Pretty Punk

“They talk shit,” adds Jonathan.

One major fringe benefit of the film was loads of new skateboards for the entire crew during production. Previously, of course, they had little cash to speak of, and couldn’t buy equipment. But Clark got hooked up with some of the skateboard companies, who were happy to supply them with boxfuls of boards for the obvious promotional returns. And now that the film is out, the kids are sponsored too. They get clothes and equipment, and soon they’re going to have their own boards, having formed a skateboard company with Danny Minnick, the photographer who filmed the skateboarding scenes in Wassup Rockers.

Off the wall: Kico on Wishire Boulevard, pulling a huge ollie

Gnarly rail slide: Kico at Bev Hills High, right before the cops busted the boys.

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More About

• Larry Clark
• Beverly Hills (California)
• Beverly Hills High School
• Skateboarding
• Punk Rock

And the band’s starting up again — if they get the band going, for sure they’ll be able to get shows, and maybe get signed to a label, or whatever way they want to do it. Having acted in this film is going to pay off — and since it took over a year to make, it’s a good thing they stuck with it.

“I was gonna start giving up after a little while, but . . .” Kico laughs.

“I didn’t really care, ’cause like all the while we were just having fun,” says Jonathan. “He would take us to skate, he would take all of us, and we would listen to music, loud or whatever, we’d take a cooler with drinks.”

“And then we’ll just ride around, fucking around with him, talking shit to people in the street. We loved it when we fucked around with him . . .”

“Then I would feed ’em. So every Saturday, I would take ’em out all day . . .,” Clark starts to say, before Jonathan cuts him off.

“You never feed us!”

“I always fed you.”

“No, you haven’t,” says Kico.

“We had fun,” Clark says, “and I’m the guy that paid the price, ’cause these kids beat the shit outta me all the time and fucked with me and called me names and . . .”

“We ripped his boxers off twice,” says Jonathan, laughing. “We gave him a wedgie so hard that his boxers would rip.”

Adds Kico, “We had him from the front, and I had him from the back, we would pick him up . . .”

“We would go other places to eat, and what these kids would do is steal all the straws. I mean, 150 straws — they’d have 30 or 50 straws apiece, and then all the way back they were spit-wadding, spit-wadding other cars, spit-wadding me as I’m driving 70 mph. I mean, it was crazy,” says Clark.

Sounds stressful . . .

“It was stressful,” Clark continues. “And there’d be four in the back seat, and then one laying across their legs, so it was five in the back seat, and then Eddie would get shotgun. And then me driving. And a few times, there’d be too many — I gotta ’95 Camry, right? So I could get like five in the back seat, seven in the car including me, but there’d be nine, right? So they’d say, ‘We’ll trunk it.’ I said, ‘What?’ They said, ‘We’ll get in the trunk.’ ”

You can get busted for that.

“I can get busted for having five kids in the back seat with no seat belts on. And then two or three in the trunk sometimes, and I’m thinking, here’s this old white guy with all these Latino kids in the car, five or six in the back seat — what if we get busted? Martin Luther King’s birthday, we all went to a bowling alley and we had 13 people in the car; Jonathan was in the trunk with Cindy and Spermball.”

“I was in there too!” says Kico.

“Spermball, Kico, Jonathan and Cindy, his girlfriend, who he had broken up with — but they got back together that day in the trunk!” Clark says. “I mean, there was no need to make up all this stuff, it all came from those stories.”

One day, Milton called up Clark and said, “I can’t be in your movie anymore, Larry.” Clark asked why not. And Milton said, “ ’Cause I don’t want to be Spermball anymore.” Clark said, “What? You have to be Spermball, that’s the greatest name in the world! There’s no better name in the world than Spermball!” And Milton said, “No, I can’t be Spermball, my mom won’t let me.”

Clark had to think quickly, because he had his script prepared and Spermball was all the way through it. So he said, “Okay, Milton, here’s what I’ll do: They’ll call you Spermball, but then you’ll say, ‘I don’t wanna be Spermball anymore,’ and then I’m gonna take you on this whole adventure, you’re gonna be a main part of it, and you’re gonna start getting respect. And by the end of the movie, you’ve gotten respect, and they’ll call you Milton.”

Which is how the movie now ends. It could have turned out quite differently, though, as circumstances in the dangerous, small world of the hood change rapidly — two of Clark’s actors left during the filming, started smoking pot and drinking, cut off their long hair, and became gangbangers overnight.