"We had one teacher in art school who we thought of as omnisexual — he hit on every student at some point. We were unaware of this until we compared notes and saw that he was preying on the innocent. He was always trying to get you to come by the office, and it was very baffling, because he had no interest in our work at all! A lot of professors are these 45- to 50-year-old guys, and that's their way to pick up boys or girls or whatever they're interested in." — Daniel Clowes, screenwriter for Art School Confidential.

"When I read the script, I said, 'Dan, everybody seems gay in the whole film. This is only going to play at the gay and lesbian film festival.' He said, 'That's art school, that's the truth of the situation.'" — Terry Zwigoff, director of Art School Confidential.

Terry Zwigoff/Daniel Clowes' satire opens with Jerome Platz (Max Minghella) being pummeled in the face by a schoolyard bully. Believing he will find soulmates at art school, Jerome is dismayed to discover that the sadism of his childhood has been turned up a notch, as neurotic fellow students criticize his work in a manner quite a bit less friendly than a good right to the jaw. Jerome learns to play the game, inventing pseudo art-speak to market his muse.

John Malkovich is at the top of his game as a self-absorbed teacher who attempts to seduce the erotically oblivious Jerome, and Jim Broadbent is grimly funny as a self-hating, failed artist. Young Minghella (previously seen as the cult-obsessed kid in Bee Season ) shifts between dewy-eyed innocence and suicidal despair. Minghella's countenance, itself a work of art, is framed by sexy, thick eyebrows, a facial landmark that rivals Groucho's mustache. This sublime bit of Sensitive Guy Cinema comes from San Francisco's Zwigoff in cahoots with comic-book artist Clowes. Their Ghost World, adapted from Clowes' graphic novel, garnered a best screenplay Oscar nomination.

Based on a few panels in Clowes' Eightball comic book series, the film starts off as a send-up of the neurotic foibles of the young and restless, presenting a more sharply focused parallel universe to the art-school meltdown depicted in the last few seasons of Six Feet Under. Art School Confidential climaxes as a darker look at artistic obsession and the pitfalls of keeping your eye a little too tightly focused on the prize.

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Clowes admits part of the humor comes from recalling his own art-school days, when he learned that an ability to hype your work often trumped real artistic talent. "I've never been a very articulate person, nor have I ever been a very good salesman. And we had guys in art school who were only that, and who were so well-spoken and so clever. They'd walk into the classroom and start talking about something, you know, they had

n't even shown you yet, but you're so built up with anticipation that when you finally see it, it was just so baffling. 'Could this really be what they're talking about?' Really sort of like advertising more than art."

He describes the out-of-body experience of helping cast the young actor who would in essence play his own younger self, Max Minghella, son of English Patient director Anthony Minghella.

"You hear those Hollywood stories: 'We looked at 200 actors before we settled on Max,' and that was literally true. When I saw Max, he had this innocence about him." Minghella also possessed an unsettling ability to deliver his lines in a totally believable American accent. "When we first auditioned him, he did the whole thing in an American accent, including talking to us, and we had no idea that he was British. We said, 'Where do you live?' 'London.' 'How do you really talk?' Then he went into his British accent, and it was absolutely uncanny. That kind of won us over, too. 'If he's that good an actor that he fooled us, that's a good sign.'"

Clowes admits that though he's a heavyweight in the comic book genre, he never expected the credential would provide him with a portal to the film world. "I was always a fan of movies, but it seemed an impossible field to enter. When I met Terry, sort of by pure luck, I was able to write the script to Ghost World and get dragged into this thing, and found it really compelling." Art School Confidential started as "just 30 panels of funny things that happened to me in art school."

In his first two films, Clowes has refined a technique that might be called the anti-cute meet. In Ghost World, Thora Birch has tricked Steve Buscemi by answering a sex ad, then failing to show up. Their resulting relationship becomes unacknowledged reparations. "She goes to his garage sale after playing that mean trick, with the intent of apologizing in some way. She feels so terrible for what she's done, and the whole relationship arises out of her sympathy for him at first. Then she imagines he'll actually be a cool person, and they become friends."

Clowes and Zwigoff have a flawless ability to cast actors against type, like the nerdy, depressed young convenience-store clerk played by Brad Renfro in Ghost World. Previously, Renfro had appeared as a surly young drifter in Larry Clark's Bully who joins a pack of kids to kill a former friend.

"He could not have been less like the character. He's really a rough-and-tough redneck, and the most swaggeringly confident kid I'd ever met in my life. He just walked right into the room, every eye is on him, he just had a certain something. The character was supposed to be sort of a version of myself, he's suppose to be much more shy and bookwormish, kind of blend into the wallpaper, yet somehow he was the right guy for it. It was surely acting on his part."

Buscemi turns in a career performance in Ghost World, a performance Clowes notes is drawn from an archetypal character he created for his comic books. "I was getting letters to my comic book from people saying, 'There's this actor who looks like you created him.' And it was Steve. He just has this kind of bug-eyed, sweating, nervous look, and that's sort of my trademark. The minute we started writing Ghost World and developing it, Terry and I were both fixated that it had to be Steve."

There are two brilliant scenes in Ghost World that give Buscemi a chance to strut his peculiar anti-charisma: the scene with Birch in a car where she's turned on an obnoxious DJ and he's viscerally in pain; and later, he goes to a club to see a musician, he has a drink spilled on him, and it's almost like he's had really bad sex, he's shell-shocked.

"I think what he did was he hung around Terry and watched how Terry reacted to things, and he was channeling Terry in both of those scenes, just the angry disappointment Terry radiates at all times."

Breaking the rules

Terry Zwigoff's truly accidental film career began inauspiciously when he created a little documentary in 1985, Louie Bluie, in honor of America's last black string-band. Then an odd friendship with the underground cartoonist Robert Crumb turned into a searing portrait of the Philadelphia-born artist's terminally eccentric family, Crumb.

Crumb is one of those amazing movies where, first, the filmmaker violates the old rule where all documentaries are supposed to come to a screeching halt after 80 minutes. Then he violates other polite filmmaking conventions by producing a family portrait that plays more like a horror film. In the course of two hours, Robert and his late brother Charles, a frustrated artist, reveal what on the surface appears to be a really hateful relationship, which Zwigoff says was misunderstood by critics and fans of the film, in part because of a bitter phrase that Robert repeats throughout the film: "'Oh, how perfectly, goddamn delightful it is, to be sure.' A lot of people misinterpreted that, the fact that he often laughs when Charles is pouring his heart out to him. I think that Charles was like the closest person Robert had on earth. I think he had to laugh to keep from crying."

Art School overflows with mostly unresolved sexual tension, including John Malkovich's character coming on to an oblivious Jerome. "He's got blinders on. He's very focused, his eye's on the prize, just trying to get to that object at the end however he can, whether he has to resort to plagiarism to get to it, or murder, whatever he has to do."