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May 04, 2006
'Fifty Pills': Pucci, Bell and Youth Appeal to Spare
"It's strange," said Theo Avgerinos, the 27-year-old director of the Tribeca comedy Fifty Pills. "It was Feb. 28. We had a distribution screening set up in L.A. to go straight to distributors for the film. We had also sent it to Tribeca. So the timing kind of merges. The screening was set up for Tuesday, but on Monday morning I get a phone call saying, 'We're going to forward you an e-mail you pretty soon; you're going to the Tribeca Film Festival.' I was like, 'What?'
"So we yanked the entire distribution screening, of course, to open the film here," he continued. "And instead of having a screening and wrap party afterward, it just became a celebration party for getting into Tribeca. Some of the most fun parts are being back on the very streets where we shot."
Indeed, Fifty Pills (which screens tonight at 11:45 and Saturday at 1 p.m) is all over New York, mostly around the NYU area as college freshman Darren (Lou Taylor Pucci) faces expulsion for egregioulsy decadent parties he and and his roommate (John Hensley) host in their dorm room. For what it is worth to him, Darren stays enrolled but loses his financial aid; his drug-dealing roommate proposes he can sell 50 of his ecstasy pills to make up what he owes the university. Along the way, Darren finds a love interest (Kristen Bell), a succession of quirky clients (a dual-personality dominatrix, a Diff'rent Strokes obsessive) and a pair of formidable drug-trade foes (including a deliciously scenery-chewing Michael Peña).
As comedies go, Matthew Perniciaro's script leaves a little to be desired; it lurches heavily in the territory between raunchy teen films and wrong-man comedies like After Hours. But as young casts go, Fifty Pills offers a group that viewers are likely to see onscreen for years. Bell's popular TV sleuth Veronica Mars has almost made her a household name among teenagers, while Peña, Hensley, Eddie Kaye Thomas (who is in three--count them--Tribeca films) and Brick's Nora Zehetner all elevate the material to something better than what it is. And Pucci is typically strong, following his triumph as the New York-bound student of Thumbsucker as the New York-arrived student of Avgerinos's film. In narrative terms, the movies connect almost seamlessly; in structural terms, not so much.
"I've never been in a movie that was purposely funny--that was a real comedy," Pucci told The Reeler during a chat last week at Tribeca Cinemas. "I really wanted to do that whether I was going to be playing the straight man or the comedian or what. I wanted to do something new. I just kind of felt like the beginning of a career in acting is kind of like a big movie. You kind of have to show all the different tones that your going to use in a move in the beginning so that they're not surprised in the middle. I want to try all these different things to begin with so I can kind of go anywhere."
As least in literal terms, Pucci plans a trip to Cannes, where his two latest films--Southland Tales and Fast Food Nation--are featured as premieres. NYC native Avgerinos, meanwhile, is headed back to Los Angeles as Fifty Pills plays the distribution field. He told me he has another project in the works for this summer, but added that shooting in New York was an experience he hoped to repeat.
"The mayor's office was unbelievably supportive from the beginning," he told me. "It was one of the great incentives for us to do the films and use New York, because they say, 'Sure. Grab a block. Grab ten blocks. It's yours. Shoot. Take the permits.' By having that flexibility, we could kind of run around. And being back in Washington Square Park and in some of these places where I've shot before, I just kind of felt we're back doing a bigger version of an old student film--with a much bigger premise and concept. ... At the end of the day, you could put the camera anywhere in the city and you could get a great photograph."
Posted by stvanairsdale at May 4, 2006 12:12 PM
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