Episode 749 - Larry Clark
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What the fuckadelics?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast WTF.
Marc:Welcome to it.
Marc:Pretty exciting for me today.
Marc:Oh, by the way, I recorded this yesterday, so I have not watched the debates yet.
Marc:That was a strange sentence.
Marc:I don't know if it works mathematically.
Marc:But maybe I should say it another way.
Marc:This was recorded before whatever happened last night.
Marc:So I'll be taking that in with you in terms of what Monday's news looks like.
Marc:I'll be taking that in as you do today.
Marc:But I got no comment on it because...
Marc:It hadn't happened yet when I recorded this.
Marc: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.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He's a real dude.
Marc:He's the real deal.
Marc:He's a real photographer, a real artist who did some pretty amazing work.
Marc:So I'll be talking to him in a little while.
Marc:I enjoyed the film Kids, which he directed and Harmony Corrine scripted.
Marc:But I really love the film Bully.
Marc:I think it's a raw, visceral masterpiece of a movie.
Marc:But also, you know, Larry's books.
Marc: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 sort of Oklahoma criminals that they all were at that time in the early 70s late 60s and
Marc:The first time I really came in touch with his work was when I was at Boston University, and I was very into photography.
Marc:I thought that's what I wanted to do with my life.
Marc: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.
Marc:There's a lot of chemistry involved, and to control that part of the art, you needed a lot of...
Marc:It required some experimentation and some know-how and some chemistry.
Marc:And I didn't like that part.
Marc:I liked shooting and making the picture and watching it come to life in the fixer or in the developer.
Marc:I liked watching the image appear.
Marc:I liked focusing the enlarger and seeing the negative.
Marc:But the terms, when it comes down to mixing my own chemicals, figuring out papers, figuring out percentages of chemicals to get effect and all that stuff.
Marc:It wasn't my bag.
Marc:It just...
Marc:I don't have the discipline.
Marc:I didn't focus on that.
Marc:So I let it get away from me.
Marc:But when I was in college, I took a I was a I had an art history.
Marc:What was it?
Marc:A film criticism minor, which involved which was part of the art history department.
Marc:And just by a fluke.
Marc:I took a history of photography class with a guy named Carl Curenza, who was also a photographer, but was at BU for years.
Marc:And it was within the art history department.
Marc:It was the history of photography.
Marc:It was a year long survey class.
Marc:And he started the first semester at the cave paintings.
Marc:and he moved up, and the second semester began at the introduction of photography, which I thought was a brilliant way to... It changed my life, that class.
Marc:But during the second half of the class, where photography sought to be established as an art form, which was difficult once everybody...
Marc:was able to take pictures.
Marc:And the two schools of thought in my recollection of the class where you had documentary photography and you had art photography.
Marc:And these were the two contexts under the umbrella of photography as art.
Marc:Those were the two intentions, the two modes.
Marc:And they crossed over, obviously, at some point.
Marc:But there was, you know, there was a long sort of discussions about whether you can manipulate the image or manipulate the negative.
Marc:And it doesn't maintain its integrity.
Marc:You can't do that with documentary photographs.
Marc:All these conversations, I imagine, have been annihilated now to some degree, given that, you know, digital photography and has almost completely eradicated, you know, the process.
Marc:And given everybody a certain amount of control over manipulation and all that.
Marc:But I don't know.
Marc:I'm not in that circle.
Marc: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.
Marc:And I saw some of those images when I go down to New York.
Marc:And right now, you know, Larry's got a big, a big show.
Marc:It's an exhibition of his work at the new UTA Artist Space at 670 South Anderson Street here in Los Angeles.
Marc:It's up until October 29th.
Marc:I have not gotten down there yet.
Marc:I need to get down there because his work is very, very visceral, very raw, very you can feel it.
Marc:So let me just say this.
Marc:The Now Hear This Festival is less than three weeks away.
Marc:Come hang out with me and my producer, Brendan McDonald.
Marc:We're doing a special WTF event on the Saturday of the festival.
Marc:But there are more than 30 podcasts live all weekend.
Marc:It's at the Anaheim Marriott, October 28th through October 30th.
Marc:Go to NowHearThisFest.com and use the offer code WTF to get 25% off a three-day general admission pass.
Marc:That's NowHearThisFest.com, offer code WTF.
Marc:WTF.
Marc: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 Santa Barbara, USC at Santa Barbara at Campbell Hall.
Marc:It's all there at WTFpod.com.
Marc:Nashville, Tallahassee, there's a lot of dates coming up, all the dates in Connecticut and upstate New York next year, but they're all available at WTFpod.com.
Marc:Did I want to share that email?
Marc:Yeah, here it is.
Marc:Subject line, Miles Davis, Jack Johnson.
Marc: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.
Marc: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 Johnson, 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.
Marc:I hope I'm pronouncing that right.
Marc:Geringer.
Marc:It's probably Geringer.
Marc:I called him up to let him know and he gave me all the details.
Marc:It was 1970.
Marc:My dad was a student at Columbia Film School and the documentary was his thesis project.
Marc:The producer he worked for later stole director credit, but my dad still got credit at Columbia.
Marc:Show business.
Marc:He 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.
Marc:see look at that arty jazz thinking it's beautiful 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's most overlooked albums but a great one and you're mentioning it
Marc:put a huge smile on my father's face and mine.
Marc: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.
Marc:Thanks again for the mention, and let this be a reminder to all your listeners to never skip an episode.
Marc:Ah, Alex Geringer.
Marc:I'm hoping I'm saying it right.
Marc:Thanks.
Marc:I love that email, buddy, and I love that record.
Marc:And now I've got to see that documentary.
Marc:Larry Clark, in this conversation, I think what is 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.
Marc:I mean, a lot of people have a lot of feelings about about Larry's film work, certainly.
Marc: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.
Marc:I mean, I just I moved in and sort of astounded when when I talked to real artists who were possessed.
Marc:with that spirit of, of creating art.
Marc: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, his vision and, and his compulsion, you know, outside of drugs was, was art and living within it.
Marc:So this is me and the photographer, filmmaker, artist, Larry Clark here in the garage.
Guest:so larry clark in los angeles what a you're pretty comfortable out here right yeah yeah you know i've i've uh i've made a number of films here i made uh what's up rockers here yeah by the kids from south central la um another day in paradise another day in paradise ken park the first time i heard of you
Marc:I took a year-long survey of photography at Boston University.
Marc:And for some reason, the guy spent the entire first semester starting at the cave paintings and moving up to the introduction of photography.
Marc:And then we got into the difference between documentary and art photography.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that was the first time I saw the images from Tulsa.
Marc:And the other book, the Teenage Lust.
Marc:Teenage Lust, yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Second book.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But you were shooting, because I'm looking at the catalog for the show that opens here in L.A.
Marc:soon.
Marc:What gallery is that at?
Marc:The gallery is at UTA Artist Space in L.A.
Marc:And there are images in there that go back way before even Tulsa.
Guest:Go back of the first images, the first serious images I ever took.
Guest:There's a couple of pictures from 1961.
Guest:And how old were you?
Guest:I was born in 43, so in 61 I was, what, 18?
Guest:18, 19.
Guest:You grew up in Oklahoma.
Guest:I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and...
Guest:My goal in life was to get out of Oklahoma.
Guest:So when I was 18, well, my mother and father had this little mom and pop baby photography business.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Photographing babies.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:And my mother was great at photographing babies, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What was the trick?
Guest:The trick was she was just great at it.
Marc:Distracting them with a little toy?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:With everything, everything, everything.
Guest:She knew every trick in the book.
Guest:And did they process the film there?
Guest:Well, what happened was my father was a traveling salesman.
Guest:And that's how I met my mother.
Guest:What is he selling?
Guest:Books, door-to-door magazines, prescriptions for the Reader Service Bureau in Chicago.
Guest:And like back then, my father was a manager and he would go around the country from town to town and hire crews of young people
Guest:to go knock on doors and sell these magazine subscriptions, right?
Guest:And people would buy the magazine subscriptions, and anyway, that's how they made the living.
Guest:It was very, very big back in the 50s.
Marc:When you were in Tulsa, were you reading the beatniks?
Marc:Were you looking for that kind of life?
Marc:When I was in Tulsa, I didn't know nothing.
Guest:But did you learn how to shoot at your mom's place?
Guest:My mother and my father, as I said, he came back when I was 12 and my mother, and he got a job at a furniture store selling furniture and then I think selling cars for a year.
Guest:And my mother took a job with...
