rangefinder camera and extremely quiet,

just barely the click of it. Yeah, yeah. And started photographing my friends in Tulsa, which was a secret world.

And I was one of the kids. So they all knew you. They were comfortable. And they were so comfortable that if I didn't have my camera when I walked in, they'd say, Larry, where's your camera? We're ready to go. Because it was like a part of me.

Right, yeah. You know, it was a part of me. So they knew me with a camera, and if it wasn't a camera hanging from my shoulder from my early days with my mother's Ol flex after work it was unusual I looked naked or something where's your camera yeah and so when I started photographing my friends in this secret world that nobody else could have possibly come in right and done except someone from the inside like me I was just one of the guys, right? Yeah. And there were no plans ever to show these photographs to anybody.

There was never any plans to do a book. There was never any plans for anything. I was just practicing photography. Right. And these guys at that time, they were shooting up speed. One guy shot himself, I think, right? This is 71, yeah. Right. And you're just there taking pictures.

This is their life. Shot himself by accident. I want to make that clear. It wasn't committing suicide. This was my life. Right. My life. But you'd had a break from it.

You'd been awake for a couple years. I had a break. So it's my life, and I'm one of the guys, and there's nothing special about me. I'm just one of the guys, except I had been away and- Got a head full of art. And got a head full of art. Yeah. So, as I'm there being myself and interacting with my friends naturally, At the same time, I'm up here in the corner,

another me looking down and seeing the scene that I'm in. So I'm photographing my friends very close. We were in very small rooms and I had a 50 millimeter lens. So I'm like a foot from them, two feet from them. It's very small very tight space my camera's so quiet that after after a couple of minutes you never heard it anymore and they didn't hear it were you were you shooting up then too of course yeah of course and so um everybody's all jacked up yeah so so uh and this is so early that it wasn't even called speed then.

It was amphetamine. Yeah. It became speed later in the 60s, 67, when methadrine started. So you were shooting these in 63, 64? No, 62 and 63. That's when Tulsa was shot? 1962, 63. So that world was nowhere.

No one knew about it. Nowhere. No one knew about it, right? And so then I went away. Where'd you go? To New York. Right. And you met New York City.

With that dude. And I got a job. I was such a great darkroom and a great printer. Yeah. And knew everything backwards and forwards about chemistry and photography and all this stuff. Because all I did for two years was work. Yeah. Was work.

And I've gone to a few schools. I'm not a good teacher. But I've gone to a number of schools through the years as a guest speaker. Right. And I see these kids there going to like four years of photography school and college. Yeah. And on their daddy's dime, right? Sure, sure.

And just fucking around, you know? And I'd tell them him i would say look man you can look at photography in six months you don't need to be to be in this school you're wasting your time you're wasting your parents money if you want to really want to be a photographer quit school and go out and just make photographs and there's no reason for them to know about chemicals anymore there's no reason for them to know about anything except you know you know make the photographs uh from your own personal vision right and so obviously i wasn't invited back to very many schools to talk right so and uh so when you got to new york you got a gig in the lab

so when i got to new york i got a job with a um a big commercial photographer who worked with this designer, famous designer George Lois. Yeah. And Carl Fisher did all the covers for Esquire back then. Right, right. Barbara Streisand and John Updike. Were you going on the shoots? Everybody.

Well, the shoots were in the studio and I was there. Right. And I remember- You were mostly printing or what? I was the darkroom. Right, you were it. I was this 20-year-old kid who was the darkroom. And I knew more than anybody else.

Right. And I used to go in the darkroom and a call would want to print, right? Yeah. And I would print it the way that I wanted to print it, a better way, and make these beautiful prints. And he would freak out and say, that's not the way I asked you to do it. And I way, and make these beautiful prints. And he would freak out and say, that's not the way I asked you to do it. And I said, no, but it's better, man. You don't trust me.

I know what I'm doing. And so he would go talk to the manager that hired me, Dwayne Dalrymple, Dal. And, but they wouldn't fire me. They didn't fire me because I was just too good a printer, man. Yeah.

And so after a year, my mother called me. And I never in my life called my mother mommy, you know. Never, ever in my life called her mommy. And I remember the phone rang. It was for me. And Carl was there. And Dow was there there and some other studio assistant was there um uh and she told me i'd been drafted you know um they'd gotten a letter you see because this is like 60 uh um uh four and there was no Vietnam. There was no war. President Johnson hadn't sent the first 50,000 troops to Vietnam over the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident,

so-called incident, right? Right. So I was drafted and nobody tried to get out of the draft, you know. And the only way you could get out of the draft, and a couple of people, I was in New York, did it by going and wearing a dress. Yeah. You know, otherwise there was no way to get out. You were drafted. No matter what you told them, you were drafted unless you went wearing a dress and full makeup and everything like that.

And since it was New York City, there were a couple of gay guys that did this, right? They put on a dress and lipstick and makeup and air rings and went to the draft, which was so far out in 64, man. And the Army just immediately said, go home. Right. Because there wasn't a war outside of the lack of choice, were you frightened or what? No, I was just part of life. Everybody went to the Army for two years. I was drafted.

So where'd you go? If you joined, it was three years. But fuck, I didn't join. I was drafted for two years like everybody else. I went to Fort Gordon, Georgia for georgia for basic uh terrible hot uh hellhole uh and um halfway through basic training uh the drill sergeant walked in one morning and said uh are you guys ready to go kill the commies in vietnam and we said what's vietnam because that that day president johnson had sent the first 50 000 troops yeah over to vietnam and we didn't know what vietnam was and so uh i spent my first year

in the army in the south i was in fort eustis virginia uh and then i was in virginia beach yeah uh and um i was the most fucked up soldier. I was always getting busted, and I was always like a private E-1. Busted with what? Speed? Busted for whatever you can imagine, you know, talking back to the sergeant. You know, every rule I could break, I broke, right? Yeah.

