Reporter's Notebook: St. Redford's Brat Pack?

Chace Crawford, Emma Roberts and more bright young things team up for Joel Schumacher's latest

By Josh Grossberg Jan 31, 2010 2:15 AMTags

Chace Crawford, Emma Roberts, Rory Culkin, Zoë Kravitz and...50 Cent? Is the world ready for Brat Pack 2.0?

St. Elmo's Fire director Joel Schumacher is no slouch in the starmaking department. With his Sundance-closing Twelve, he returns to the type of young adult-oriented fare for which he's best known. The high-society teen melodrama brings together a new batch of young rising actors bound to make a big impact on the big screen.

First and foremost is Crawford. The Gossip Girl stud plays White Mike, a brainy kid who opts out of Harvard to deal pot and a designer drug called Twelve to the privileged narcissistic teens who inhabit Manhattan's tony Upper East Side.

Crawford, who knows a little something about wayward youth, filled us in on collaborating with the guy who created The Lost Boys (as well as giving us a preview of this spring's new Gossip Girl episodes—more on that in the video above).

For her part, Roberts said she was thrilled to be working with Schumacher, who directed her aunt Julia in the 1990 thriller Flatliners.

And then there's Rory, brother of Macaulay, who's been quietly racking up a string of rock-solid performances in movies like Signs and Igby Goes Down.

"This is really a movie about bad parenting," Schumacher tells E! News. "These kids may be rich and somewhat glamorous, but this is the same story in every high school and town and in every family that parents don't want to look at—and they're sort of nice to look at."

That includes a number of hottie newcomers like Emily Meade, Esti Ginzburg, Billy Magnussen and Cody Horn, some of whom are appearing in movies for the first time. (As for 50 Cent, he plays one of the film's resident drug dealers, natch.)

With the exception of Roberts, who plays the good girl, as Schumacher puts it, Twelve is all about "beautiful people doing bad things."

And despite the mixed response it garnered after Thursday night's premiere (someone hurled a water bottle at the screen), with its Less Than Zero-style portrayal of debauched teens, it's a flick that will no doubt appeal to the CW set.

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Check out all the stars beefing up their indie credentials this year in our Sundance 2010: Star Sightings gallery.