The Story of "Bully"

''I threw the script away and I shot the book. I had my assistant actually type out the book, and we would actually work from that.''

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/08/movies/film-larry-clark-moralist-in-the-florida-suburbs.html

FILM

FILM; Larry Clark, Moralist, In the Florida Suburbs

By Jamie Malanowski

July 8, 2001

“BULLY,” the new film by Larry Clark that opens Friday, is like a cancer drug: powerful, hard to take, necessary. A faithful retelling of an ugly murder of a nasty punk by a bunch of troubled, amoral teenagers that took place in Florida in 1993, “Bully” is a “Lord of the Flies” for our time, except that the kids who lose their tenuous grip on morality here are not lost in some distant jungle but in the tract houses and strip malls and Pizza Huts of suburbia. A movie filled with nudity, sex scenes and acts of violence large and small.

“Bully” is in fact a deeply conservative film, one that right-wing radio hosts could chew on for weeks, if they could bring themselves to see it.

“I call myself a moralist and people laugh at me, I swear to God,” said Mr. Clark, himself laughing at the notion. He is, after all, a famous ex-drug addict and a celebrated artist whose reputation was built on photographs of young people -- naked, on drugs, with guns -- that alternately and in combination shock, repel and attract. He is also the director of “Kids” (1995); his first picture, it was another film examination of violent, directionless teenagers.”My friends actually laughed,” he said. “So what are you going to do? Because it is about morality. All of it. Actions have consequences.”

“Bully” tells the true story of the murder of a high school student, Bobby Kent (Nick Stahl), an act committed by his lifelong best friend, Marty Puccio (Brad Renfro), aided and abetted by his girlfriend Lisa (Rachel Miner) and three other friends. The incident was ugly in itself, but as Mr. Clark discovered when he read the 1998 book “Bully: A True Story of High School Revenge” by the journalist Jim Schutze, the story leading up to the murder was just as sordid. “Bobby was a rotten kid,” Mr. Clark said. “He was mean and violent and nasty to everyone, including Marty. But Marty would take it, for whatever reason. Marty could be a good guy when he wasn't with Bobby, but when he was, he became just like Bobby. They would rob cars and steal stuff, they would go to this gay club and hustle gays and beat them up. They picked up one guy and made a porno video of him that they then tried to sell to adult bookstores and make a lot of money. A couple of real jokers.”

Their relationship took a turn when Marty fell in love with Lisa. Bobby welcomed her by viciously abusing her and the others in their set (who have their own awful back stories involving drug addiction, teen prostitution and other crimes), except she did not tolerate it as well as Marty, and suggested solving the problem through murder.

Mr. Clark, unimpressed with the original screenplay, almost passed on the project, until the producer Don Murphy encouraged him to read the book. “The screenplay had left out all the good stuff,” Mr. Clark said. The bully was all bad and Marty was an angel. The crimes were eliminated as was any hint of homosexuality; the screenwriters were afraid that they would lose the audience, largely teenagers, who would be put off by the underlying gay theme, Mr. Clark explained. “I said: 'If you're going to write for the audience, why do it? It's a real story!“

Though he specified the material he wanted included, Mr. Clark never got a screenplay that satisfied him, even when it came time to shoot. “Basically,” he said, “I threw the script away and I shot the book. I had my assistant actually type out the book, and we would actually work from that.”

ut the absence of a script (David McKenna and Roger Pullis received screenplay credits) wasn't the largest of Mr. Clark's problems. Because of budgetary constraints, “literally two days before we started, my shooting schedule was cut from 30 days to 23.”

“My first reaction was to think it was impossible,” he continued.” But what do you do? You either shut down or accept the challenge. And luckily I'm probably at my best in the heat of battle.”

This may sound like an immodest self-assessment, but it's one his colleagues endorse. “Larry was just so cool, all the time,” said Mr. Renfro. “The climax of the movie is the murder scene, and somebody ordered the wrong lights, so we only had one night to shoot it. And Larry was just so calm, saying, 'O.K., you go here, you go there, now you lie down in the back of the car in a fetal position.' “ Mr. Clark shot 36 setups that night, and produced a harrowing sequence.

“In my mind, from the point I became interested in the story, I thought that would be the key scene,” Mr. Murphy said. “I thought it would have to be as brutal as when it happened. Well, it is. I can't watch it.”

BUT the violence is only part of what makes the film hard to take; it isn't easy watching characters so blindly and eagerly degrade themselves. There are sex scenes, but the characters engage in them almost passionlessly, mechanically, and Mr. Clark's decision to film the sequences documentary style, with minimal lighting, inoculates the moments against any

prettification.

“It was a very difficult decision to do the nudity,”Ms. Miner said, “but Larry explained why the scenes were important, that we had to show what the kids' lives were like. And I trusted him.” Ms. Miner has moments in which she is naked with a lost look in her eyes that are utterly dismaying.

Like all directors, Mr. Clark had to endure some studio oversight, although it seems that he was able to use his authority as are cognized artist to limit the supervision.