I got cart marshaled once. For what? I went AWOL. Yeah. martial once. For what? I went AWOL. Yeah. Because I'd gotten leave to go visit, and I went to visit my girlfriend in New York. And I just stayed, you know, for a couple extra weeks. And then I went back and they threw me in the brig. And then it wasn't like a real court martial. It was just, it was called a summary court martial i mean so i had to go see the the head of the unit the major um who sent me to the captain who had gone to cornell yeah um

and he said to me uh um you think you're pretty smart don't you you know he said i graduated from cornell and i laughed at him and so he busted me down to private E1 and I took my pay for six months so I didn't get my $90 check a month whatever it was I had no money and put me on like a kitchen detail so I had to peel potatoes and scrub pots for a few months and then he transferred me out of the unit to I was in a unit where I could have been a photographer and stuff. But he transferred me out of that unit, he didn't want anything to do with me, to a transportation unit. And the transportation unit was a unit where they offloaded trucks and ships and stuff. And it was 90% black.

And it was all like hard labor. And we were out working on the railroad in Virginia with pickaxes and stuff. Almost like prison. Yeah, but I was smart. And the one thing I realized in basic training that I'd never known before, in basic training was that I'd never known before that in basic training of all these guys in basic training that I was smarter than all of them because most of them were 18 and straight out of their home.

They were like mama's boys. They didn't know anything. They were like, didn't know nothing. So by chance uh the uh the company clerk had um mustered out of the army his time was up right and so they needed needed like like a company clerk and um uh when i got a basic had volunteered, which you never volunteer. The rural has never volunteered. But there was a typing class and the drill sergeant,

we were in formation at attention. The drill sergeant came out and said, I need a volunteer for typing class. And I raised my hand and said, me, me, me.

So he said, okay. So I got to go to typing class every afternoon for six weeks or something. And I learned how to be a great typist. I typed right in a minute. I could speed type. I could do like 120 words a minute or something.

That was really good. Even though I was a private E1 in this transportation unit, they needed a company clerk, and since I could type so well, they made me company clerk. So now I'm in the captain's office, right? The same guy. The company clerk, and I'm the captain's man, right? Right.

And so everything that comes in, the orders and all the information and all the correspondence, I'm typing it and being the company clerk. Not the Cornell guy, the captain. No, no, no. It's a different guy. As a matter of fact, he wasn't a captain in the second year. He was a major. Yeah.

And I got along with him, but I didn't get haircuts, and I was shaggy, and my uniform was supposed to be pressed and starched and all that. I would just take my uniform and throw it in the laundry and into the dryer and put it on all wrinkled and go in the captain's office. I mean, the major's office. And I was the company clerk and typing. And I was so good that they couldn't really get rid of me because there was nobody else qualified. But the first chance he got, I'd been in the South for one year.

He sent me to Vietnam. He signed orders to send me to Vietnam. So my second year in the Army, I spent in Vietnam. So I was in Vietnam all of 1966. So I was in the South all of 65 and Vietnam all of 1966. So I was in Vietnam early and I mustered out in Oakland California December of 1966 and this is two years before the first Tet Offensive so you didn't see you weren't I didn't I didn't see any any real action I got shot at a few times because we were in a transportation unit. Right. We used to take the ammo up to the soldiers in the jungle. Yeah. And back then, if you saw like Oliver Stone's first film, Platoon,

they used to take the soldiers up into the jungle way up north in northern Vietnam and drop them in the jungle and they would fight and I was stationed in Tui Wa which later became like a fighting place too but it was fairly safe when I was there because all the fighting was done up in the jungle. So the war hadn't expanded yet. It hadn't expanded yet so but I would see these truckloads of soldiers coming back from the jungle yeah you know like a truck open truck with both sides the soldiers sitting there like 30 soldiers yeah and every one of them was like staring blankly ahead man yeah i'd never see anything like i'll never forget the image of these soldiers coming back man from the jungle

fighting in the jungle no camera though huh you know huh? You know, no, no, no. I had a camera, but I took very few pictures when I was in the Army, a few, a few good ones. But when I was in Vietnam, what I did was I smoked weed and drank warm beer every evening. And as I say, the unit was 90 black yeah and um uh 89.9 of them had never smoked pot in their life nobody smoked pot yeah and i would i would like going to the small village um uh in um outside of tuiwa uh and cop like a a small pillowcase full of the most potent marijuana you've ever smoked in your

life back then yeah for like 10 bucks right yeah right and i and i'd bring it back and i turned on um all all all my friends in this unit life change so yeah yeah so like uh so like one year later when i mustered out 99 of the squad smoked weed, right? You know? And we would, like, sit on the sand noon at night, late, drinking warm beer, really, like, hot, warm, hot, warm beer in a smoking pot, getting so fucked up that one night I was walking back to my tent, and I passed out face first in the sand. And I woke up, you know, like 5 o'clock in the morning, still passed out face first in the sand. It was sand on my nose, all in my eyes, all in my mouth. I didn't know where I was, and then I woke up enough to know where I was.

And I went and tried to wash the sand out of my eyes and nose and mouth. Yeah. And I went into my tent and slept another hour. that's how strong the shit was man so there was no dope around yet there was no dope i went into the village uh and found uh found an opium den right and i went into the opium den and um the uh the chief of police of this village came in and said hello and watched me. And the opium den guy was like straight out of Gunga Den, right? This little skinny Vietnamese guy,

skinny skin and bones, wearing like a loincloth. And on the floor was this straw mat and a wooden pillow and it was a piece of wood with like a a curve hollowed out that was so smooth because it'd probably been there for 100 years and about a thousand heads had laid on it right and and actually a piece of wood was smooth and comfortable because so many people had laid on their side on it smoking opium right so so um he had the the big hookah there and i took three hits of opium and he said that's enough no more and uh the chief of police is watching me and laughing and um and me being like uh you know an old doper you know and like and like a fucking hog, I said, no, no, no, I want more.