Guest:Lloyd Roberts Photography, who did baby photography.
Guest:And they did some door-to-door photography where you go into these small towns and knock on doors.
Guest:It's a photographer and a caller.
Guest:The caller knocks on doors and says, oh, you have a new baby.
Guest:I think her name is Deborah.
Guest:Could I see her, please?
Guest:And the husband's away working.
Guest:And the caller talks his way into the house.
Guest:And then the photographer, my mother, goes in and makes photographs.
Guest:And she had a Roloflex with a flash on it.
Guest:And then like a screen, like a little movie screen, a pull-down screen.
Guest:And they'd throw a blanket over a coffee table, put the baby on it.
Guest:And have the mother standing at the edge of the table right outside a camera range.
Guest:And set the baby up.
Guest:and make the baby laugh and snap a picture before the baby fell backwards and the mother would catch her.
Guest:And then there was a second strobe, a slave unit pointed at the background which went off when my mother took the picture with the flash and the rollie and it washed out all the shadow.
Guest:So you got this, it looked like a studio portrait photography.
Guest:And so when I was 15 I was forced into the business
Guest:And I was knocking on doors for my mother and making calls.
Guest: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...
Guest:A real hustler kind of man type, but a great guy.
Guest:So you're learning the whole lingo.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest: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.
Guest:And I had to go knock on doors and talk my way in.
Guest: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.
Guest:and makes the baby laugh and takes a picture, man.
Guest:And I hated it and I hated what I was doing.
Guest:I was forced into working for my parents in the mom and pop business and being a baby photographer.
Guest:But you learned how to shoot.
Guest:But I put a camera in my hand.
Guest:I didn't learn how to shoot because it was just a rolling and two flashes.
Guest:And I never thought photography was anything but photographing babies.
Guest:I didn't know anything.
Guest:But I always had a camera, always had a camera in my hand.
Guest:And if I didn't have a camera because I would go
Guest:to my friend's house after work and shoot amphetamine.
Guest:When you were 15?
Guest:When I was 15 and almost 16.
Guest: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.
Marc:Who started the shooting?
Marc:When did it go from taking Benzedrine to shooting it?
Guest:When did that become it?
Guest:World War II, where they gave all the soldiers speed, amphetamine.
Guest:After the war, they started making this nasal inhaler called Valo, and it was made by the Pfeiffer Company, which is a famous company, right?
Guest:They make Viagra and 100 Pfizer, right?
Guest:And they made this little nasal inhaler called Velo for 75 cents.
Guest:And you opened it up and it was a plastic tube inside.
Guest:You stuck it up your nose and it cleared up your sinuses.
Guest:It was full of amphetamine.
Guest:So someone discovered that some ex-cons or somebody's
Guest:You know, older brother, right?
Guest:And you would twist off the top and break it open.
Guest:And inside was a piece of cotton soaked in menthol and other shit and amphetamine.
Guest:And we would put the cotton in a little cup or something and add an eyedropper full of water and work it up.
Guest:And the grease would...
Guest:would float to the top and the grease was pure amphetamine mixed with menthol and stuff.
Guest:And we would shoot it, inject it.
Marc:Did you feel the menthol in your veins?
Guest:And you would get this incredible rush and this incredible flash.
Guest:And some people would dance across the room and some people would just open their mouth and fall backwards on the bed.
Guest:And, you know, all different kinds of reactions.
Guest:But I was this hyper kid that stuttered like mad.
Guest:And I had like, I mean, I must have had terrible ADD, right?
Guest:But then no one knew what that was.
Guest:So the amphetamine calmed you down?
Guest:The amphetamine made me, not like my friends, totally calm.
Guest:I went from this hyperactive kid who couldn't talk
Guest:to this most calmest person in the world.
Guest:And I started photographing my friends.
Guest:When I was 18, I left Oklahoma, luckily.
Marc:Wait, when you left, had you shot Tulsa?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:You came back.
Guest:I'd taken a few pictures of my friends
Guest:with my mother's roller flex, and you'll see two of those pictures in the show, my first two serious photographs, because I always had my camera, and I was in this secret world, because it wasn't supposed to be drugs back then, Eisenhower was president, it was supposed to be mom's apple pie and white picket finches, there was no drugs, there was no alcohol,
Guest:There was no child abuse.
Guest:There was no mother and father, alcoholics, drug addicts.
Guest:There was nothing, you know.
Marc:But at that point, you'd already come in contact with a few hustlers, and you knew there was a racket.
Guest:Listen, man, I knew everything, you know.
Guest:And I was hip to rhythm and blues.
Guest:And, you know, there was a black station in Tulsa.
Guest:A guy named Frank Berry would come on.
Guest:the radio like at 11 o'clock at night and play muddy waters howling wolf jimmy reed you know lightning slim yeah everything so when i was like 12 years old i'm like under the covers uh 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 you knew there was another world guys you know yeah and when i was about to 12 i read um
Guest:uh, this book by Louis Armstrong, um, um, uh, called Satchmo.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which was his first autobiography written, uh, you know, like 50, 60 years ago.
Guest:Um, uh, 60 years ago, I guess.
Guest:And, uh,
Guest:And I read it and it was all about him growing up like in New Orleans and like the red lights district.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And like black women chasing black men down the street with a razor slicing and slicing them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was just fascinated by this and I knew there was another world out there.
Guest:And that book just changed my life, Satchmo by Laurie Armstrong, man.
Guest:So where do you go when you're 18?
Guest: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
Guest:and they would take pictures of them and retouch every line out of their face and then hand color them.
Guest:Oh, the hand colored ones.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest: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?
Marc:Right, with the rosy faces.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So Gerhard Barker,
Guest:gave a talk.
Guest:He was from Milwaukee, and he came through town.
Guest:He gave this talk.
Guest:He was a really charismatic guy, and he had this school in Milwaukee.
Guest:So he talked to men.
Guest:It was a photography school, commercial cornball photography school in the basement of an art school.
Guest:And the art school tolerated it because it brought money into the school.
Guest:So they sent me to the school thinking I was gonna come back and take over the family business.
Guest:And so I was already like a drug addict and was hip to the music.
Guest:And smoking weed and shooting every drug because by the time I was 18, you know, I hadn't slept for three years.
Guest:So this is what, 1960 something?
Guest:This is like 58, 59, 60, 61.
Guest:So you head out to Milwaukee?
Guest:And I headed to Milwaukee to this corn bowl little photography school with all these corny little students.
Guest:But Gerhard Bacher was this hip teacher.
Guest:And so I started hanging out immediately with all the art school students, with the sculptors and painters.
Guest:And my first girlfriend in Milwaukee, my first real girlfriend ever, a steady real girlfriend, was this girl named Shirley Lewis, who was a painter.
Mm-hmm.
Guest:And then... Changed your life.
Guest:Changed my life, and then I had another girlfriend there at the same time.
Guest:They didn't know about each other called Chris Hotfit, who's passed away now with the cancer, unfortunately.
Guest:And she was a very good painter.
Guest:Are you still slamming speed at this point?
Guest:Only a couple of times because I was in Milwaukee and I wanted to get away from that whole scene.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then they quit making Velo.
Guest:And all my friends in Tulsa had gone on to, you know, be criminals.
Guest:And they already were.
Guest:I mean, like we all were.
Guest:Dope.
Guest:They went on to...
Guest:of the penitentiary and all the girls became prostitutes.
Guest:Really?
Guest:And they quit making Velo and amphetamine available for a few years and then methadrine hit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Desoxone, which was pure amphetamine on these little yellow pills that you could soak in water and crush them down and pull up
Guest:a shot of pure methadone and that's what andy warhol and all all of his people were taking yeah uh back in the 60s right 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 so so i go to milwaukee and i hang out with all the painters and sculptors yeah and then all my friends were painters and sculptors and i room with a friend a great painter
Guest:Ed Jankowski.
Guest:So I realized that a camera was something that you could use other than to make these baby pictures because it never occurred to me.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I can use my camera as a tool for my expression.
Guest:Right.
Guest:As an artist.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Now, did you, had you seen, like, did the teacher show you, like, the Americans or any of that stuff, Dorothea Lange?
Marc:Did you, are you taking any of that in?
Marc:No.
Marc:Nothing.
Marc:No.
Guest:I learned about Edward Weston.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:Ansel Adams.
Guest:Yep.
Guest:Luckily, there was one other student that was hip, and he showed me Walker Evans.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Who is my favorite photographer of all time.
Guest:I can see it.