“I'd get these notes from Lion's Gate” -- the company financed the film with the French company Canal Plus -- “they'd say, 'The gay club scene -- isn't that too long?' Well no, it's not too long; it's fascinating, because they have these gay clubs in Florida that have amateur teen night, and I saw them. Or they'd say: 'When Marty's in the kitchen he gets kind of rough with Lisa; can't you cut that out? It'll confuse the audience if first he's good and then he's mean.' And I'd say: 'Well, that's the story! Why do the book if you're not going to tell the story?' But that's the Hollywood way, to explain everything. But here's a story where you can't explain hy they all acted this way.”

Or perhaps he can, at least in a more general way. “All these kids were basically suburban middle-class kids,” he said. “Their parents knew where they were, but they certainly didn't know what was going on. They wanted everything to be O.K., and their kids to be happy, and they didn't want any confrontations. But that's not enough.”

Mr. Clark, who is 55, and who has a long face with large, Lincolnesque features, speaks from experience, being the father of a 15-year-old daughter and a 17-year-old son. “I try to be very aware of what's going on in their lives,” he said, “how they're doing in school, who their friends are. I talk to them about everything, but it can be difficult. They reach a certain age, and they don't want to know a lot of stuff you want to tell them. But there's so much you can say. They get so down and depressed. Tell them not to get too depressed, that everything will pass. I thought I'd die a lonely old man, I thought I'd be dead by now, I thought I'd always be unhappy. Somehow, though, I'm happy and healthy, I'm in love, things do work out.”

Mr. Clark's insistence on realism means that “Bully” will be released without a rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, which is likely to severely limit the number of theaters that will exhibit it. “When the M.P.A.A. told us there was no way we could get an R, we did ask them their advice on what we could cut,” Mr. Clark said. “And they sent back -- and I have their fax, I'm going to publish it in my next book -- a message that said, 'Our advice is 'hide your children.' “ So, you know -- I try to make films real, but if you make them real, they won't let you put your product out.”

Mr. Clark seems unlikely to compromise. “I got into drugs when I was 15,” he said, speaking of his upbringing in Tulsa, Okla. “It was such a secret life back then. This was the 50's. There were no drugs. There were no alcoholic parents. There was no incest. There was no child abuse. But of course, there was. I went to school, and kids were coming in with black eyes because the parents were beating them up. There was a girl who had five brothers, and they were all having sex with her, and probably so was the father, but that wasn't talked about. So when I started to photograph the things around me, I wondered why you can't tell stories truthfully. I wondered why do people have to pull their punches. And I still wonder. I make these movies, and everybody says, 'Gee whiz, you can't do that.' But as an artist, it never crosses my mind that I can't do something, whereas that's the first thing a lot of people think. But as I get older -- and I hate this, I don't want to be responsible for anything -- I do feel that if I sellout, it'll start to affect other people, because people do look at my work, and I don't want to be responsible for anybody getting the wrong idea.”

One of Mr. Clark's next projects is “Ken Park,” about five families living in a California suburb. “Wait until you see this one!” he exults. “I don't want to talk about it yet, but it's going to be something. It's about parents and kids, and I've never seen anything like it -- I don't know what I did!”

Laughing, he calms down. “Actually,” he says, “I know exactly what I did.”

Roger Ebert’s review of “Bully,” the film:

Larry Clark‘s “Bully” calls the bluff of movies that pretend to be about murder but are really about entertainment. His film has all the sadness and shabbiness, all the mess and cruelty and thoughtless stupidity of the real thing. Based on a real story from 1993, it tells the story of a twisted high school bully and a circle of friends who decide to kill him. But this is not about the evil sadist and the release of revenge; it’s about how a group of kids will do something no single member is capable of. And about the moral void these kids inhabit.

Clark moved to the Hollywood, Fla., suburb where the actual murder took place, and sees it as a sterile expanse of Identikit homes, strip malls and boredom, where the kids drift from video arcades to fast food hangouts, and a car means freedom. There is no doubt a parallel universe in this same suburb, filled with happy, creative, intelligent people and endless opportunities–there always is–but these kids are off that map. They are stupid by choice, not necessity; they have fallen into a slacker subculture that involves leading their lives in a void that can be filled only by booze, drugs, sex, and the endless, aimless analysis of their pathetic emptiness.

The movie is brilliantly and courageously well-acted by its young cast; it’s one of those movies so perceptive and wounding that there’s no place for the actors to hide, no cop out they can exercise. Their characters bleed with banality and stupid, doped reasoning. Their parents are not bad and, for the most part, not blamed; their children live in a world they do not understand or, in some cases, even see.

We meet Marty Puccio (Brad Renfro) and Bobby Kent (Nick Stahl). For as long as Marty can remember, Bobby has picked on him, and we see it as a daily ordeal: The ear twisting, the hard punches, the peremptory orders (“Get back in the car now!”), the demands that he go where he doesn’t want to go and do what he doesn’t want to do. In a key scene, Bobby takes him to a gay strip club and makes him dance on the stage while patrons stuff bills into his shorts. Marty is not gay. Bobby may be; certainly his relationship with Bobby is sublimated S/M.

