by Mary Glucksman

Brad Renfro.

Put Bully on the list of new films you won't see Joe Lieberman lining up to see. Larry Clark (Kids, Another Day in Paradise) is finishing up this true story about seven teens who gang up to kill steroid-popping bully Bobby Kent (played by Nick Stahl) after a lifetime of being pushed around by him in their downwardly mobile Everglades-area suburb. The movie got some early publicity Labor Day weekend when co-star Brad Renfro (Apt Pupil), cast as Kent's best friend and favorite whipping boy, was arrested for taking a stranger's yacht on a joy ride as the Fort Lauderdale shoot was gearing up. The unusual mix of young stars on board also includes Leo Fitzpatrick (Kids' "Virgin Surgeon"), Michael Pitt ("Dawson's Creek"), Bijou Phillips (Almost Famous) and Rachel Miner (Macaulay Culkin's wife) among those in on the plot to kill him.

Clark's courted outrage as far back as Tulsa, the portrait of teenage speed freaks at love and work that put him on the map as a photographer in 1971; long out of print and highly valued at auction, it gets a reissue next month from Grove Press at an affordable $40.) Kids, his first film, drew protests in 1995 for its frank depiction of casual teenage sex and suspicions that the dope-smoking pre-teens in the cast were really getting high. Bully should prove even more controversial in the current climate; territory like this is more normally mined for film only in documentaries like Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's Paradise Lost.

Bully's story started in 1993 when Kent was killed and journalist Jim Schutze jumped on the story as a sure bet for a true-crime book he could later sell to Hollywood. All seven kids who participated in Kent's murder went to jail and Schutze's chronicle of the crime and trials came out in 1997. Six lapsed options later, he'd abandoned hopes for a film and settled into a column at the Dallas Observer when Apt Pupil producer Don Murphy called. Murphy got David McKenna (American History X) to do an adaptation and teamed with legendary producer Chris Hanley (American Psycho) to put Bully on the fast track. With star power like that on both sides of the camera, Bully's a bright spot on the radar for next year.

For more info, check out an interview spanning Tulsa to Kids at www.artcommotion.com/VisualArts/indexa.html.

Try musefilm.com for a wealth of info – pix included – on Chris Hanley projects past and future including Freeway and Buffalo 66.

Bookmark: Jim Schutze's Bully is out in paperback and his more recent investigative reports are online at www.dallasobserver.com.

Related items: For a real page-turner about movie making without a map check out Jane Hamsher's Killer Instinct, a gasp-by-gasp chronicle of how, as novice producers, she and Don Murphy got Natural Born Killers made with Oliver Stone.