Guest:Who influenced Robert Frank and everybody, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Walker Evans was the, him and Dorothea did the Dust Bowl shots.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:And Walker Evans did a ton of other stuff.
Guest:So I saw Dorothea Lange's pictures and I saw all the photographers that worked for the government, right, because Roosevelt started this program.
Guest:and sent photographers out around America to photograph the conditions of the Dust Bowl.
Marc:What was the ones before that?
Marc:Like Sullivan, was that his name?
Marc:He did the Indian photographs, the big Indian photographs?
Guest:Oh, his name was Sullivan.
Guest:It's a famous name, but I'm blanking.
Guest:Yeah, me too.
Guest:He worked for the government, I think, right?
Guest:Anyway, yeah.
Guest:He was a great photographer.
Guest:He photographed all the Indians.
Guest:He photographed Geronimo and all those people, right?
Guest:A great photographer.
Guest:And he had a big box camera on Tripos.
Guest:He was making like 8x10 photographs, so 4x5 or something.
Guest:Big plates.
Guest:Big, big plates.
Guest:So you're looking at all that stuff.
Guest:So I'm looking at that.
Guest:And I hadn't seen Robert Frank, but I had seen some photographs by Robert Frank imitators.
Guest:And there was a ton of them, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I saw a couple of those.
Guest:And I saw W. Eugene Smith, who worked for Life Magazine.
Guest:And back then, Life Magazine had great photographers working for them and great stories.
Guest:And I liked Gene Smith the best.
Guest: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 something, some people.
Guest:And he did a famous series called The Country Doctor, and he did one about... I remember seeing that.
Guest:Yeah, he did one great one about a black nurse in the South.
Guest:Documentary style.
Guest:It was like a midwife, a documentary style.
Guest:But he was this great...
Guest:dramatic printer where he printed dark and then he brought up the highlights and the faces with ferrocyanide which was a bleach.
Guest:Did you learn how to print in Milwaukee?
Guest:In Milwaukee what I did for two years in school was all I did was practice and take pictures.
Guest:I took more pictures by the thousands
Guest:than anybody else in the class.
Marc:Once you got the vision that you can express yourself.
Guest:I mixed all my own chemicals.
Guest:I learned how to mix my developer, hypo, everything.
Guest:I mixed all my chemicals.
Guest:I tried out every kind of film known to man.
Guest:What'd you land on usually?
Guest:Tri-X.
Guest:Tri-X F400?
Guest:Yes, which was the fastest film made, black and white, grainy.
Guest: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.
Guest:And they tore it down, and it was on the drive, and the lake was behind it.
Guest:This beautiful, beautiful...
Guest:way ahead of its time contemporary building that they tore down because they were gonna put a highway through it that never happened, right?
Guest:So it was torn down for nothing, and it was a beautiful building.
Guest:But two blocks from the building was this movie theater, and they showed art movies.
Guest:And in Oklahoma, I'd only seen like John Wayne movies, like Hudson and Doris Day and John Ford, and I'd never seen a foreign film in my life.
Guest:But they showed all these foreign films.
Guest:And I went in one day when I was 18.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I went back for two years and saw every film they showed.
Guest:And I saw all of Bergman, all of Godard, all of Truffaut.
Guest:Right.
Guest:All of everybody, all the French greats, auteurs.
Guest:Auteurs, yeah.
Guest:And then in 1962, there was a film showing, and it said Shadows.
Guest:And I went in, and it was John Cassavetes' first film in black and white.
Guest:And there'd never been anything like it, nothing.
Guest:There'd never been a film made like it ever in the history of cinema.
Guest:And I saw it in 62 when it came out in this art theater on a big screen, right?
Guest:Or on the screen, right?
Guest:And it changed my life.
Guest:Cassavetes changed my life because I walked out and I said, shit, man, someone sees the way I see.
Guest:Somebody else sees the way I see.
Guest:And it validated me.
Guest:the way that I saw.
Marc:And I went back to Oklahoma and by then... Did it plant the seed that you were going to maybe do film at some point?
Guest:I always wanted to make film.
Guest:I always wanted to be a storyteller.
Guest:I always wanted to be a writer.
Guest:I always wanted to be a filmmaker.
Guest:I always wanted to be a sculptor.
Guest:I always wanted to be a painter.
Guest:I always wanted to be anything but a photographer.
Guest:But I had a camera.
Guest:It was the only tool I had.
Guest:So I saved my money and I bought a 35 millimeter camera.
Guest:Conica?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:Not a reflex camera where the mirrors crashed together to make a sound.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But a little Leica SP which was a rangefinder camera and you don't look through the lens, you look through a little rectangular
Guest:a little rectangular on the side which is calibrated to see through the lens, but you're not looking through the lens.
Guest:And so when you click the shutter, it's very silent.
Guest:It hardly makes any noise at all.
Guest: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.
Guest:And I started photographing my friends in Tulsa, which was a secret world.
Guest:And I was one of the kids.
Guest:So they all knew you.
Guest:They were comfortable.
Guest: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?
Guest:We're ready to go.
Guest:Because it was like a part of me.
Guest:Right, yeah.
Guest:You know, it was a part of me.
Guest:So they knew me with a camera.
Guest:And if it wasn't a camera hanging from my shoulder from my early days with my mother's roller flex after work,
Guest:It was unusual.
Guest:I looked naked or something.
Guest:Where's your camera, Larry?
Guest:And so when I started photographing my friends in this secret world that nobody else could have possibly come in and done except someone from the inside like me, I was just one of the guys, right?
Guest:and there were no plans ever to show these photographs to anybody.
Guest:There was never any plans to do a book.
Guest:There was never any plans for anything.
Guest:I was just practicing photography.
Marc:Right, and these guys at that time, they were shooting up speed.
Marc:One guy shot himself, I think, right?
Marc:That's in 71, yeah.
Marc:Right, and you're just there taking pictures.
Marc:This is their life.
Marc:Shot himself by accident.
Guest:and i want to make that clear it didn't wasn't committing suicide it was this was my life right my life but you'd gotten it you'd had a break from it you've been away i had a break so so um uh 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 uh got a head full of art
Guest:And got a head full of art.
Guest: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.
Guest:So I'm photographing my friends very close.
Guest:We were in very small rooms, and I had a 50-millimeter lens.
Guest:So I'm like a foot from them, two feet from them.
Guest:It's very small, very tight space.
Guest:My camera's so quiet that after a couple of minutes, you never heard it anymore, and they didn't hear it.
Guest:Were you shooting up then, too?
Guest:Of course.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and so um uh 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 uh in the six later in the 60s 67 when methadrine uh started so you were shooting these in 63 64 oh no 62 and 63 that's when tulsa was shot so
Guest:So that world was nowhere.
Guest:No one knew about it.
Guest:Nowhere.
Guest:No one knew about it, right?
Guest:And so then I went away.
Guest:Where'd you go?
Guest:To New York.
Guest:Right.
Guest:New York City.
Guest:With that dude.
Guest:And I got a job.
Guest:I was such a great darkroom and a great printer and knew everything backwards and forwards about chemistry and photography and all this stuff because all I did for two years was work.
Guest:I've gone to a few schools.
Guest:I'm not a good teacher.
Guest:I've gone to a number of schools through the years as a guest speaker.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I see these kids there going to like four years of photography school in college.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And on their daddy's dime.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:and just fucking around.
Guest:And I'd tell him, I would say, look, man, you can look at photography in six months.
Guest:You don't need to be in this school.
Guest:You're wasting your time.
Guest:You're wasting your parents' money.
Guest:If you really want to be a photographer, quit school and go out and just make photographs.
Marc:And there's no reason for them to know about chemicals anymore.
Guest:There's no reason for them to know about anything except, you know, make the photographs from your own personal vision.
Guest:And so obviously I wasn't invited back to very many schools to talk, right?
Guest:So when you got to New York you got a gig in the lab?
Guest:So when I got to New York I got a job with a big commercial photographer
Guest:who worked with this designer, famous designer, George Lois.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Carl Fisher did all the covers for Esquire back then.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Barbara Streisand and John Updike.
Guest:Were you going on the shoots?
Guest:Everybody.
Guest:Well, the shoots were in the studio and I was there.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I remember John Updike.
Guest:You were mostly printing or what?
Guest:I was the darkroom.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You were it.
Guest:I was this 20-year-old kid who was the darkroom.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I knew more than anybody else.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I used to go in the darkroom and a car would want to print, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I would print it the way that I wanted to print it, a better way and make these beautiful prints.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he would freak out and say, that's not the way I asked you to do it.