Marty and Bobby meet Ali and Lisa (Bijou Phillips and Rachel Miner).

Bobby eventually rapes both girls. He also likes to watch Marty and Lisa in the back seat. He is, we sense, evil to the core; something has gone very wrong in his life, and maybe it was engendered by the authoritarian style of his father, who likes to dominate people under the guise of only doing what’s right for them.

The movie establishes these kids in a larger circle of friends, including the tall, strong and essentially nice Donny (Michael Pitt), the anything-goes Heather (Kelli Garner), and Derek (Daniel Franzese), along for the ride. It watches as they drift from coffee shops to malls to one another’s cars and bedrooms, engaged in an endless loop of speculation about the only subject available to them, their lives. The leadership in this circle shifts according to who has a strongly held opinion; the others drift into line.

A consensus begins to form that Bobby deserves to be killed. At one point, Lisa simply says, “I want him dead.” It’s chilling, the way the murder is planned so heedlessly. The kids decide they don’t know enough to do it themselves, and need to hire a “hit man.” This turns out to be Leo Fitzpatrick (from Clark’s powerful first film, “Kids“), who is essentially a kid himself. The conspirators vaguely think his family is “Mafia,” although his qualifications come into question when he worries that car horns will bother the neighbors; eventually we get the priceless line, “The hit man needs a ride.” The details of the murder are observed unblinkingly in a scene of harrowing, gruesome sadness. It is hard, messy work to kill someone.

Once the body is disposed of, the arguments begin almost immediately: Everybody had a hand in the assault, but nobody actually can be said to have delivered the fatal blow, and we watch incredulously as these kids cave in to guilt, remorse, grief, blaming one another, and the irresistible impulse to tell outsiders what happened.

Clark’s purpose in the film is twofold. He wants to depict a youth culture without resources, and to show how a crowd is capable of actions its members would never commit on their own. In “Kids” (1995) and in this film, the adult society has abandoned these characters–done little to educate or challenge them, or to create a world in which they have purpose.

One of Bobby’s sins, which I neglected to mention, is that he is still in high school and plans to go to college; the others live with fast-food jobs and handouts from parents, and Ali has a revealing line: “I was married once, for about three weeks. I have a little boy, but it’s no big deal–my parents take care of him.” “Kids” takes place in Manhattan and “Bully” in south Florida but these kids occupy essentially the same lives, have the same parents, share the same futures.

It may be that “Bully” helps to explain the high school shootings. We sense the chilling disconnect between an action and its consequences, the availability of firearms, the buildup of teenage resentments and hatreds, the moral vacuum, the way they can talk themselves into doing unthinkable things, and above all the need to talk about it. (So many high school shooters leave diaries and Web pages, and tell their friends what they plan to do.) Yes, Bobby Kent is a bully (and one of the most loathsome characters I’ve seen in a movie). But he dies not for his sins, but because his killers are so bored and adrift, and have such uncertain ideas of themselves.

Larry Clark is obviously obsessed by the culture of floating, unplugged teenagers. Sometimes his camera seems too willing to watch during the scenes of nudity and sex, and there is one particular shot that seems shameless in its voyeurism (you’ll know the one). But it’s this very drive that fuels his films. If the director doesn’t have a strong personal feeling about material like this, he shouldn’t be making movies about it.

Clark is not some objectified, outside adult observer making an after-school special, but an artist who has made a leap into this teenage mindscape. Some critics have attacked him as a dirty old man with a suspect relationship to his material; if this film had been directed by a 25-year-old, some of these same critics might be hailing it. I believe “Bully” is a masterpiece on its own terms, a frightening indictment of a society that offers absolutely nothing to some of its children–and an indictment of the children, who lack the imagination and courage to try to escape. Bobby and his killers deserve one another.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013.

New York Times review of Bully, the book

March 23, 1997

By PATRICIA FIELDSTEEL

The other teen-agers in Bobby Kent's crowd just wanted to continue the paradisaic existence of unlimited sun, surf, sex, drugs and alcohol their parents had worked so hard to make possible in the privileged suburbs outside Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

They might be dropouts, occasional prostitutes, hustlers, thieves and drug dealers, but they still were considered good kids from churchgoing families. And unless Bobby forced them during one of his steroid-induced rages, they didn't make a sport of torturing retarded people or harassing homosexuals. But Bobby Kent was spoiling their fun, so in July 1993, seven of his friends savagely murdered him.

For the three young women and four young men, the only problem was that they got caught. Three received life sentences; Bobby's best friend got the death penalty.

In “Bully,” Jim Schutze, the Dallas bureau chief for The Houston Chronicle, has written a deeply disturbing book, an indictment of suburban values and of an aimless, violent middle-class youth culture that is depraved because it is morally -- not economically -- deprived.