So I took a couple more hits against this guy. And this guy's saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And so I get back to my unit high as a kite. And then I was sick as a dog for three days, man, throwing up and dying for three days because I OD'd on it it was that strong and I should have stopped it two or three hits but then I took five or six you know not realizing what I was doing because I'd never smoked opium before and man I was so sick for three days I'll never forget I never been that sick in my life but that wasn't your except kicking heroin many years later I was that

sick right yeah but but that was my Vietnam experience. And so I came back, and I was lucky because we would get shot at as we floated up the river up north to bring them the ammo. But two years later, after the Tet Offensive, all that area was overrun by vietcong and people were getting killed and then uh the government there was no heroin in vietnam when i was there i guarantee you if there was i would have found it yeah you know there was opium dens uh in the villages and weed that was just fantastic but then after i left um the government, the government of Vietnam started bringing in heroin and sending it to the American troops because they had a captive audience, right? Sure. And then after that, thousands and thousands and thousands of soldiers came back to mustered out of the army from Vietnam with incredibly high dope habits, heroin habits, right? Yeah.

And so they came back to America and started shooting heroin in America and then had a lot of trouble, you know, kicking it. But that was all the government of Vietnam getting heroin and sending it into the troops. Right. And making millions of dollars, right? Right. And they strung out the whole country. The whole fucking country, man.

And so it was so corrupt, man. So corrupt back then. So when you get back, do you go back to New York then? When I got out, I mustered out in December 67 in San Francisco, luckily. And the next day, I took my first hit of acid with some friends. It was a whole different world then now. It was a whole different world, right? And I'm in Vietnam reading Life magazine and seeing the hippie movement starting with kids with long hair.

And I couldn't wait to get out and get back, man. Yeah, yeah. And like Dylan's record, Everybody Must Get Stoned was playing on the radio in Vietnam, you know. You know, and because, you know, we got a radio and stuff. Yeah, sure. And I couldn't wait to get back. So I got back and immediately started growing my hair and growing a mustache and doing acid and smoking weed and doing every drug I could do. When did your relationship with the heroin start?

You know, and I was in Frisco for a few months, San Francisco. Excuse me, San Francisco. They hate it. I know, they hate it. They hate it when you call it Frisco. So I was in San Francisco for a few months, and then I went back to New York, So I was in San Francisco for a few months.

And then I went back to New York. And I was doing all the drugs, peyote and everything and LSD. And back then for just about five months at the max, six months at the very max, they had THC legally in pill form. Yeah. That was legal. Yeah. That was like a prescription drug, right? Right. And for about six months, it was legal.

And you could get like pure THC pills. Yeah. And take them. And man, it was the greatest, most pleasant high in the whole world. Just so much fun. You were so happy and laughing and just a high that I've never had again. It was that great and pleasant.

And then the government snapped and they passed a law against him. How was the acid? The acid, you know, the acid never really agreed with me so much. I had two or three trips that were were great and i saw god and everything you know and then he went away and then uh i took two i had two really bad trips in a row yeah horribly bad acid trips awful awful awful man and um so i never took acid again now what so when do you when how does tulsa happen as a

book you back from vietnam i'm back from vietnam and it's 68 uh and i go back to tulsa most everybody was in jail and then i went back in 68 and um uh i rented a little 16 millimeter a movie camera yeah film. Filmed my friends. Billy Mann was like back in town, whose daddy died in 1970, who's one of the two main characters in the book. It starts when we're kids and it ends with these young kids,

the next generation, 15, 16 year old kids. So it's like a circle. I was saying this is a circle. It just goes on and on. And it's still still going on if you go back to tulsa now there's more method green in tulsa than there ever was in my whole life and tar and and uh the whole um uh country uh does method green now and they make it how did you like you know we've got through vietnam we got through the photos and we talked a bit about the opening but what was your deliverance into the world of fine art i mean how did tulsa get made into a book how did that become uh you know this notorious and important

documentary photography well what what happened was uh back then all all the photographers wanted to have a book of their work. Right. And there were only a few places that would publish your book, and it was very, very hard to get your book published, especially if you wanted your book to be like you wanted your book to be because they would want an editor to edit your book. And you can imagine that if an editor had touched Tulsa, what would have happened, right?

Because I got naked, and I got dicks, and I got everything that was happening in the book. Guns, drugs, and dicks. Yeah, and so my friend Ralph Gibson, who I met, is a great photographer, a very well-known photographer, a real photographer. I'm not a real photographer. He's a real photographer.

What does that mean? A real photographer loves photography and photographs every day of their life, and that's what they do. Right. And the real photographers are Ralph Gibson, Lee Friedlander, Gary Wintergran, who passed away, was a real photographer. Those are the real photographers. What do you consider yourself?

An artist. Okay. And I just had a camera as a tool. Right. Because I always wanted to be anything but a photographer. And I always wanted to make films. And I always wanted to be a sculptor or a painter. So in 68, you could not get your book published.

Right. So Ruff had a very personal book that he wanted published that he laid out completely himself called The Somnambulist. Yeah. And finally, Aperture, Peter Bunnell, who ran Aperture for 30 years, agreed to publish a Ralph's book, but wanted to come over to Ralph's every Wednesday night and edit it with him. And Ralph said, no way, right? It's a very personal book. And so Ralph, being very smart and a very intelligent guy, one of the smartest men that I've ever met, just natural, you know, high IQ, decided to self-publish his book, which had never been done.

