Lost Boys

Nickolas Perry’s film Speedway Junky belongs on the small but growing list of films that turn sexually ambiguous yet entrepreneurial teenage boys and the seedy streets upon which they pose into objects of fetishes. But Perry says he was deliberately striving to have this, his first full-length feature, look at this world in a different light than Gus Van Sant’s genre-defining My Own Private Idaho.

“Hustler movies are always described as ‘gritty,'” he says, “and I didn’t want this to look gritty. I wanted to go for something that had an anti-look: very clean and slick. And I wanted to change the colors of Las Vegas you were used to seeing — the oranges, reds and whites; that reflective, artificial, neon warmth. I think I’ve made it look cooler, with blues and greens that, only as the movie progresses, get a little warmer.”

It’s only coincidence that Idaho‘s Van Sant is executive producer of Speedway Junky; he and Perry just happen to be friends, and Van Sant just happened to select this script from several Perry asked him to read. Even so, Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting made him the gay director of record and earned him a name Hollywood doesn’t ignore.

“Certainly, having Gus attached to this was instrumental to getting this made,” says Perry, whose short film Must Be the Music was part of the gay compilation Boys Life 2. “It allowed us to go after talent like Daryl Hannah and Tiffani-Amber Thiessen. No one knew who Nick Perry was, but with Gus’ name attached, we were able to get the money.”

Speedway Junky is among more than thirty films in the Kansas City Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, which opens June 23 with the Midwest premiere of Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

Junky could be called a movie about family if your family included a maternal ex-showgirl (Daryl Hannah) who dispenses soup and cereal like a strung-out Mary Poppins, and a pack of trick-turning boys who really hate what they’re doing but like the cash they make doing it. As Home Improvement‘s Jonathan Taylor Thomas, playing an anything-goes hustler named Steven, says with a nonchalance that upgrades his street value, “I’m buy-sexual.'”

Jesse Bradford, who is best remembered for Steven Soderbergh’s St. Louis-based King of the Hill, stars as Johnny, a boy whose semicharmed life has spared him the philosophy that everyone young has a price. He’s merely passing through Vegas on his way to North Carolina, but his last twenty bucks are lifted in a casino and, in his naive daze, he stumbles upon a group of rowdy teens like J.T. (Erik Alexander Gavica) and Eric (Jordan Brower). Most of the kids are prostitutes living hand to mouth by the grace of their seductive youthfulness. But there’s nothing all that glamorous about their lives. (Thomas is aggressively shedding his teen-idol status with this and another gay role in Common Ground.) When Steven first walks up to the group, his opening line is “Get fucked in the ass tonight?”

“His first line — in close-up — is intentional,” Perry says. “I wanted it to say, ‘Let’s do this as strong as we can.'”

Though no trick is actually turned onscreen, the male johns are predictably wheezy and grotesque, a stereotype minted in Midnight Cowboy and yet to be altered. Perry says that this too was intentional. “Yeah, I’ve gotten flak for that. But I was really looking at this in a historical context. This hideous, stereotypical john was to reinforce Johnny’s already negative view of gay people. I needed it so it would throw up a later obstacle to Johnny and Eric’s friendship.”

Eric, who is the only purely gay youth of the core group, falls for Johnny’s farmer tan and uncomplicated mien. Though Johnny rebuffs Eric’s unmistakable advances, it’s only after Johnny’s been beaten up and Eric becomes his caretaker that Johnny stops wigging out about his friend’s sexual orientation. Drugs and more violence figure in before it ends well for Johnny; the fate of Steven and Eric, with at least ten pretty years left on their faces, is more suspect.

Perry says the movie came to him after a weird Halloween night that began in Los Angeles, where he lives, and ended several mile markers east. “It was just about a year before we shot it. I was in L.A., hopped in my car without anywhere really to go and drove east. I ended up in Las Vegas. I was walking around on the strip and ran into Club Utopia, where this rave was going on. Having been deeply into the rave scene in L.A., where rave kids, to make extra cash, would turn tricks, I spent the whole night partying with these suburban Vegas kids. It was a different vibe [from L.A.] but familiar.

“So the next morning, I’m sitting on one of those benches along the strip, watching the sun come up, and the whole movie came to me,” Perry continues. “I wanted to take that [L.A.] weirdness and make it a Vegas movie — but with a different take on Vegas I hadn’t seen before. I wrote the script in three weeks, sent it to Gus and he said, ‘Yeah, this is great.'”

Speedway Junky came in at a cost of about $1.5 million — incredible considering the movie’s high quality and the names on the marquee. Perry says, “Because of those budgetary restraints, we had to move really fast. And child-labor laws — all of the kids but Jesse Bradford were under eighteen — cut your shooting time down; it went from having twelve to fourteen hours to shoot to about nine, if I was lucky. Seventy-five percent of what you see was shot in one or two takes. The movie is a little static to me; I usually like to move the camera more. But we had to shoot and move on.”

Speedway Junky will get a wide release in August, but its early festival screenings have placed it favorably on such magazine covers as The Advocate and Genre. It will be shown twice: at 4:45 p.m. Friday, June 29, and 9:15 p.m. Tuesday, July 3, before its inevitable return later in the summer.