The real reason Harmony Korine was actually banned from ‘The Late Show with David Letterman’
The filmmaker Harmony Korine once said, “I never cared so much about making perfect sense. I wanted to make perfect nonsense.” That rings true.
The enigmatic Gummo director has lived a strange and storied life, attempting to push filmmaking into a new realm along the way. As he put it himself, “After 100 years, films should be getting really complicated. The novel has been reborn about 400 times, but it’s like cinema is stuck in the birth canal.”
That has proven an easy task for Korine, and he has never tried to tackle it easily either. Evidence for this can be found in his increasingly troubled press run on The Late Show with David Letterman.
Having heard about a young writer who had risen to fame with his first script at 18, after he was simply asked to write about skaters following a chance encounter with the photographer, Larry Clark, by a half-pipe in Manhattan, the King of the Talkshow was keen to have Korine on as a guest.
Their first encounter was a charming mishmash between a cheeky young upstart and a seasoned pro. The second was a rather more surreal affair. By the third, it was self-evident that Korine had succumbed to drug addiction. The director would later admit that he was surprised he survived the period. So, a fourth booking was perhaps inadvisable from the get-go, and a mysterious banning ensured Korine never actually made it to the couch.
For years, his last-minute dismissal was the stuff of legend, then in 2013, all was revealed. On a chilly March edition of The Late Show with David Letterman, actor James Franco was promoting the new Spring Breakers film directed by Korine. Franco mentioned that the controversial director was banned from the show, prompting Letterman to bluntly explain the reasoning.
“I went upstairs [to the green room] to greet Meryl Streep,” recounted Letterman. “I looked around and found your friend, Harmony, going through her purse.” Generally speaking, that’ll get you banned.
The director never denied this claim and has been very open about the troubled days when he struggled to come to terms with fame and adulthood. But even in 2013, Franco happily clarified that Korine is “a very sane guy now” and, on his say-so, Letterman even rescinded the ban.
All the same, Spring Breakers itself proved Korine’s punky ability to polarise an audience. Starring Ashley Benson, Vanessa Hudgens, and Selena Gomez, it is a manic mess that many loved, and just as many hated, as is Karine’s typical way.
He never returned to Letterman despite the lifted banning order.