In keeping with the film's aura of all-too-gritty authenticity, Leo Fitzpatrick had no professional acting experience when he was cast as one of the leads in Larry Clark's controversial first feature Kids (1995). One of the New York teens who hung out in the same downtown "skater" milieu as Kids screenwriter Harmony Korine, Fitzpatrick was recruited to play Telly, the self-professed "Virgin Surgeon" and unknowing AIDS carrier. With his callow looks, foul mouth, and hardened self-confidence, Fitzpatrick's Telly was the ultimate adolescent nightmare; or, in Clark and Korine's view, simply a sign of the 1990s times. Critics split over whether the unrated Kids was a fiction-verit