And so he actually printed up these stocks. He just went to his typewriter and printed up these stocks he just went to his uh his uh typewriter and printed up these stocks yeah had them printed and went around to friends and rich people that uh that he met and actually sold them enough stocks for his book uh and raised three thousand dollars and flew out to california because then there were all these printing companies that printed for the aerospace industry and stuff. And that had stopped, so they were hungry for business. So you could get a book published for $3,000

and get 3,000 copies. And in California, there was a 10% law where the printer could be 10% over or 10% under. So of course you got 3,000 copies and of course you got exactly 2,700 copies. They were always just accidentally 10% under, which was legal. So Ralph printed the 7,900 and got 2,700 copies

and self-published it and just put the, and said, I got to think of a press. So he put Lestrum Press on it. And then the somnambulist, Ralph Gibson, The Spine. And on the cover it just says, I don't think it has, it doesn't say anything on the cover, just a photograph. On the side it says, I'm an amuletist. Yeah. So he was my buddy, so I wanted to print Tulsa.

And so I laid out the book, completely laid out the book from 62 to 68. And then went back to Tulsa with my dummy to finish the book, knowing exactly what was missing from the scene, knowing exactly what photographs I needed that I didn't have of things that were happening. Yeah. And I didn't know when they would happen, where they would happen, or how they would happen.

But I knew I was going to be there when they happened. So I went back to Tulsa in 71. And I started firing up methadrineadrine um the good stuff good stuff that's oxygen man pure for pure pharmaceutical methadrine on a pill little plastic pill you crush up yeah and then draw up the um uh with it put it in a half an eye drop or water and draw up the methadrine and and fix right yeah and uh so i went back and just jumped back into the life and made photographs. 71.

In 71 and finished the book. And the second half of the book is all in 71, and all those photographs were made within a three- or four-month period because I knew what was missing, and I knew the scene. And once I had all the photographs from the 71, I went back to New York. And I printed the 71 photographs in the darkroom, in Ralph's darkroom, which happened to be, Ralph had met Robert Frank.

And Robert Frank had given Ralph his old enlarger. It was like an Omega D2. Get out of here Ralph his old enlarger. It was like an Omega D2. Get out of here. This enlarger. So the synambulars in Tulsa were printed, or the 71 pictures from Tulsa, were printed on Robert Frank's old Omega D2 enlarger in Ralph Gibson's darkroom.

So that might have been the enlarger he used to make the Americans? Possibly. I guess so. Probably. Because I was thinking about it, and I never thought about it until today, that Tulsa on some level, though they're maybe over a decade apart, is the next wave of the Americans. In some weird way, there's a continuity to it.

Well, the Americans was the late 50s and Tulsa was 71. So there was more than a decade, but yeah. Do you know what I'm saying, though? Yeah. The other America. The Americans changed photography forever. Yeah. And Tulsa changed photography forever.

That's right. I printed the book exactly as you see it today. And you have that great quote in it. Once the needle goes in, it never comes out. Yeah, and that was from Billy Mann. He said that. Billy Mann said that to me in 68. And I never forgot it.

So I think it's under his photograph. So I print the pictures. Ralph comes back from Europe, lets me crash on his couch for another month. One night, Danny Seymour comes over because Danny Seymour has this book, A Loud Song, which was his personal diary that he made

and he wanted it published. And so he came over to ask Ralph to publish it for him, right? To go out to California and publish it for him for like 3,000 bucks. The way he did his book. The Sun Ambulist. And Ralph had a second book that he wanted to publish

called Days at Sea. And also a photographer named Neil Slavin had a book called Portugal that he wanted to publish, self-publish himself. Ralph agreed to do that and put the Luston Press on it. And he agreed to do Danny's book and put Luston Press on it. And when Danny came over, I'd never met Danny in my life,

and he walked up to me and said, Hi, Larry, I'm Danny. Robert told me that you have these photographs that should be published, and I want to pay to publish the book. Just like that. Yeah. And so Ralph and Danny and I flew out

to California together, and Danny was shooting heroin, and I was doing cocaine like crazy. And so Ralph and Danny and I went to the printers. And we printed The Loud Song, Tulsa, and Nils Levin's Portugal. And so we printed all those three books together. And I got exactly 2,700 copies, of course. We paid for 3,000 for the 10% law.

And Danny got 2,700 copies of The Loud Song, and Neil Slavin got 2,700 copies of Portugal. And so the first edition is a paperback, and there's only 2,700 copies, and that's why now you go on eBay and you see it sells for thousands of dollars sometime, you know, a good cherry copy. And I have, I actually have two copies. I have one cherry copy and then I have one copy still in the shrink wrap.

Yeah. It was published in 71, Ralph Gibson's Luston Press. So all of a sudden this, there wasn't a Luston Press. All of a sudden there's a Luston Press with four photography books out there on the shelves, right? And Tulsa was an immediate sensation, man. I mean, the reviews were Alan Coleman in The Village Voice, a great photography critic who worked for the New York Times after The Village Voice. This book, Larry Clark's Tulsa,

comes out of nowhere, you know. It's too good to be believed. Yeah. That was the start of the review, you know. So it was like this rave review. And the New York Times gave it a rave review. Wow, yeah. And everybody gave it a rave review. and it sold out within months, right?

What about Teenage Lust? When did that first come out? So Teenage Lust was published. I self-published that myself in 83 or 84. When were the images taken? The images were taken through my whole life. It was kind of a scrapbook style book of images of me from a little kid all the way through my life. And I went back to Tulsa in 72 and just continued on photographing the kids at the end of Tulsa and my friends who

were still alive. And I got a girlfriend who was a prostitute and we went around and she'd go in and fuck doctors or give them a blowjob and get scripts for the Zoxxon and for an opiate for herself because she was a heroin addict. And we drove around the whole country for a couple of years and um uh uh so i just went back into life and and really just lived out a lot of life and uh and some of the stuff from times square those images were pretty great and and um and then i went to the penitentiary because I was in a poker game with some guys that I didn't know well. And I won and they wouldn't pay me.