Guest:And I said, no, but it's better, man.
Guest:You don't trust me.
Guest:I know what I'm doing.
Guest:And so he would go talk to the manager that hired me, Dwayne Dalrymple, Dal.
Guest:But they wouldn't fire me.
Guest:They didn't fire me because I was just too good a printer, man.
Guest:And so after a year,
Guest:My mother called me and I never in my life called my mother mommy.
Guest:Never ever in my life called her mommy.
Guest:I remember the phone rang and it was for me and Carl was there and Dow was there and some other studio assistant was there and she told me I'd been drafted.
Guest:You know, they'd gotten a letter, you see, because this is like 64, and there was no Vietnam.
Guest:There was no war.
Guest:President Johnson hadn't sent the first 50,000 troops to Vietnam over the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident, so-called incident, right?
Guest:So...
Guest:I was drafted, and nobody tried to get out of the draft.
Guest: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.
Guest:Otherwise, there was no way to get out.
Guest:You were drafted.
Guest:No matter what you told them, you were drafted unless you went...
Guest:uh wearing a dress and full makeup and everything like that and a couple and and since it was new york city there were a couple of um of um of gay guys that did this right they put an address and lipstick and makeup and arrow rings and went to the draft right which was so far out in 64 man i mean and and and and and the army just immediately said go home right to them
Marc:But because there wasn't a war outside of the lack of choice, were you frightened or what?
Guest:No, I was just part of life.
Guest:Everybody went to the Army for two years.
Guest:I was drafted.
Guest:So where'd you go?
Guest:If you joined, it was three years, but fuck, I didn't join.
Guest:I was drafted for two years like everybody else.
Guest:I went to Fort Gordon, Georgia for basic.
Guest:a terrible hot hell hole.
Guest:And halfway through basic training, the drill sergeant walked in one morning and said, are you guys ready to go kill the commies in Vietnam?
Guest:And we said, what's Vietnam?
Guest:Because that day, President Johnson had sent the first 50,000 troops over to Vietnam.
Guest:And we didn't know what Vietnam was.
Guest:And so I spent my first year in the Army in the South.
Guest:I was in Fort Eustis, Virginia.
Guest:And then I was in Virginia Beach.
Guest:And I was the most fucked up soldier.
Guest:I was always getting busted.
Guest:And I was always like a private E1.
Guest:Busted with what?
Guest:Speed?
Guest:Busted for whatever you can imagine.
Guest:Talking back to the sergeants.
Guest:Every rule I could break, I broke, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I got cart marshaled once.
Guest:For what?
Guest:I went AWOL.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest: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.
Guest:And then I went back, and they threw me in the brig, and then...
Guest:It wasn't like a real court-martial.
Guest:It was called a summary court-martial.
Guest:So I had to go see the head of the unit, the major, who sent me to the captain who had gone to Cornell.
Guest:And he said to me, you think you're pretty smart, don't you?
Guest:He said, I graduated from Cornell.
Guest:And I laughed at him.
Guest:And so he busted me down to Private E1.
Guest:And I took my pay for six months so I didn't get my $90 check a month, whatever it was.
Guest:I had no money.
Guest:And put me on like a kitchen detail so I had to peel potatoes and scrub pots for a few months.
Guest:And then he transferred me out of the unit to, I was in a unit where I could have been a photographer and stuff.
Guest:But he transferred me out of that unit, didn't want anything to do with me, to a transportation unit.
Guest: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.
Guest:Almost like prison.
Guest:Yeah, but I was smart, and the one thing I realized in basic training was that I'd never known before
Guest: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 and they were like mama's boys.
Guest:They didn't know anything and they were like didn't know nothing, right?
Guest:So by chance the company clerk had mustered out of the army as time was up, right?
Guest:And so they needed like a company clerk.
Guest:And when I got out of basic, I had volunteered, which you never volunteered.
Guest:The ruralists never volunteered.
Guest:But there was a typing class, and the drill sergeant, we were in formation at attention.
Guest:The drill sergeant came out and said, I need to volunteer for typing class.
Guest:And I raised my hand.
Guest:I said, me, me, me.
Guest:So he said, okay.
Guest:So I got to go to typing class every afternoon for six weeks or something, and I learned how to be a great typist.
Guest:I was a typewriter.
Guest:I mean, I could speed type.
Guest:I could do like 120 words a minute or something.
Guest:That was really good.
Guest:So even though I was a private E1,
Guest:In this transportation unit, they needed a company clerk.
Guest:As I could type so well, they may be company clerks.
Guest:So now I'm in the captain's office, the company clerk, and I'm the captain's man.
Guest:And so everything that comes in, the orders and all the information and all the correspondence,
Guest:I'm typing in and being the company clerk.
Guest:Not the Cornell guy, the captain.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:It's a different guy.
Guest:As a matter of fact, he wasn't a captain in the second year.
Guest:He was a major.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I got along with him.
Guest:But I didn't get haircuts, and I was shaggy, and my uniform was supposed to be pressed and starched and all that.
Guest:I would just take my uniform and throw it in the...
Guest:Laundering into the dryer and put it on all wrinkled and go in the captain's office.
Guest:I mean the major's office.
Guest:And I was the company clerk and typing.
Guest:And I was so good that they couldn't really get rid of me because there was nobody else qualified.
Guest:But the first chance he got, I'd been in the South for one year, he sent me to Vietnam.
Guest:He signed orders to send me to Vietnam.
Guest:So my second year in the Army, I spent in Vietnam.
Guest:So I was in Vietnam all of 1966.
Guest:So I was in the South all of 65 and in Vietnam all of 1966.
Guest:So I was in Vietnam early.
Guest:And I mustered out in Oakland, California, December of 1966.
Guest:And this is two years before the first Tet Offensive.
Guest:So you didn't see, you weren't.
Guest:I didn't see any real action.
Guest:I got shot at a few times because we were in a transportation unit.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We used to take the ammo up to the soldiers in the jungle.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And back then, if you saw like Oliver Stone's first film, Platoon.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They used to take their soldiers up into the jungle way up north in northern Vietnam.
Guest:drop them in the jungle and they would fight and I was stationed in Tuiwa which later became like a fighting place too but 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
Guest:open truck with both sides, the soldiers sitting there, like 30 soldiers, and every one of them was like staring blankly ahead, man.
Guest: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.
Guest:No camera, though, huh?
Guest:No, no, no, I had a camera, but I took very few pictures when I was in the Army, a few good ones.
Guest:But when I was in Vietnam, what I did was I smoked weed and drank warm beer every evening.
Guest:And as they say, the unit was 90% black.
Guest:And 89.9% of them had never smoked pot in their life.
Guest:Nobody smoked pot.
Guest:And I would go into the small village outside of Tuiwa
Guest:and cop like a small pillowcase full of the most potent marijuana you've ever smoked in your life back then for like 10 bucks, right?
Guest:And I'd bring it back and I turned on all my friends in this unit.
Guest:Life-changing.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So like one year later when I mustered out,
Guest:99% of the squad smoked weed, right, you know?
Guest: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.
Guest:And I woke up, you know, like five o'clock in the morning, still passed out face first in the sand, with sand on my nose, all in my eyes, all in my mouth.
Guest:and 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 and went into my tent and slept another hour but that's how strong the shit was, man.
Guest:So there was no dope around yet?
Guest:There was no dope.
Guest:I went into the village and found an opium den and I went into the opium den and the chief of police of this village came in and said hello and watched me
Guest:And the Opium Den guy was like straight out of Gunga Den, right?
Guest:This little skinny Vietnamese guy, skinny, skin and bones, wearing like a loincloth.
Guest:And on the floor was this straw mat and a wooden pillow.
Guest:And it was a piece of wood with like a curve hollowed out that was so smooth because it had probably been there for 100 years and about 1,000 heads had laid on it.
Guest:And actually a piece of wood was smooth and comfortable because so many people had laid on their side on it smoking opium, right?
Guest:So he had the big hookah there, and I took about three hits of opium, and he said, that's enough, no more.
Guest:And the chief of police is watching me and laughing, and me being like an old doper and like a fucking hog.
Guest:I said, no, no, no, I want more.
Guest:So I took a couple more hits against this guy, and this guy's saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Guest: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.
Guest: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.
Guest:And man, I was so sick for three days.
Guest:I'll never forget it.
Guest:I've never been that sick in my life.
Guest:Except kicking heroin many years later, I was that sick, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But that was my Vietnam experience.
