Vince Chase and Teenage Paparazzo Come to BU

By Chree Izzo and Ali Carter.

Vince Chase and his entourage pulled up in a shiny black Suburban Thursday, Sept. 23 for a special screening of his new movie, welcomed by flashing cameras and fans screaming his name.

Except his name isn’t Vince Chase. It’s Adrian Grenier. And the screening wasn’t a big-time Hollywood film premiere. It was an event for college students at Boston University’s Photonics Center. But when the celebrity world collides with everyday reality, why not get caught up in the fantasy?

That’s one question Grenier ponders in his second full-length feature Teenage Paparazzo, a documentary about a precocious 14-year-old paparazzo who spends his days (and many late nights) tailing celebrities through the streets of Hollywood, incessantly snapping away with his high-tech camera to get the perfect shot. Through Austin’s story, Greinier explores celebrity culture, the media that relentlessly feeds it, and the sometimes disturbing effect it has on our society.

BU’s College of Communication and HBO Documentary Films co-hosted the event, which included a reception and the screening of the film, followed by a Q&A with Grenier. Grenier’s presence was a high-selling point for students to attend the screening, with more than 200 people attending, even resorting to sit on the floor to catch a glimpse of the Entourage star.

“We knew this event would be a big draw,” stated Lauren Glaser, COM’s External Programs Coordinator, who worked closely with HBO in planning the event. “It sold out within the first day we started to promote it.”

So how exactly did COM finagle getting a star like Grenier to come to BU? Apparently, it’s all thanks to Jay Roewe, the Senior Vice President of HBO and a BU alum (COM ’79).

BU pulled out all the stops for the event, and attendees received the celebrity treatment at the reception. BU’s Catering on the Charles provided a menu of four-cheese tortellini, rigatoni with bolognese, a gourmet burger station, crudités, cheese platters, and other hors d’oeuvres- definitely a step-up from dining hall fare. To wash it all down: a decently stocked bar for the 21-plus crowd.

We spotted HBO photographer Mike Casey snapping photos at the reception and asked why he thought HBO brought Teenage Paparazzo to BU rather than a more traditional screening. “It’s young. You guys are relevant to what’s happening to this kid on screen,” Casey stated. “It’s the age of celebrity, the age of communication.”

After the reception, the crowd filed into the screening room. Thomas Fiedler, the Dean of COM, opened the event and then offered the stage to Charles Merzbacher, Associate Professor of Film. Merzbacher welcomed Grenier and introduced the film, yet another piece of cultural commentary on the media’s obsession with celebrity.

Grenier knows a thing or two about celebrity, not only being one but playing one as well: Grenier plays Vince Chase, an A-list actor on the popular HBO series Entourage. And, being a celebrity, he’s no stranger to the paparazzi, the special breed of celebrity photographers who document every move of the rich and famous, by almost any means necessary. It’s pretty common these days to see paparazzi hiding out in trees, stalking outside private homes, chasing celebrities down the street, all for a simple picture.

What’s not so common is a professional paparazzi who’s still going through puberty. Meet the subject of Teenage Paparazzo: Austin Visschedyk, a professional paparazzi stuffed in the body of a 14-year-old skater boy. Rosy-cheeked, baby-faced, with a mop of blond Bieber hair and an array of Pac Sun hoodies, Austin looks like any other kid bopping around the streets of LA. But he’s not just any other kid. While most children his age are in school, home-schooled Austin is running around town trying to get a shot of Cameron Diaz, waiting outside Paris Hilton’s house, and getting his toes crushed by other zealous paps as they crowd around Brooke Shields on a red carpet. Selling his pictures of everyone from Lindsay to Paris to even Grenier himself to gossip magazines earns Austin $500-$1,000 per picture. “Sure as hell beats selling lemonade,” Grenier states.

Grenier lucked out finding Austin, who is fast-talking, self-assured, potty-mouthed, and much too smart for his own good. He’s an immensely interesting and engaging subject, at one moment jaded from experience, the next naively hopeful. He embodies society’s obsession with celebrity culture, with knowing where celebrities are going, what they’re saying, doing, where they’re doing it and who they’re doing it with. Austin wants to be part of the culture, wants to be famous, even goes so far as telling people he’s best friends with Paris Hilton because he’s taken a few photos of her.

Through Austin’s access to the paparazzi, Grenier decides to turn his camera on the paps to make sense of the crazy world known as celebrity. Yet, Grenier doesn’t seem to come to any conclusion about society’s obsession with celebrity, and the film is left feeling open-ended because of it. Grenier gets interviews from a number of celebrities, like Hilton, Matt Damon, Eva Longoria, and the Entourage cast, and from some professional paparazzi, like veteran pap Steve Sands, to get both sides’ perspective on the paparazzi and their antics. Mostly, the actors complain that the paps invade their privacy and make them feel objectified, but it’s Hilton (in a rare moment of wisdom) who admits, “I make a living off them photographing me. Being in Hollywood, you need them.” It’s a vicious cycle: celebrities need the paps to take their picture to make them famous, and the more famous they become, the more the paps want to take their picture.

And the more famous you are, the easier it is to get financial backing from a high-profile distributor like HBO. It’s a cinch to get behind-the-scenes access to the world of celebrity when you yourself are a celebrity. Despite such access, Grenier’s frothy, bubbly doc, though entertaining, doesn’t pack much punch.

Grenier seems to put too much on his plate- not only telling Austin’s story, commenting on celebrity culture and paparazzi, adding his own personal inflections, but also exploring our dependence on technology and social networking sites and yada yada yada.  He interviews psychologists, academics and professors, which adds credibility to the film but also bogs it down because of Grenier’s lack of direction. It’s all a bit too much for one documentary to tackle, especially such a light-hearted one as this.

Teenage Paparazzo is lively and fun, but when it deviates from documenting Austin, it loses steam: B-

The credits rolled, fittingly, to Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi,” and Grenier returned to the stage for the Q&A. Prof. Merzbacher asked some of his own questions about Grenier’s filmmaking techniques, then passed the mic to audience members. Questions ranged from the silly to the serious, and even the surprising.

One bold BU student asked Grenier if he would take a look at a film script he wrote, which he conveniently had on-hand and pre-packaged. The student passed the script through the audience up to Grenier on-stage to much laughter. Some zealous Red Sox fans in the audience ribbed Grenier, who grew up in New York, for giving Austin a Yankees’ baseball cap in the film. There were also the obligatory questions about Entourage and its current season from fans of the HBO series.

However, there were some surprisingly deeper, more pertinent questions from the audience. When asked what impression he wanted to leave with audiences, Grenier responded, “My goal was not to say, ‘celebrity good, paparazzi bad.'” Instead, Grenier said he “wanted to make a movie that got people excited and made them feel their power,” as opposed to the feelings of disempowerment he said that he gets from watching what he calls “mission docs,” citing Film, Inc. and Michael Moore’s documentaries.

Grenier concluded the Q&A with an “experiment,” in which he asked the audience to pull a paparazzi and take a picture of him on stage, then of themselves, and send the photos to the film’s website to be stitched together in a panoramic photo. And as the event ended, the night’s finale revealed the biggest irony of all: as the lights came up, a wave of students rushed the stage, braving police security, pushing and shoving their way to get a picture with Vince Chase, er, Adrian Grenier.

Teenage Paparazzo is airing on HBO. Check hbo.com/schedule for TV listings.