And one guy pulled out a gun. And so I left with my girlfriend. And I went to the car and I got a gun. And I came back and I went into the house. I shot the guy and I shot him in the arm on purpose. I think on purpose. I don't know if I just missed or I think on purpose. Yeah, yeah.

I might have just missed. I think I just shot at him. And then left. And about a week later, I got busted, and the cops stopped me and busted me for shooting this guy. And my mindset was, what? You know, the guy snitched on me? You know, why would he tell me? Why would he snitch on me?

You know, because for me and my friends and my mindset, it was the old west. It was like Billy the Kid and Jesse James, you know. You know, someone that pulls a gun on you, you get a gun and shoot him, you know. And I was actually shocked that he had snitched on me, so I had to go to court. And I got like four or five years. I got four years, I think, on one charge and a year on another charge. five years i got four years i think on one charge and a year on another charge um and i did 19 months and somehow my parole because uh my mother's brother and uncle used to be a newspaper

writer a sports writer for the uh newspaper in in oklahoma city i think and and he knew everybody and knew a lot of politicians and so my mother employed him and he pulled a few strings and so I got to go to the parole board and get parole but they wouldn't parole me to Oklahoma they would only parole me to New York so I paroled out in the 78. Was it where were you where were you in the pen? In Oklahoma, in McAllister. Bad one? State penitentiary. Hard times.

Hard times. And maximum security prison. How'd you hold up in there? I was fine, you know, because I had friends in there, you know. Yeah. So I was fine. I had people watching my back. And I'm smart enough to know, you know know how to act in the penitentiary.

Which is, I could talk about that for half an hour, how to act. But anyway, so I... What's the main thing you need to know? You need to know that you never ask anybody what they're in for. Yeah. And you never make jokes with people that you don't know, and you mind your own business, and you don't talk a lot, and you never ask people personal questions,

especially what they're in for. Because if you ask somebody what they're in for, and they say, you know, I murdered my family, my whole family, my brother, my sister, my mother, my father, and my baby brother, you know, because you never know what kind of answer you're going to get, you know. So if you're in with, and your cellmate is someone like that, and you ask them what they're in for, man, I mean, you don't want to know that yeah you know so you never ask anybody what they're in for us the number one rule and um and and you never joke around and you're quiet and you stay straight ahead and um uh and that's it because it's the penitentiary man and there's some really bad

people in there but i'll tell you one thing about the penitentiary. 90% of people are in the penitentiary, you know, for crimes. Yeah. But 90% are all drug and alcoholists, all drug addicts and alcoholics. And their crimes come from that, from them being drug addicts and alcoholics. Right. come from that, from them being drug addicts and alcoholics. This is 10% of people who are in the penitentiary that really need to be in the penitentiary. And there's 3 or 4% of people in the penitentiary that need to be executed

immediately. They need to be taken out and shot in the head. Because they're just that kind of people. They just are born that way. No, they can't be. They don't have that gene. I think scientists have proven that people like that who don't have a conscience or feel any guilt are missing a certain gene or be something in a gene. And one of my best friends, Jack Johnson was like that and he's now he od'd and he's in teenage lust um at the beginning and there's articles about him in his life and

his crimes so teenage lust is really you at your most out of control and so yeah yeah yeah yeah and i'm just uh in the life photographing the life. And my girlfriend's a prostitute and a drug addict. And my best friend, Jack Johnson, is a heroin addict and a crook. So you get paroled in New York? Yeah, so I get paroled in New York. And like Jack was the most charming guy in the world. You'd love Jack. Yeah.

But Jack didn't have this guilt thing. He had no guilt feelings, no conscience. He could be like you and me talking, and you'd turn your back, and he may take your watch and put it in his pocket and never give it a second thought. It was just a natural thing for him. He didn't feel guilt. Yeah.

But he was the most charming guy in the world. And by the way, homicide detectives are charming, charming, the most charming people I've ever met because they have to be charming for people to tell them stuff, right? So they're charming, right? So anyway, so where are we now? We're now at the publication of Teenage Lust. You self-published that?

I self-published it, and I wanted to make film, and I wanted to stop being a drug addict, so I cleaned up my act. I was still doing drugs like crazy and drinking like an alcoholic when I was on parole. As a matter of fact, once I saw my parole officer, and he wasn't there that day, fact once i saw my parole officer uh and he wasn't there that day so it was another guy um um there to talk to me because i had to go in once every couple of weeks or once a month or something and uh and and i went in and i was drunk and and i passed out in the chair talking to the parole officer the substitute parole officer yeah and And I woke up handcuffed to the chair. And I woke up, and the guy said, what the fuck, man?

You know, what's the matter with you, Larry? And I said, God, I'm sorry. You know, I'm really sorry. You know, I'll stop it. You know, please, please, please. Any unhandcuff me and let me go. And then the next time I went, I saw my parole officer, my regular parole officer, and I was always perfectly straight, you know,

and made sure that I wasn't anywhere high and there were no drugs in my system. So I lived on that parole, and the parole officer's office was on 40th Street between, I think, 8th and 9th Avenue. And I saw something I'd never seen before. Yeah. I was completely in shock. I saw all these young people. There were the girl prostitutes there that everybody knew about, right? Yeah.

There were people selling drugs that everybody knew about. But there were all these young teenage Puerto Rican boys with tight pants, you know. Yeah. And hauling their dicks, you know, and giving you these come on looks to every man that walked down the street, right? And so I walked up to one of them and I said, what's going on, man? You know, and he explained to me what was going on. He was a hustler. Yeah. And he'd come from Puerto Rico from his family there to like live with the relatives in New York. Yeah. And he'd come from Puerto Rico from his family there to like live with the relatives in New York. Yeah.

