Anyone who thinks classic Hollywood stories are just fables needs to hear how Wassup Rockers, the latest -- and, some say, greatest -- film by seminal director Larry Clark came about. The day after he moved to the West Coast, the 62-year-old was in Venice to shoot Tiffany Limos, the female lead of his film Ken Park, for a French magazine. Her male co-stars weren't available, so Clark was on the lookout for some skaters he could put in the photograph with Tiffany. Meanwhile, Kico and Porky, two Latino teens from South Central, had taken several subways and buses to reach Venice to skate. The rest is casting history. The boys, along with their friends Jonathan, Eddie and Carlos, intrigued Clark with their stories and their amazing style. Though they were skaters, they eschewed the classic skater look in favor of long rocker hair and skintight pants, a cultural hybrid that constantly led to confusion and questions from the guys' African-American neighbors.

Clark thought their lives would make a great documentary, but he isn't a documentary filmmaker, so, as he says, "I dreamed up a crazy story that looks like a documentary." Clark constructed a framework for how he wanted the scenes in the film to progress, and then he let the kids go. "Letting the kids go" meant ending up with a pretty unruly set. "I recognize that I wanted them to be natural in front of the camera, and they're not actors," Clark explains. "To do that, they had to be themselves the whole time. It was really wild and crazy, difficult to control." After setting the tone with scenes in South Central, the movie takes a wild turn. Larry says, "I thought, 'What can I do with these kids? I don't just want to do a movie about South Central. I want to take them on an adventure.'" The adventure takes them on a long metro and bus ride to Beverly Hills High, where they meet cute girls, get mixed up with crazy Beverly Hills characters and eventually get chased by the police. Paris Hilton, pre-sex-tape, was the inspiration behind the Beverly Hills girls. "Paris and Nicky were in the news just for going to clubs," Clark recalls. "I thought, 'What if these kids go to Hollywood and Paris and Nicky pick them up?' That's how it started. But Paris is too old for them." While they're in Beverly Hills, the boys have hilarious run-ins with Janice Dickinson and Jeremy Scott, as well as with a Charlton Heston type with a rifle. By taking them out of South Central and setting them loose in the manicured gardens of Beverly Hills, Clark brings an old-school adventure-film flavor to the mix, a curveball from America's art-house king.

The director has always been fascinated by the energy of youth. "It started when I was a kid, taking photographs of my friends. Since then it's been a bottomless well of inspiration." Upon further reflection, he adds, "It's the most important time of our lives, when we're formed. It dictates who we are as adults." Then he says with a laugh, "Nobody else does it. If someone else can do it, I won't have to. And people like it."

NEXT PHOTO >>

Above (l-r): Kico wears a T-shirt by Fox, jeans by Kr3w, hat by Baker, shoes by DC Shoes. * Porky wears jeans by Evisu, hat by Flip, shoes by DVS. * Jonathan wears jeans by Kr3w, shoes by Emerica. * Eddie wears a shirt and jeans by Kr3w, shoes by Osiris.