Guest: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.
Guest:But two years later after the Tet Offensive, all that area was overrun by Viet Cong and people were getting killed.
Guest:And then the government, there was no heroin in Vietnam when I was there.
Guest:I guarantee you if there was, I would have found it.
Guest:You know, there was opium dens.
Guest:in the villages and weed that was just fantastic.
Guest:But then after I left, the government, the government of Vietnam started bringing in heroin and sending it to the American troops because they had a captive audience, right?
Guest:And then after that, thousands and thousands and thousands of soldiers came back to mustered out of the army from Vietnam
Guest:with incredibly high dope habits, heroin habits, right?
Guest:And so they came back to America and started shooting heroin in America and then had a lot of trouble kicking it.
Guest:But that was all the government.
Guest:of Vietnam getting heroin and sending it into the troops.
Guest:And making millions of dollars, right?
Guest:Right, and they strung out the whole country.
Guest:They strung out the whole fucking country, man.
Guest:And so it was so corrupt, man.
Guest:So corrupt back then.
Guest:So when you get back, do you go back to New York then?
Guest:When I got it, I mustered out in...
Guest:December 67 in San Francisco, luckily.
Guest:And the next day I took my first hit of acid with some friends.
Guest:It was a whole different world then now.
Guest:It was a whole different world, right?
Guest: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.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And like Dylan's record, Everybody Must Get Stoned was playing on the radio in Vietnam, you know.
Yeah.
Guest:because we got a radio and stuff.
Guest:And I couldn't wait to get back.
Guest: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.
Guest:When did your relationship with the heroin start?
Guest:You know, and I was in Frisco for a few months, San Francisco.
Guest:Excuse me, San Francisco.
Guest:They hate it.
Guest:I know, they hate it.
Guest:They hate it when you call it Frisco.
Guest: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.
Guest:And back then, for just about five months at the max, six months at the very max,
Guest:they had THC legally in pill form that was legal.
Guest:That was like a prescription drug, right?
Guest:And for about six months it was legal and you could get like pure THC pills and take them and man, it was the greatest, most pleasant high in the whole world.
Guest:Just so much fun, you were so happy and laughing and just,
Guest:a high that I've never had again that was that great and pleasant.
Guest:And then the government snapped and they passed a law against me.
Guest:How was the acid?
Guest:The acid, you know, the acid never really agreed with me so much.
Guest:I had two or three trips
Guest:that were great and I saw God and everything.
Guest:And then he went away.
Guest:And then I took two, I had two really bad trips in a row.
Guest:Horribly bad acid trips.
Guest:Awful, awful, awful, man.
Guest:And so I never took acid again.
Guest:So how does Tulsa happen as a book?
Guest:You're back from Vietnam.
Guest:I'm back from Vietnam and it's 68 and I go back to Tulsa.
Guest:Most everybody was in jail and then I went back in 68 and I rented a little 16 millimeter movie camera.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Filmed my friends.
Guest:Billy Mann was like back in town whose daddy died in 1970 who's
Guest:One of the two two main characters in the book.
Guest:It starts when we're kids and it ends with these young kids, the next generation, 16 year old kids.
Guest:So it's like a circle.
Guest:I was I was saying this is a circle.
Guest:It just goes on and on.
Guest:And it's still going on.
Guest:if you go back to Tulsa now, there's more methadrine in Tulsa than there ever was in my whole life.
Guest:And tar.
Guest:And the whole country does methadrine now and they make it.
Marc:How did you, like we got through Vietnam, we got through the photos and we talked a bit about the opening.
Marc:But what was your deliverance into the world of fine art?
Marc:I mean, how did Tulsa get made into a book?
Marc:How did that become this notorious and important documentary photography?
Guest:Well, what happened was, back then, all the photographers wanted to have a book of their work.
Guest:And there were only a few places that would publish your book, and it was very, very hard
Guest:to get your book published, and 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?
Guest:Because I got naked, and I got dicks, and I got everything that was happening in the book.
Guest:Guns, drugs, and dicks.
Guest:Yeah, and so my friend Ralph Gibson,
Guest:who I met as a great photographer, very well-known photographer, a real photographer.
Guest:I'm not a real photographer, he's a real photographer.
Guest:What does that mean?
Guest:A real photographer loves photography and photographs every day of their life, and that's what they do.
Guest:And the real photographers are Ralph Gibson, Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand, who passed away, was a real photographer.
Guest:Those are the real photographers.
Guest:What do you consider yourself?
Guest:An artist.
Guest:And I just had a camera as a tool.
Guest:Because I always wanted to be anything but a photographer.
Guest:And I always wanted to make films.
Guest:And I always wanted to be a sculptor or a painter.
Guest:So in 68 you could not get your book published.
Guest:So Ralph had a very personal book.
Guest:that he wanted published, that he laid out completely himself, called The Somnambulist.
Guest:And he couldn't get a publisher, and finally Aperture, Peter Bunnell, who ran Aperture for 30 years,
Guest:agreed to publish a Ralph's book, but wanted to come over to Ralph's every Wednesday night and edit it with him.
Guest:And Ralph said, no way, right?
Guest:It's a very personal book.
Guest:And so Ralph being very smart and a very intelligent guy, one of the smartest men that I've ever met, just natural high IQ.
Guest:decided to self-publish his book, which had never been done.
Guest:And so he actually printed up these stocks.
Guest:He just went to his typewriter and printed up these stocks, had them printed, and went around to friends and rich people that he met and actually sold him enough stocks for his book and raised $3,000.
Guest:and flew out to California because then there were all these printing companies that printed for the aerospace industry and stuff.
Guest:And that had stopped, so they were hungry for business.
Guest:So you could get a book published for $3,000 and get 3,000 copies.
Guest:And in California, there was a 10% law where the printer could be 10% over or 10% under.
Guest:So of course, you got 3,000 copies and of course, you got exactly 2,700 copies.
Guest:They were always just accidentally 10% under, which was legal.
Guest:So Ralph printed the son of a minister and got 2,700 copies.
Guest:and self-published it and just put the, and said I gotta think of a press.
Guest:So he put Lustrum Press on it.
Guest:And then the somnambulist Ralph Gibson in the spine.
Guest:And on the cover it just says, I don't think it has, it doesn't say anything on the cover, just a photograph.
Guest:On the side it says the somnambulist.
Guest:So he was my buddy so I wanted to print Tulsa.
Guest:And so I laid out the book.
Guest:completely laid out the book from 62 to 68.
Guest: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.
Guest:And I didn't know when they would happen, where they would happen, or how they would happen,
Guest:but I knew I was gonna be there when they happened.
Guest:So I went back to Tulsa in 71, and I started firing up methadrine.
Guest:The good stuff.
Guest:The good stuff, this oxygen, man.
Guest:Pure pharmaceutical methadrine on a pill, a little plastic pill you would crush up, and then draw up the, put it in the half and I'd draw up raw water, and draw up the methadrine and fix, right?
Guest:and so I went back and just jumped back into the life and made photographs.
Guest:71.
Guest: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
Guest:from the 71, I went back to New York, and I printed the 71 photographs in the dark room, in Ralph's dark room, which happened to be, Ralph had met Robert Frank, and Robert Frank had given Ralph his old enlarger, it was like an Omega D2.
Guest:Get out of here.
Guest:This old enlarger, so the synambulus in Tulsa were printed, are the 71 pictures from Tulsa,
Guest:were printed on Robert Frank's old Omega D2 enlarger in Ralph Gibson's darkroom.
Guest:So that might have been the enlarger he used to make the Americans?
Marc:Possibly, I guess so, probably.
Marc: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.
Marc:In some weird way, there's a continuity to it.
Guest:Well, the Americans was the late 50s, and Tulsa was 71, so there was more than a decade, but yeah.
Guest:Do you know what I'm saying, though?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The other America.
Guest:The Americans changed photography forever, and Tulsa changed photography forever.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:I printed the book.
Guest:I lay out the book exactly as you see it today.
Marc:You have that great quote in it.
Marc:Once the needle goes in, it never comes out.
Guest:Yeah, and that was from Billy Mann.
Guest:He said that.
Guest:Billy Mann said that to me in 68, and I never forgot it, so I think it's under his photograph.
Guest:So I printed the pictures, Ralph comes back from Europe,
Guest:lets me crash on his couch for another month.
Guest: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.
Guest:And so he came over to ask Ralph to publish it for him, right?
Guest:To go out to California and publish it for him for like 3,000 bucks.
Guest:The way he did his book.
