May 2006

I thought that making Monster’s Ball was rough. I vowed upon wrapping that film that I would never make another. After the accolades and success of that film, I was offered tons of projects from studios for lots of money (which I really could have used.) But all of them were jokes: Who’s My Baby’s Cousin’s Daddy, Leprechauns From the Hood (really). I felt that as a black filmmaker, my sophomore attempt at film should be just as interesting as my first; that I should not sell out.

Writer, producer, and film executive James Schamus has had about as brilliant a career in independent film as they come, and it just keeps getting better.

In 1973, a young, cinema-loving bohemian couple fled the high rents of Manhattan for the more affordable suburbs of Huntington, NY. Once there, Vic Skolnick and Charlotte Sky found that they had also fled, inadvertently, the vibrant independent cinema scene in New York City, which was then in its heyday, with more than a dozen arthouses sprinkled throughout the boroughs.

“I don’t know how big of a historian you are,” begins David Dundas, one of the founders of YouAreTV, a video hosting site launched at the beginning of this year. “But this whole technology thing is kind of equivalent to when the printing press came out.”

Larry Clark’s films are shocking. There’s Kids, about drug-using, AIDS-carrying,
sexually active Manhattan teenagers; Bully, the true story of a group of teens who
murder their tormentor; and Ken Park, which was so sexually explicit, it was never released in the U.S. These films are shocking because they capture a reality most people don’t want to know exists.