LARRY Clark, the controversial photographer whose graphic debut film, “Kids,” shocked the nation in 1995, is promising more of the same with his ripped-from-the-headlines flick, “Bully.”The film, out Friday, re-creates real-life events of 1993, when Florida teen Marty Puccio rounded up a bunch of local youths to exact murderous revenge on his best friend, Bobby Kent, who had been bullying and abusing him since childhood.
Like the disturbing, NC-17 rated “Kids,” about a group of Manhattan teens involved in drug use and unprotected sex, “Bully” is another raw, unflinching look at the teen milieu.
Daily Variety’s critic has already dismissed it as “teensploitation,” but Clark makes no apologies for the graphically pru-rient nature of his films.
“Most of the films being made about youth are either comedies or silly,” the director says. “I’m just trying to do something that reflects the reality.
“This is a true story, and I’m just trying to make it as real as possible. So many films are homogenized and sanitized and Hollywood-ized, but this is trying to get that feeling of what it’s really like to go through something like this.”
Production on “Bully” – which stars Brad Renfro, Rachel Miner and Bijou Phillips, and features Clark in a cameo role – was postponed for 10 months after the Columbine shootings, but the film arrives in theaters at a time when the sometimes lethal results of school bullying are still a hot-button topic.
Based on the book “Bully: A True Story of High School Revenge,” by Jim Schutze, the film examines the events before and after the vicious murder, for which the middle-class, suburban killers received sentences from seven years in prison to the death penalty.
“It was almost like Marty was the victim of spousal abuse, where the abused partner can’t seem to get away. It’s that old question: Why can’t you walk away? Why did you have to kill him?” Clark says.
“It’s complicated. I think that your sympathy is with the other kids until [the killing], and then you realize what a horrible thing it is.
“Bullying is part of life, but it’s good to have the dialogue. It’s good to have this thing examined and understood.”
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