Supreme has uploaded the Larry Clark-directed film Kids to its website to view for free. Highly controversial, the the NC-17 film was a coming-of-age portrayal of a group of teenagers living and hanging out in New York during a period of 24 hours.
Now 25 years old, the film was Harmony Korine’s first screenplay as well as the then 52-year-old Clark’s first movie. Prior to the film Chloë Sevigny was an intern for Sassy and a salesperson at downtown boutique Liquid Sky. Actress Rosario Dawson was still in middle school at the time of filming. Many of the skateboarders were street cast while hanging out in Washington Square Park.
Tellingly, Harvey Weinstein was an early supporter of the film and went so far as to create a new distribution company independent of The Walt Disney-owned Miramax to make sure it would be seen.
Commenting on the effort, Korine told Rolling Stone, “We wanted to make a kind of insider’s look at this gnarly adolescent culture that you would never get to see otherwise, like [MTV’s] ‘The Real World’ pushed into something hyper and insane.”
Sadly, actor and original Supreme skate team member, Justin Pierce, killed himself at the age of 25 while Zoo York-sponsored skate legend Harold Hunter, who was also featured in the film, died 11 years later from a drug-induced heart attack at the age of 31.
Commenting on the experience, Leo Fitzpatrick, who played the role of Telly, said, “The older I get the more I’m surprised any of us survive our 20s. The older I get the more I realize how none of it makes sense. There’s no rhyme or reason. Harold and Justin, those are the only two reasons I would rewatch the film, just to hang out with those guys for two hours more. It sucks when you don’t know what they could have grown into. But you have to appreciate the time they were here.”
While Supreme had opened just month before filming of Kids began in the summer of 1994, the retailer was very much a part of the downtown skate scene. Paying tribute to the film’s 20th anniversary, Supreme launched a capsule collection commemorating the movie.
Check out Kids here.
