Not Another Teen Movie

New York's young and beautiful descended on the Landmark Sunshine Cinema last night for the premiere of Twelve, Joel Schumacher's film about the darker side of privileged Upper East Side teens. In fact, many of them are in it. The cast of Twelve, based on the best-selling novel by Nick McDonell, is teeming with twentysomething actors and kids-about-town, like Liam McMullan and Zoë Kravitz, whose names you might not expect to see on a credits crawl. They were joined at the 2(x)ist-sponsored screening by Chace Crawford and Curtis Jackson, a.k.a. 50 Cent, who both play drug dealers in the movie.

'It's a very New York film, but I think it's more just about kids who have access to a lot,' Kravitz said, adding that her social life at the Rudolf Steiner School was hardly the substance-fueled tragedy that Twelve depicts. 'I had a lovely experience. We hung out in the park and sang Sublime songs and knitted. We would buy forties of Olde English and sit on people's stoops, but that's kind of as crazy as it got.'

The underage party scene in Twelve is, to put it mildly, less low-key. With Crawford in the lead—and Blake Lively, Penn Badgley, and Jessica Szohr in last night's audience—comparisons to a certain TV show were inevitable. "Gossip Girl is more powdered, more glamorized. It's like a big cupcake," noted Crawford, who kept his Dolce & Gabbana suit on for the after-party at Le Bain. "This is a film about self-destruction." Still, according to Crawford's cast mate, Philip Ettinger, the teenage girls who'd crowded the set might not have appreciated the difference. "Joel bribed them with taking pictures with Chace, as long as they were quiet on set and didn't text all their friends."

—Darrell Hartman