E-Mail This Article to a Friend Advertisements for themselves Norman Mailer’s Maidstone, Larry Clark’s Kids stuff BY GERALD PEARY

The guilty amusement of this week, or any week, is Maidstone (1970), which is at the Harvard Film Archive on Saturday (April 23) as part of its "Death of the Sixties series." It’s Norman Mailer’s self-starring, self-promoting, self-indulgent saga about a porno filmmaker who runs for president. Probably the last time Maidstone screened in Boston was in 1983, when, through the ICA, I organized a first-time Hub retrospective of Mailer’s films at the Coolidge Corner. (There were three pictures then: in 1987, he added on Tough Guys Don’t Dance.)

For the event, The Naked and the Dead author helped to dig out old prints, and he came up from New York for the Maidstone screening. In his introduction, he called the film "an experiment" and said he hoped the audience would view it charitably: "I’m curious to see whether it’s 10 years ahead of its time or 20 years behind it, or whether it went clear off into a time that never existed." At the end, he was smiling. "It’s better the fourth or fifth time," he assured the skeptical crowd, "especially if treated as a family movie." He did realize that Maidstone becomes increasingly chaotic and incoherent as it moves along. "I made the film on three hours’ sleep a night. By the last days, I was a general suffering from combat fatigue." He was sorry, he deadpanned, that this audience hadn’t been treated to the original three-hour version. "It was kind of good. Also easier to follow. Also, very boring."

At any length, Maidstone beats Mailer’s first film, Wild 90 (1968), the embarrassment of the Boston tribute. It’s a stagnant, one-set No Exit in Brooklyn, with three Mafia thugs lying low in a warehouse. Two of them talk pidgin Peter Falk. The third, the bleary-eyed Prince (Mailer), snarls a lot and engages in a sustained barking contest with a German shepherd. In 1983, the "auteur" admitted to being uncomfortable about making anyone watch Wild 90. But he remained proud of what came next, Beyond the Law, his only movie to elicit good reviews. In that one, he’s a hard-nosed Irish police lieutenant conducting tough-guy interrogations. It was the semi-success of Beyond the Law that led Mailer to believe he could shoot Maidstone in five days. Everyone who mattered to him flocked to Long Island to be in the film: boxing pals, acquaintances from his summer residence in Provincetown, two ex-wives, his then current wife, and a host of Mailer children. The slim, dim plot: the Secret Service agents guarding Norman T. Kingsley (Mailer) hope to assassinate him before he trumps both Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 election.

The film is remembered mainly for its coda, a legendary moment of painful reality intruding on fluffy fiction. Rip Torn, who played Kingsley’s brother, went for Mailer’s head with a toy hammer. As the camera ran, a surprised, bleeding Mailer retaliated by sinking his teeth into Torn’s ear. It was the most dubious battle since the two Ali-Liston fights. Mailer’s spouse, Beverly Bentley, joined in, clobbering Torn. Two against one — so much for macho Norman Mailer.

Why the attack? Rip Torn claimed that he was improvising in character, trying to wound Kingsley, and that somehow real-life Mailer’s noggin got in the way. "I think Rip was right," Mailer conceded 15 years later in Boston. "We made up long ago. But my eldest daughter, who witnessed the fight as a child, wouldn’t talk to him at parties for years."

I WASN’T A HUGE FAN of Kids when it came out in 1995. But looking at posters and photos of the cast at the Larry Clark Retrospective at New York’s International Center of Photography (through June 5), I felt an excitement, an iconic shiver. Clark was on to something, discovering raw high-schoolers Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson and, as a co-screenwriter, Harmony Korine. Is this story of teen sex, drugs, and violence exploitative? Certainly, but so is everything that Clark’s been doing, in photography and film, since the early 1970s. It’s all one piece, from homo-erotic photo books like Tulsa (1971) through his bare-chested muscle-boy movies.

In addition to displaying 200 Clark photos, the ICP is revolving three Clark features: Kids, Another Day in Paradise, and Bully. There’s a cool room with scattered couches in which you can watch the video projections on a wall. But where is Clark’s X-rated Ken Park (2002), which was co-directed by Ed Lachman? Or Teenage Cavemen (2002), futuristic adolescent posing, which he did for cable TV?

Contact Gerald Peary at gpeary@geraldpeary.com