Young Hollywood Takes A New Spot: Behind The Camera

With the Tribeca Film Festival still two weeks away, the Gen Art Film Festival (which kicked off last night) arrived as a sort of youth-oriented preamble. One notable thing about this year’s edition is the number of familiar names turning up in the same unfamiliar place: behind the camera. Consider it a spring coming-out party for directorial debuts. Among the debutantes: Tatiana von Furstenberg, fashion photographer Patrick Hoelck, and Adrian Grenier, whose documentary Teenage Paparazzo explores America’s obsession with celebrities.

The main event last night, which had Malin Akerman and Richie Rich walking the carpet at the Ziegfeld, wasHappythankyoumoreplease. Written and directed by first-time filmmaker Josh Radnor (pictured), star of the popular sitcom How I Met Your Mother, it’s a Manhattan ensemble dramedy starring, among others, Akerman, Kate Mara, and Zoe Kazan, who made time for last night’s premiere between performances of A Behanding in Spokane, the play she’s in alongside Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell. “Josh is really writing from an honest place. He put a lot of true stories—his stories, other people’s stories—into the background of the movie,” she explained. “It was very easy to act, because so many of those conversations I’ve actually had.” The coming week will give Radnor’s fellow first-timers a chance to show the world (or, at least, New York) whether their efforts ring as true.

—Darrell Hartman