Guest:The Sunambulist.
Guest:And Ralph had a second book that he wanted to publish called Days at Sea.
Guest:And also a photographer named Neil Slavin had a book called Portugal.
Guest:that he wanted to publish, self-publish himself.
Guest:Ralph agreed to do that and put Luston Press on it.
Guest:And he agreed to do Danny's book and put Luston Press on it.
Guest: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.
Guest:Robert told me that you have these photographs that should be published and I want to pay to publish the book.
Guest:Just like that.
Guest:And so Ralph and Danny and I flew out to California together.
Guest:And Danny was shooting heroin.
Guest:And I was doing cocaine like crazy.
Guest:And so Ralph...
Guest:And Danny and I went to the printers, and we printed The Loud Song, Tulsa, and Neil Siphon's Portugal.
Guest:And so we printed all those three books together.
Guest:And we came back, and I got exactly 2,700 copies, of course.
Guest:We paid for 3,000 copies.
Guest:for the 10% law.
Guest:And Danny got 2,700 copies of The Loud Song and Neil Slavin got 2,700 copies of Portugal.
Guest: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.
Guest:And I have, I actually have two copies.
Guest:I have one cherry copy and then I have one copy still in the shrink wrap.
Guest:It was published in 71, Ralph Gibson, Lust and Press.
Guest:All of a sudden, there wasn't a Lust and Press.
Guest:All of a sudden, Lust and Press was four photography books out there on the shelves, right?
Guest:And Tulsa was an immediate sensation, man.
Guest: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.
Guest:This book, Larry Clark's Tulsa, comes out of nowhere.
Guest:It's too good to be believed.
Guest:That was the start of the review.
Guest:So it was like this rave review.
Guest:And the New York Times gave it a rave review.
Guest:And everybody gave it a rave review.
Guest:And it sold out within months, right?
Guest:What about Teenage Lust?
Guest:When did that first come out?
Guest:So Teenage Lust was published, I self-published that myself in 83 or 84.
Guest:When were the images taken?
Guest:The images were taken through my whole life.
Guest:It was kind of a scrapbook style book of images of me from a little kid all the way through my life.
Guest: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.
Guest:And I got a girlfriend who was a prostitute and we went around and she'd go in and...
Guest:Fuck doctors or give them a blowjob and get scripts.
Guest:For what?
Guest:For desoxin and for an opiate for herself because she was a heroin addict.
Guest:And we drove around the whole country for a couple of years.
Guest:And so I just went back into life and really just lived a lot of life.
Guest:And some of the stuff from Times Square, those images were pretty great.
Guest:And then I went to the penitentiary.
Guest:Because I was in a poker game with some guys that I didn't know well.
Guest:And I won and they wouldn't pay me.
Guest:And one guy pulled out a gun.
Guest:And so I left with my girlfriend.
Guest:and I went to the car and I got a gun and I came back and I went into the house.
Guest:I shot the guy and I shot him in the arm on purpose.
Guest:I think on purpose.
Guest:I don't know if I just missed or I think on purpose.
Guest:I might have just missed.
Guest:I think I just shot 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
Guest:What?
Guest:You know, the guy snitched on me, you know?
Guest:Why would he tell me?
Guest:Why would he snitch on me, you know?
Guest:Because for me and my friends and my mindset, it was the old west.
Guest:It was like Billy the Kid and Jesse James, you know?
Guest:You know, someone that pulls a gun in you, you get a gun and shoot him, you know?
Guest:And I was actually shocked that he had snitched on me, so I had to go to court.
Guest:And I got like,
Guest:four or five years.
Guest:I got four years, I think, on one charge and a year on another charge.
Guest:And I did 19 months and somehow made parole because my mother's brother and uncle used to be a newspaper writer, a sports writer for the newspaper in Oklahoma City, I think.
Guest:And he knew everybody and knew a lot of politicians.
Guest:So my mother employed him and he pulled a few strings.
Guest:And so I got to go through the parole board and get parole, but they wouldn't parole me to Oklahoma.
Guest:They would only parole me to New York.
Guest:So I paroled out in 78.
Guest:Where were you in the pen?
Guest:In Oklahoma, in McAllister.
Guest:Bad one?
Guest:State Penitentiary.
Guest:Hard times.
Guest:Hard times.
Guest:And, you know, maximum security prison.
Guest:How'd you hold up in there?
Guest:I was fine, you know, because I had friends in there, you know.
Guest:So I was fine.
Guest:I had people watching my back.
Guest:And I'm smart enough to know how to act in the penitentiary.
Guest:I could talk about that for half an hour, how to act.
Marc:But anyway, so I... What's the main thing you need to know?
Guest:You need to know that you never ask anybody what they're in for.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest: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.
Guest:Because if you ask somebody what they're in for and they say, you know, I murdered my family, you know, 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.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like that, and you ask them what they're in for, man.
Guest:I mean, you don't want to know that.
Guest:So you never ask anybody what they're in for.
Guest:It's the number one rule.
Guest:And you never joke around, and you're quiet, and you stay straight ahead, and that's it, because it's the penitentiary, man.
Guest:and there's some really bad people in there.
Guest:But I'll tell you one thing about the penitentiary.
Guest:90% of people are in the penitentiary for crimes, 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.
Guest:Then there's 10% of people
Guest:who are in the penitentiary that really need to be in the penitentiary.
Guest:And there's three or 4% of people in the penitentiary that need to be executed immediately.
Guest:They need to be taken out and shot in the head.
Guest:Because they're just that kind of people.
Guest:They just...
Guest:They just are born that way.
Guest:No rehabilitation.
Guest:No, they can't.
Guest:They don't have that gene.
Guest:I think scientists have proven that people like that who don't have a conscience or fill any guilt are missing a certain gene or be something, a gene.
Guest:And one of my best friends, Jack Johnson, was like that.
Guest:And now he OD'd.
Guest:And he's in Teenage Loss.
Guest:at the beginning and there's articles about him and his life and his crimes.
Marc:So Teenage West is really you at your most out of control in some way.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I'm just in the life, photographing the life.
Guest:And my girlfriend's a prostitute and a drug addict and my best friend Jack Johnson is a heroin addict and a crook.
Guest:So you get paroled in New York?
Guest:Yeah, so I get paroled in New York and like Jack had no...
Guest:was the most charming guy in the world.
Guest:You'd love Jack.
Guest:But Jack didn't have this guilt thing.
Guest:He had no guilt feelings, no conscience.
Guest: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.
Guest:It was just a natural thing for him.
Guest:He didn't feel guilt.
Guest:He was the most charming guy in the world.
Guest:And by the way,
Guest: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?
Guest:So they're charming, right?
Guest:So anyway, so where are we now?
Marc:We're now at the publication of Teenage Lust.
Marc:You self-published that?
Guest:I self-published it and I wanted to make a film and I wanted to stop being a drug addict.
Guest:So I cleaned up my act.
Guest:I was still doing drugs like crazy and drinking like an alcoholic when I was on parole.
Guest:As a matter of fact, once I saw my parole officer, and he wasn't there that day, so it was another guy there to talk to me because I had to go in once every couple of weeks or once a month or something.
Guest:And I went in and I was drunk and I passed out in the chair talking to the parole officer, the substitute parole officer.
Guest:And I woke up handcuffed to the chair.
Guest:And I woke up and the guy said, what the fuck, man?
Guest:What's the matter with you, Larry?
Guest:And I said, God, I'm sorry.
Guest:I'm really sorry.
Guest:I'll stop it.
Guest:Please, please, please.
Guest:And he unhandcuffed me and let me go.
Guest: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.
Guest:So I lived on that parole.
Guest:And the parole office was on 40th Street between, I think, 8th and 9th Avenue.
Guest:And I saw something I'd never seen before.
Guest:I was completely in shock.
Guest:I saw all these young people.
Guest:There were the girl prostitutes there that everybody knew about, right?
Guest:There were people selling drugs that everybody knew about.
Guest:But there were all these young teenage Puerto Rican boys
Guest:with tight pants, you know, and hauling their dicks, you know, and giving you these come on looks to every man that walked down the street, right?
Guest:And so I walked up to one of them and I said, what's going on, man, you know?
Guest:And he explained to me what was going on.
Guest:He was a hustler.
Guest:And he'd come from Puerto Rico, California,
Guest:from his family there to live with the relatives in New York.
Guest:And his relatives had like 10 kids too.
Guest:So after a couple of weeks, he was thrown out of that house, had to leave.