And they had, and his relatives had like 10 kids too. So after a couple of weeks, he was thrown out of that house, had to leave. So he was like 16, 15 years old in New York City on his own. So the only way that he could make money or find out how to make money was to go to 42nd Street and hustle, right? And hustle these like, you know, old men,

middle-aged men, I don't know, everybody, right? And let them suck his dick and they give money or, you know, I guess suck their dick or whatever they did man you know um and you found that and and i just found that fascinating because i never heard of

it before i never it never had occurred to me that this stuff happened so i started photographing these kids um um and made friends with them and how i made friends with them. And how I made friends with them was I would photograph them on the street, you know, as they were just standing there hustling. And then I would go home and I had a docker in my kitchen then so I could print at nighttime. And I had a blackout curtain there. Yeah. And I would make these beautiful, I was a great printer,

I'd make these beautiful 11 by 14 prints and then take them back to the kids the next day and give them to them. Yeah. And they would be so impressed. They would go, wow, man, thanks, Larry. Because it's a great photograph of them. You know, and they'd never seen anything like that before.

Yeah, yeah. These beautiful 11 by 14 prints. And they would say and they would say gee thanks Larry so I made great friends with him yeah and my best story about that is I gave this this kid this incredible print there was only two of them I won for myself and one for him so it was only two of a kind and he took the print and he said, geez, thanks, Larry. And he folded it in fours and put it in his back pocket. I thought that was the greatest thing ever. And those are the pictures that are in Teenage West. Yeah.

Well, let's talk about it, because I think that Bully is a little masterpiece. Thank you very much. I love that movie. Thank you, I do too. I think it's one of my best ones. And you're in it, you're kind of looming in it a bit. And Brad Renfro.

I play a tiny part where I have one line as a kid's father because the actor didn't show up. We had no actor to play it, so I was forced him to do it. Now, when you approach that, because now that you mentioned early on in this conversation that Cassavetes blew your mind, that there is an element to the naturalism of how you approach film that's a lot like his, don't you think? Yeah. Now, in that movie, I see it as sort of a continuation of some of the kind of emotional and sexual elements of probably teenage lust and something you've always done.

But what you allowed the actors to do, it was sort of like, to to me encapsulated your whole sort of do i want to use the word oeuvre but you know sure yeah you know that it was all larry clark yeah it all been leading to bully for me right do you think that's true very true and you know in terms of how that movie was received i don't remember how it was received but for me that the rawness of of of sexuality and violence in that movie was something that you know it felt like you were going for it felt like someone somewhat of the core of your artistic vision but it couldn't be realized completely in the photographs exactly right

i always wanted to be a filmmaker right and film for me was was uh i had done everything that i could do with photography right I was finished with photography. I'd done everything for myself that I could do, and so I wanted to make film. Yeah. And I wanted to make film my whole life, but I was too fucked up to do it. No one's going to give me millions of dollars to do it.

Yeah. So I cleaned myself up, and luckily fell in love after I cleaned up with this wonderful woman from Atlanta, Georgia, who had come to New York after college. She your wife? My wife. And we ended up getting married, having two children. And we were together about 13 years um and then separated um in my fault uh separated um it's my fault because i started drinking again and um um uh my fault uh but anyway we separated

after about 13 years but but i was the most wonderful children you you just met matt my son yeah uh who has a punk rock band in Seattle called Wild Mohicans. Yeah. You see my tattoo here? Wild Mohicans. And my daughter has a, my granddaughter now, she's nine months old, wonderful, beautiful daughter, smart kid, who married her high school sweetheart. Oh.

And so wonderful. So I always wanted to make films, so I cleaned up, and then I was lucky enough to meet this woman and fall in love, and we got married, and I stayed clean for years, and then I decided it was time to make a film, and I wanted to make a film not about myself

because all my work had been autobiographical, and I wanted to make a film about a world I didn't know. So I wanted to make a film about a world I didn't know. So I wanted to make a world about contemporary teenagers that I knew nothing about. And so I picked skateboarders because visually they were the most exciting. As a visual artist, it was very exciting to watch skateboarders. So I infiltrated the skateboard world. And to do that, I had to learn how to skateboard at 50 years old and no one no one does that are 47 48 years old I started skateboarding and because if you're going to photograph skateboarders you can't run after them you got to skate yeah right so I learned

how to skate fast enough in bomb hills and everything with my Leica. And so I skated in California and then back in New York with skaters and met skaters for three or four years and got the idea for kids from real life events that happened. And so kids is really, everything in kids is true to real life that actually happened except Jenny having HIV. Jenny is the only made-up character in the film. And she's there because I didn't want to do a documentary, and I needed something so I could make the film narrative, right? And so I just reverted back to the old i'm made and tied on the railroad

tracks with the train coming right and the hero's rushing the saber right and so that was the that was the idea so jenny's made up and then i tied all the true stuff of skateboarders from that i knew with it and i wrote this one page treatment uh with um and i called a friend of mine jim lewis who's a who's a well-known novelist and writes about art, and I told him the story I wanted to tell, and he helped me write this one-page treatment with the story, right? And I said, I like 24-hour movies. I wanted everything that I've seen happen in the last three years,

I wanted it all crammed into this 24-hour movie to make it exciting. And I thought of this character, Jenny, that had HIV, got it from her first sexual experience. And then I said, you know, now I know the story, the beginning, the middle, the end, everything that happens, but I'm not really a writer. And since I did Tulsa from the inside, I need a kid from the inside to write it.