Guest:So he was like 16, 15 years old in New York City on his own.
Guest: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?
Guest:And hustle these like, you know, all men, middle-aged men, I don't know, everybody, right?
Guest:and let him suck his dick and they give money or I guess suck their dick or whatever they did, man.
Guest:And you found that sort of... And I just found that fascinating because I'd never heard of it before.
Guest:It never had occurred to me that this stuff happened.
Guest:So I started photographing these kids.
Guest:and 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 dark room in my kitchen then so I could print at nighttime and I had a blackout curtain there and I would make these beautiful, I was a great printer, I'd make these beautiful 11 by 14 prints
Guest:uh 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 right you know and they never seen anything like that before yeah he's beautiful 11 by 14 prints and they would say gee thanks larry so i made great friends with him yeah and um my best story about that is i gave this this kid this uh incredible print there was only two of them one for myself and one for him
Guest:There was only two of a kind.
Guest:And he took the print and he said, geez, thanks, Larry.
Guest:And he folded it in fours and put it in his back pocket.
Guest:I thought that was the greatest thing ever.
Marc:And those are the pictures that are in Teenage West.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, let's talk about it.
Marc:Because I think that Bully is a little masterpiece.
Marc:Thank you very much.
Marc:I love that movie.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:I do, too.
Marc:I think it's one of my best ones.
Marc:And you're in it.
Guest:You're kind of looming in it a bit.
Guest:And Brad Renfro.
Guest:I play a tiny part where I have one line as a kid's father because the actor didn't show up.
Guest:We had no actor to play it, so I was forced him to do it.
Marc: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.
Marc:Don't you think?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, in that movie, I see it as sort of a continuation of some of the...
Marc:the kind of emotional and sexual elements of probably teenage lust and something you've always done.
Marc:But what you allowed the actors to do, it was sort of like, to me, encapsulated your whole sort of, do I want to use the word oeuvre?
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Yeah, you know, it was all Larry Clark.
Marc:It had all been leading to bully for me.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Do you think that's true?
Marc:Very true.
Marc:And, you know, in terms of how that movie was received, I don't remember how it was received, but for me, the rawness of sexuality and violence in that movie was something that, you know, it felt like you were going for.
Marc:It felt like somewhat of the core of your artistic vision, but it couldn't be realized completely in the photographs.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:I always wanted to be a filmmaker.
Guest:And film for me was, I had done everything that I could do with photography.
Guest:I was finished with photography.
Guest:I'd done everything for myself that I could do, and so I wanted to make film.
Guest:And I wanted to make film my whole life, but I was too fucked up to do it.
Guest:No one was gonna give me millions of dollars to do it.
Guest:So I cleaned myself up, and luckily fell in love after I cleaned up.
Guest:with this wonderful woman from Atlanta, Georgia, who had come to New York after college.
Guest:To your wife?
Guest:My wife.
Guest:And we ended up getting married, having two children.
Guest:And we were together about 13 years and then separated.
Guest:My fault.
Guest:Separated.
Guest:It was my fault because I started drinking again.
Guest:And my fault.
Guest:But anyway, we separated after about 13 years.
Guest:But I have the most wonderful children.
Guest:You just met Matt, my son.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Who has a punk rock band in Seattle called Wild Mohicans.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Wild Mohicans.
Guest:And my daughter has a...
Guest:And my granddaughter now is a nine-month-old, wonderful, beautiful daughter, smart kid who married her high school sweetheart.
Guest:And so wonderful.
Guest:So I always wanted to make films.
Guest:So I cleaned up, and then I was lucky enough to meet this woman and fall in love, and we got married.
Guest:And I stayed clean for years.
Guest: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.
Guest:So I wanted to make a world about contemporary teenagers
Guest:that I knew nothing about.
Guest:And so I picked skateboarders because visually they were the most exciting.
Guest:As a visual artist, it was very exciting to watch skateboarders.
Guest:So I infiltrated the skateboard world.
Guest:And to do that, I learned how to skateboard at 50 years old.
Guest:And no one does that are 47, 48 years old.
Guest:I started skateboarding.
Guest:And because if you're going to photograph skateboarders, you can't run after them.
Guest:You got to skate.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:So I learned how to skate fast enough in bomb hills and everything with my Leica.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest: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.
Guest:And so kids is really, everything in kids is true to real life that actually happened except Jenny having HIV.
Guest:Jenny is the only made up character in the film.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest: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?
Guest:And so I just reverted back to the old Maiden tied on the railroad tracks with the train coming, right?
Guest:And the heroes rushing to save her.
Guest:And so that was the idea.
Guest:So Jenny's made up, and then I tied all the true stuff of skateboarders that I knew with it, and I wrote this one-page treatment.
Guest:And I called a friend of mine, Jim Lewis, 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?
Guest:And I said, I like 24-hour movies.
Guest:Everything that I've seen happen in the last three years, I want it all crammed into this 24-hour movie to make it exciting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I thought of this character, Jenny, that had HIV, got it from her first sexual experience.
Guest:And then I said, you know, now I know the story, the beginning, the middle, the end.
Guest:Everything happens, but I'm not really a writer.
Guest:And since I did Tulsa from the inside, I need...
Guest:a kid from the inside to write it, but there are no kid skateboard writers I know.
Guest: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.
Guest:So I called him up.
Guest:This was a year later after I met him briefly in the Washington Square.
Guest:I called him and I said, Harmony, I said, Larry Clark, you told me you wrote this little 20-minute screenplay.
Guest:Bring it over and let me read it.
Guest:So he brought it over.
Guest:I read it.
Guest:It was brilliant.
Guest:And it was the kind of a story that wouldn't please adults.
Guest:Most people that age write for their teachers to please adults.
Guest:And this would not please adults.
Guest:So I asked him to write kids.
Guest:And he said, I've been waiting all my life to write this.
Guest:and he was 19 and he was 18 when I met him.
Guest:He just got out of high school.
Guest:And then he went to NYU for a year and I told him to quit.
Guest:I made him quit school.
Guest:And he wrote kids.
Guest: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.
Guest:And as I said, the movie is, except for that one little improv of the four
Guest:boys on the couch, it's all of Harmony's words and I made the kids say the script.
Guest:And Harmony wrote the brilliant script and he also wrote the brilliant script for Ken Park for my diaries.
Guest:And what happened with Another Day in Paradise?
Guest:What was the story on that?
Guest:Another Day in Paradise was my second film.
Guest:Someone had sent me an unpublished manuscript by this ex-convict named Eddie Little, who was on his way back to the penitentiary, and he was in a rehab in Sun Valley, California, the worst rehab I've ever been in, hot.
Guest: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.
Guest:And I talked Eddie into optioning his manuscript, unpublished manuscript called Another Day in Paradise.
Guest:And then I met a young writer, Christopher Landon, who was Michael Landon's son, one of his sons, youngest son, I think.
Guest:And Christopher wrote this screenplay that was close enough that I could get the money and make the movie.
Guest: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.
Guest:And incorporated that into the character of Mel, played by Jimmy Woods, James Woods.
Guest:And so I changed the script all around.
Guest:And so James Ward's character of Mel is half Eddie Little's manuscript and half me.
Guest:And you directed it?
Guest:Me and I directed it.
Guest:And then Jimmy knew Melanie Griffith and we needed like a star to get the money for it because it was like a three and a half million dollar movie or something.
Guest:so we needed a female star and he knew melanie so he called melanie over to his house who he'd worked with before yeah and um uh jimmy and i talked melanie into doing it so we made it and um and it was a rough shoot because once again i had to train the whole crew because the hollywood crew crew right and they have all these rules and every everything i'd say they say no it's not done that way there's this rule it's done that way
Guest:And I said, listen, pal, there are no rules.
Guest:We're not going to do it that way.
Guest:We're going to do it backwards.
Guest:They'd look at me like I was crazy.
Guest:I'd say, I'm only kidding.
Guest:We're going to do it sideways.
Guest:And so then I had them totally confused.
Guest: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.
Guest:I always have a very clear vision.
Guest:I know exactly what I want, how the movie is going to look exactly.
Guest:Did they do it?
Guest:And they did it, yeah, but it was a fight.
Guest:But they did it, and I made them do it.
Guest: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.
Guest:I'd stand there and make them do it.
Guest:Were you using during that?
Guest:Another day in paradise, I had just come off of heroin habits.
Guest:I was clean during the filming.
Guest:Totally clean during the filming.
Guest:But then editing it.
Guest:I went back to heroin and edited heroin.