But there are no kid skateboard writers I know. And then I thought, hey, I met a kid a year ago that told me he was a writer named Harmony who told me that he'd written this little 20-minute screenplay when he was in high school. So I called him up. This is a year later after I met him briefly in the Washington Square. I called him and I said, year later after i met him briefly in the washington

square i called him and i said harmony i said harry clark you told me you wrote this little 20 minute screenplay bring it over let me read it so he brought it i read it it was brilliant and it was the kind of a story that wouldn't please adults most most people that age write for their teachers to please adults right and this And this would not please adults. So I asked him to write kids, and he said, I've been waiting all my life to write this. And he was 19, and he was 18 when I met him. He just got out of high school. And then he went to NYU for a year,

and I told him to quit. I made him quit school. Yeah. And he wrote kids. He went to his grandma's house with one sheet of paper with this story and wrote this brilliant, brilliant, brilliant screenplay, all the dialogue. And as I said, the movie is, except for that one little improv of the four boys on the couch, it's all of Harmony's words.

And I made the kids say the script. And Harmony wrote the brilliant script, and he also wrote the brilliant script for Ken Park for my diaries and yeah and what happened with another day in paradise that was uh what was the story on that another day in paradise was my second film um someone had sent me an unpublished manuscript by this ex-convict named eddie little yeah who was uh on his way back to the penitentiary and he was in a rehab in sun valley cal California, the worst rehab I've ever been in. Hot, this little house full of ex-convicts, all these burly guys with tattoos on their face and necks and arms and the whole body, waiting to go in front of a judge and trying

to get clean so maybe they wouldn't get so much time. And I talked Eddie into optioning his manuscript, unpublished manuscript called Another Day in Paradise. And then I met a young writer, Christopher Landon, who was Michael Landon's son, one of his sons, youngest son, I think. And Christopher wrote this screenplay that was close enough that I could get the money and make the movie.

And then when I made the movie, I changed it around and incorporated myself and Jack Johnson from Tulsa and experiences that I'd had and my friends had had from Tulsa and incorporated that into the character of Mel played by Jimmy Woods, James Woods. And so I changed the script all around.

And so James Woods' character of Mel is half Eddie Little's manuscript and half me. And you directed it? Me, and I directed it. And then Jimmy knew Melanie Griffith, and we needed like a star to get the money for it because it's like a three and a half million dollar movie or something so we needed uh a female star and he knew melanie so he called melanie over to his house who he'd worked with before yeah and

uh jimmy and i talked melanie into doing it so we it. Yeah. And it was a rough shoot because once again, I had to train the whole crew because it's a Hollywood crew. Right. And they have all these rules. Right. And everything I'd say, they'd say, no, it's not done that way. There's this rule. It's done that way.

Right. And I said, listen, pal, there are no rules. We're not going to do it that way. We're going to do it backwards. Right. They'd look at me like I was crazy. I'd say, I don't know. I'm only kidding.

We're going to do it sideways. so um then i had them totally confused so i had to train the whole fucking crew to do it the way i wanted to do because i had a very clear vision i always have a very clear vision i know exactly what i want how the movie is going to look exactly did they do it and they did it yeah but it was a fight but they did it and i made them do it and And they did it, yeah, but it was a fight. But they did it, and I made them do it. And there are little scenes in that movie that no one has ever done before that I made them do, and they would not do it, and I made them do it. I'd stand there and make them do it. Were you using during that? No, in Paradise, I had just come off of heroin habits.

I was clean during the filming totally clean during the filming yeah but then edited it I went back to heroin and and edited heroin and my editor was was doing cocaine so like he's doing cocaine by that by the bags and and I'm in the bathroom yeah yeah but but that was editing. But during the shoot, I was perfectly clean. In every movie I've ever shot, I've shot perfectly clean. Nothing.

No drugs, no alcohol, no pot, no nothing. Perfectly clean, except for the last film, Morphic Girl 2, which will be out next year. And I'd had this big spinal operation, and I was all drugged up and fucked up and I shouldn't have made the film and I was staggering around and falling down because my knees were going with arthritis. So right after I made Marford Girl 2, which I just finished cutting, it'll come out early

next year in Marford, Texas. I made Marford Girl there and then Marford Girl 2. I flew back to New York and had both knees replaced. So I shouldn't have been making the film, but the money was there, so I made it.

I'm glad I made it, but I paid the price. So by then, I was in so much pain for years for my knees and the arthritis, bone on bone. I had both knees replaced.

So the only film I've ever been under the influence directing was Marford Gold II. But all the other films I've insisted on being straight. I'll tell you, man, you know, Bully, like, you know, that thing, you know, watching that, the experience of watching that and how raw it was, it's unlike any other movie. Unlike any movie ever made visually

because it's so visually exciting. Yeah unlike any other movie unlike any movie ever made visually because it's so visually exciting yeah no other movie i watch it and it's so visually exciting every scene because there's all these scenes where people just talk to each other it's the same information over and over and over again now how are you going to make this you know you know uh uh uh uh uh compelling compelling compelling for an audience to sit through it, so I was going to make it visually exciting. So with my DP, Steve Gaynor, which was his first feature, I decided, because we were shooting so quick, we shot it in 23 days.

I was supposed to have 40 days and 30 days and the day we started shooting they said we only have 23 days it couldn't it can't be done and i said fuck you i'm gonna do it so steven i shot in 23 days never saw dailies i never saw a frame of footage until the editing room and uh and no shit no shit and what we did was we shot every single shot known to man from every movie ever made every different shot made yeah and and and we ran out of every shot ever made then i went to shots I would never make that I hated, like pull focus and stuff like that. And we did like four or five shots that I hated that I said swore I'd never shoot. We shot scenes with those shots.