Guest:And my editor was doing cocaine.
Guest:So like he's doing cocaine by the bags and I'm in the bathroom shooting heroin.
Guest:But that was editing.
Guest:But during the shoot, I was perfectly clean.
Guest:And every movie I've ever shot,
Guest:I've shot perfectly clean.
Guest:Nothing, no drugs, no alcohol, no pot, no nothing.
Guest:Perfectly clean except for the last film, Marford Girl 2, which will be out next year.
Guest: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.
Guest:I was staggering around and falling down because my knees were going with arthritis.
Guest:So right after I made Marford Girl 2, which I just finished cutting, it'll come out early next year.
Guest:in Marford, Texas.
Guest:I'm in Marford Girl there and then Marford Girl too.
Guest:I flew back to New York and had both knees replaced.
Guest:So I shouldn't have been making the film but the money was there so I made it and I'm glad I made it.
Guest:But I paid the price.
Guest:So by then I was in so much pain for years for my knees and the arthritis bone on bone.
Guest:I had both knees replaced.
Guest:So the only film I've ever been under the influence directing was Moffat Gold 2.
Guest:But all the other films I've insisted on being straight.
Marc: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 not it's unlike any other movie.
Guest:Unlike any movie ever made visually because it's so visually exciting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No other movie.
Guest:I watch it.
Guest:And it's so visually exciting.
Guest:Every scene because there's all these scenes where people just talk to each other.
Guest:It's the same information over and over and over again.
Guest:Now, how are you going to make this, you know,
Guest:Compelling.
Guest:Compelling for an audience to sit through it.
Guest:So I was going to make it visually exciting.
Guest:So with my DP, Steve Gaynor, which was his first feature, I decided...
Guest:Because we were shooting so quick, we shot it in 23 days.
Guest:I was supposed to have 40 days and 30 days.
Guest:And the day we started shooting, they said, Larry, we only have 23 days.
Guest:It can't be done.
Guest:And I said, fuck you, I'm going to do it.
Guest:So Steve and I shot it in 23 days.
Guest:Never saw dailies.
Guest:I never saw a frame of footage until the editing room.
Guest: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 i hated
Guest:like pull focus, you know, and stuff like that.
Guest:And we did like four or five shots that I hated that I swore I'd never shoot.
Guest:We shot things with those shots.
Guest:And I talked to Steve and I said, is there any shot that you hate you'd never do?
Guest:And he said, yes, one.
Guest:And we did that shot.
Guest:So every shot known to man is in that film because I'm such a good visual artist, right?
Guest:And it's the most exciting visual film I've ever seen.
Guest:And the actors were great.
Guest:The actors were great.
Marc:Brad Renfro, Bijou Phillips, Michael Pitt, Nick Stahl, and there's a bunch of others.
Marc:Fantastic, fantastic.
Marc:I noticed in the new exhibition there is sort of a piece dedicated to Brad Renfro.
Marc:Two pieces, yeah.
Marc:Two big collages.
Marc:What is it about the... You seem to be compelled in the sense that you look at photographs and you look at even the film that you shot at Tulsa.
Marc:These guys, this part of your life that was out of control but also filled with possibility.
Marc:This weird adolescent.
Marc:The strange...
Marc: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.
Marc:That energy there seems to be something that you're attracted to.
Guest:Well, you know, I look back at my work for 50 years.
Guest:I realize that all my work, if you look at every piece of work I've done, it's always about small groups of people.
Guest:from bullies who was up rockers yeah about South Central Latino kids just trying to be their self you know yeah with all this peer pressure from the blacks yeah to wear baggy clothes and cut off their hair and wear and listen to up against your app and smoke pot these kids wanted to grow their hair wear tight clothes listen to punk rock and skateboard so they had to fight
Guest:to be who they are.
Guest: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 their self.
Guest: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.
Guest:They're so poor.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That they couldn't afford new clothes.
Guest:So they're actually wearing clothes when they're 14 or 15, right?
Guest:They're wearing clothes that they had when they were 12, right?
Guest: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
Guest:all this soul, you know, and I told him when we were shooting the film, and we shot in South Central where no white people go except me.
Guest: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.
Guest:And I've walked through gang-infested neighborhoods and guys have driven by in cars and shot at the house.
Guest:where I'm next to where I'm talking to someone.
Guest:I'm leaning up against the fence talking to one of the kids.
Guest:It was up there because the car drives by slowly.
Guest:So I was popping caps into the house next door.
Guest:And I went, what the fuck, you know, to Kramer, right?
Guest:I said, what the fuck, Kramer's going on?
Guest:He said, oh, that happens all the time.
Guest: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.
Guest:Because you never knew about these 14-year-old Latino kids and their life.
Guest:Because you only saw Latinos in movies cast as gangbangers or drug addicts.
Guest:But these are just normal, regular kids.
Guest:Growing up in, it happened to grow up in the worst, most violent section where no white people go as all black and Latino to the worst high school in America, Locke High School, which happened.
Guest:The New York Times listed the worst high schools in America.
Guest:Locke was number one.
Marc:but isn't there also, there's gotta be an energy to it.
Marc:There's something, you know, pure and vital about, you know, that period in people's life.
Guest:Yeah, well, like, my period was so fucked up and unhappy because my father hated me and, uh,
Guest:When I was 12 years old, I was sitting reading a comic book after school in the sixth grade.
Guest:My father walked in the house, and he'd come home around then from being a traveling salesman.
Guest:And for some reason, he didn't like me.
Guest:Maybe I reminded him of him when he was a kid.
Guest:I have no idea why.
Guest: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.
Guest:A total isolator.
Guest:He walked by and said, looked at me and said, you look like shit.
Guest:And walked up and says, never spoke to me again.
Guest:My whole adolescent never spoke to me again.
Guest:I couldn't wait until I was 18 years old to get out of the house.
Guest:And once, when I was about 17,
Guest:I mean, all I wanted was my father to love me or to like me.
Guest:Once a couple of old friends of his, a very old friend of his from the road, from the business, from the crew that worked for the Reader Service Bureau that he worked for,
Guest:came into town, Guy Painter, and Guy Painter came in with his son who was a teenager.
Guest:And Guy played golf and my father played golf.
Guest:And so Guy said, hey man, let's go play golf tomorrow and we'll bring Guy Jr.
Guest:and bring Larry along to play golf.
Guest:So my father had no choice.
Guest:so so so so we went out that day and played golf um uh with a guy painter and his son and me and my dad or my dad and i and um and then after that day uh next day guy painted his son left town my father continued playing golf and he got every hit a bucket of balls never asked me to go play golf never asked me to go hit a bucket of balls with him
Guest:never never spoke to me again and still except that one day when guy was in town and I have no idea why and and when he died about 82 he went to the hospital he was always a bleeder he was like he had auburn hair and really like white light skin he couldn't get a suntan yeah when the son he got sunburned and he was a bleeder so he had to have like a bowel resection
Guest:Not the worst operation in the world.
Guest:It was a success, but he kept bleeding.
Guest:He couldn't stop the bleeding.
Guest:So he took him in for like three more operations to stop the bleeding.
Guest:And finally, I just told the doctors, I said, look, enough's enough.
Guest:The guy can't stand another operation.
Guest:He keeps bleeding, keeps bleeding, keeps bleeding.
Guest:So the doctor called my older sister and told her that I was trying to kill my father.
Guest:So as soon as my father passed away, and I still didn't love him, and I still don't love him to this day.
Guest:And I don't hate him anymore, but I just don't give a fuck about him, you know?
Guest: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.
Guest:So all my work, mostly a lot of my work has been about that.
Guest:I love talking to you and I think we got a lot in.
Guest:I think so too.
Guest:Thank you, Mark.
Guest:Thank you very much.
Guest:Okay, man.
Guest:See you again sometime.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:Okay, you can take a nap now.
Marc:It's a lot.
Marc:It was a lot.
Marc:It was a lot for me, but I was honored to talk to Mr. Clark.
Marc:Again, to check out my tour dates and get some merch, go to WTFPod.com, powered by Squarespace.
Marc:There's a new poster from my recent Boston shows there, if you're collecting.
Marc:I think I will play a little guitar if I can get... I'm getting so fat.
Shh.
Marc:Don't say that out loud.
Marc:But it's on set.
Marc:All the food.
Marc:There's just always food everywhere.
Marc:It's like a fucking cruise ship.
Marc:Hold on.
Marc:Let me get my guitar.
Guest:Yeah.
guitar solo
Marc:Boomer lives!