And I talked to Steve and I said, is there any shot that you hate you'd never do? And he said, yes, one. And we did that shot. So every shot known to man is in that film because i'm such a good visual artist right and it's the most exciting visual film i've ever seen and the actors were great i mean actually they're great brad renfro bijou phillips michael pitt yeah nick stall and there's a bunch of fantastic fantastic when you know i

noticed in the in the new exhibition there is sort sort of a piece dedicated to Brad Renfro. Two pieces. Yeah. Two big collages. Did you know, like, what is it about the, you know, you seem to like be compelled in the sense that, you know, you look at photographs and you look at even the film that you shot at Tulsa. These guys, this part of your life that was out of control, but also filled with possibility. This weird adolescent, the strange, you know, there's something loaded and electric about adolescence because you don't know which way it's going to go, how your life's going to

be dictated, what's going to happen. That energy there seems to be something that you're attracted to. Well, you know, I look back at my work for 50 years i realized that um uh all my work if you look at every piece of work i've done it's always about small groups of people from bully to was up rockers yeah about south central uh latino kids uh just trying to be their self you know yeah uh with all this peer peer pressure from the blacks to wear baggy clothes and cut off their hair and listen to a gangster rap and smoke pot. These kids wanted to grow their hair,

wear tight clothes, listen to punk rock and skateboard. So they had to fight to be who they are. Every day they had to fight just to be who they are, who they wanted to be as an adolescent to try out different identities, to be who they are, who they wanted to be as an adolescent to try out different identities, to be their self. And the reason why they're wearing such tight clothes, and you can see their dicks and shit through their jeans, is because they were so poor that as they reached

12, 13, 14, 15 years old, they're wearing the same clothes they had when they were 11 and 12. They're so poor that they couldn't afford new clothes. So they're actually wearing clothes when they're 14 or 15. They're wearing clothes that they had when they were 12. Right. And they just, you know, kept growing and wearing the same clothes. So the clothes got so tight and ripped and fucked up. So they started drawing pictures on their clothes and really, you know, making their clothes quite, you know, like different and unusual and compelling and all this soul, you know. And I told them when we were shooting the film, and we shot in South Central where no white people go except me.

I've been going there for years. No one's ever said a word to me because it's all about attitude. I'm not scared. And I've walked through gang infested neighborhoods and guys have driven by in cars and shot at the house next to where

I'm talking to someone. I'm leaning up against the fence talking to one of the kids. It was a Paracas. A car drives by slowly. So I was leaning up against the fence talking to one of the kids. I was up in the car, driving by slowly. So I was popping caps into the house next door. And I went, what the fuck, you know? The creamer, right?

I said, what the fuck? Creamer's going on? He said, oh, that happens all the time. And so anyway, I'm always drawn to small groups of people that you would not know about unless I made the photographs or I made the films.

Because you never knew about these 14-year-old Latino kids and their life because you only saw Latinos in movies cast as gangbangers or drug addicts. But these are just normal, regular kids. Growing up in, I happened to grow up in the worst most violent section where no white people go it's all black and latino to the worst high school in america lock high school which happened the new york times listed the worst high schools in america lock was number one but isn't there also there's got to be an energy to it there's there's something you know pure and vital about you know that period and people's

well well like my period was was so fucked up and unhappy because my father hated me and uh when i was 12 years old i was sitting reading a comic book after school in the sixth grade my father walked walked in the house and and he'd come home around then from being a traveling salesman and for some reason he didn't like me. Maybe I reminded him of him when he was a kid. I have no idea why. But he walks in the house, and as he's walking past me to go upstairs to his room where he always was, he isolated up there, a total isolator.

He walked by and said, looked at me and said, you look like shit. And walked to his stairs and never spoke to me me again my whole adolescent never spoke to me again i couldn't wait until i was 18 years old to get out of the house and once when i was about 17 i mean all i wanted was my father to love me or to like me or you know um once um a couple of old his, a very old friend of his from the road, from the business, from the crew that worked for the Reader's Service Bureau that he worked for, came into town. Guy Painter. And Guy Painter came in with his son who was a teenager. And Guy played golf. And my father played golf.

And so Guy said hey man let's go play golf tomorrow and and Guy Jr. will bring Guy Jr. and bring Larry along to play golf so my father had no choice so so so so we went out that day and played golf with Guy Pain painter and his son and me and my dad or my dad and I and and then after that day next day guy painter his son left town my father continued playing golfing God ever even hit a bucket of balls never asked me to go play golf never asked me to go hit a bucket of balls with him and never never spoke to me again and still except that one day when guy was in town and i have no idea why and um um and when he died about 82 um he went to the hospital he was always a bleeder he was like uh he had auburn hair and really like white light skin he couldn't get

a suntan yeah he went to sun he got sunburned and um he was a bleeder so he had to have like a bowel resection not not the worst operation in the world it was a success but he but he kept bleeding because of the bleeding so they took him in for like three more operations to stop the bleeding and finally i just told the doctors i said look you know you know enough's enough. You're not going to, the guy can't stand another operation. He keeps bleeding, keeps bleeding, keeps bleeding. So the doctor called my older sister and told her that I was trying to kill my father.

So I assume my father passed away. And I still didn't love him. And I still love him to this day. And I don't hate him anymore, but I just don't give a fuck about him, you know. So, I had an unhappy childhood, and I've always been drawn to other people's adolescence and how they grew up. Because everybody grows up in a different way, different situation, different environment, different parents. grows up in a different way, different situation, different environment, different parents.

So all my work, mostly a lot of my work has been about that. I love talking to you, and I think we got a lot in. I think so too. Thank you, Mark. Thank you very much. Okay, man. See you again sometime. Absolutely. Okay, you can take a nap now. It's a lot.

It was a lot. It was a lot for me, but I was honored to talk to Mr. Clark. Again, to check out my tour dates and get some merch, go to WTFpod.com, powered by Squarespace. There's a new poster from my recent Boston shows there,

if you're collecting. I think I will play a little guitar if I can get... I'm getting so fat. Shh. Don't say that out loud. But it's on set. All the food.

There's just always food everywhere. It's like a fucking cruise ship. Hold on. Let me get my guitar.meme me me me me

me Thank you. Boomer lives! You can get anything you need with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get an ice rink on Uber Eats. But iced tea and ice cream? Yes, we can deliver that. Uber Eats. Get almost, almost anything. Order now. Product availability may vary by region. See app for details.

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