I have added 59 pictures of Chace at the DIRECTV’s 4th Annual Celebrity Beach Bowl yesterday, February 6th, 2010 in Miami Beach, Florida and I added a new still from Chace’s movie Twelve!

PARK CITY, UTAH—On the evening of Friday, Jan. 29, Curtis Jackson—better known as the rapper 50 Cent—was milling about the red carpet before the premiere of Twelve, director Joel Schumacher’s adaptation of the 2002 novel of the same name, which wunderkind New York author Nick McDonell penned when he was 17.

It was Mr. Jackson’s third time at Sundance, but his first starring in a closing night film.

“Speedy turnaround, right?” he said.

In Twelve, which sold to Hanover House last week for $2 million, Mr. Jackson portrays a Harlem dealer named Lionel, who supplies a 17-year-old high school dropout—played, quite appropriately, by Gossip Girl’s Chace Crawford—with drugs to sell to all of his privileged former classmates on the Upper East Side. In one scene, Lionel gets killed while a young girl exchanges her virginity for a new super drug.

“I don’t mind dying in films,” said Mr. Jackson, amid an explosion of flashbulbs, “’cause you get up after they say, ‘Cut!’”

Unlike Mr. Jackson, Mr. Schumacher, who is 70, said he had never been to Sundance before, and he was proclaiming over and over that he was “the world’s oldest student filmmaker.” His hair was streaked with gray to the chin, and he was dressed in a denim shirt under a double-breasted black wool blazer, and a hemp necklace a shade lighter than his tan.

Mr. Schumacher, who grew up in Long Island, said he was drawn to the material of Twelve, which has its violent climax inside an Upper East Side palace crammed with 400 Marc Jacobs-clad teens, as soon as he read the galleys back in 2002.

“It smacked of the truth,” he said. “It’s a story where the characters are concerned more with celebrity than accomplishments. It’s really a portrait of bad parenting. It’s the same story in every high school, in every town.” (The film ends with a quote from Camus’s The Plague: “After all…there is more to celebrate in the human being than to denigrate.”)

Twelve is ranked dubiously in a critics’ poll on IndieWire. But at Friday’s premiere, John Cooper, the new programming director of Sundance, introduced the film by proclaiming that its cast was perhaps “the most beautiful in the history of the festival.”
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Twelve This teenage drug thriller, compared to Less Than Zero, was this year’s train wreck. (Last year it was The Informers and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.) Directed by Joel Schumacher, it prompted howls of unintended laughter at the press screening … so hey, why not pay $2 million for theatrical rights? That’s what Hannover House did, before it had even played to a festival audience presumably banking on the teen-friendly cast, which includes Chace Crawford, Emma Stone, 50 Cent and Kiefer Sutherland. Hannover says they’ll do a major theatrical roll-out sometime this year.
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I have added 24 pictures of Chace at the 52nd Annual GRAMMY Awards – Salute To Icons Honoring Doug Morris on January 30th, 2010!

I have added photos from the “Twelve” premiere and portraits session at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival!

Chace Crawford’s “Twelve” won’t premiere at the Sundance Film Festival until Friday afternoon (January 29), but the movie has already been snatched up for distribution for a cool $2 million by Hannover House, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

That quick transaction might have more than a little something to do with the talents and public profile of the “Gossip Girl” star, who gets his first chance to take on a gritty, mature role in “Twelve.” Based on a novel by Nick McDonell, the indie flick has Crawford playing White Mike, a teenage dropout whose mother has just died and who is selling drugs to his ex-classmates on the gleaming streets of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. In a conversation earlier this week at Sundance, director Joel Schumacher explained to MTV News why the young actor was perfect for the part.

“Chace is very intelligent, comes from a really fine family,” he said. “There’s an old soul in him somewhere. He could play the grieving really well. There are a few scenes of anger. He was just right for the part, and the camera loves him. He does a lot with very little, and that’s the essence of a good actor.”

Schumacher certainly knows how to pick ‘em. Going back to ’80s films like “The Lost Boys” and “St. Elmo’s Fire,” the director has worked with a string of young actors who became Hollywood stars, like Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson and Kiefer Sutherland.

The movie also stars Sutherland, Emma Roberts, Rory Culkin, Ellen Barkin and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson — who plays vicious drug dealer Lionel. Schumacher said filming on location with 50 and Crawford proved difficult.

“Trying to shoot a scene on the streets of Manhattan with Chace Crawford and Curtis Jackson — when all the schools let out around 3 o’clock and you’re trying to do an intimate scene with two people and there are 300 kids screaming — was a challenge,” he said. “But I have to say Chace and 50 were great with the kids. They were really fantastic. But I have to say, some of those private school teenage girls — pretty aggressive there.”

Source: MTV.com

Gossip Girl’s Chace Crawford has a new woman in his life — model Jennifer Akerman. Chace and Jennifer, who is the sister of Couples Retreat star Malin Akerman, were seen getting cozy at a Hollywood house party on January 15. “They’ve known each other for a while, but now it looks like they’re dating,” a friend reveals. While it’s not serious yet, the pair is enjoying each other’s company. “Jennifer is adorable and exactly his type,” says the friend. He has been happily living the single life since breaking up with country singer Carrie Underwood via a text message in 2008. “I’m 24 in New York City, so I’m not exactly coming home every night plucking the violin strings,” Chace recently said. After attending a Golden Globes celebration, Chace moved on to the house party where he focused his attention on Jennifer, a sexy blond model.

Source: In Touch Weekly

Joel Shumacher, the man who famously put nipples on the Dark Knight’s costume in “Batman Forever,” isn’t known as a lion of the independent cinema. Still the director of “The Client” and “A Time to Kill” insists that he’s always had a penchant for mixing in low-budget personal projects like “Tigerland” with more mainstream fare.

“Twelve,” the story of a high-school dropout (”Gossip Girl”s’ Chace Crawford) who peddles designer drugs to spoiled Upper East Side teens is very much a passion project. Based on a novel by Nick McDonell, penned when he was just 17, it also involves a brutal murder, a false arrest and a lot of strung-out kids.

The movie, which stars newcomers like Crawford and more established actors like Kiefer Sutherland and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, has been tapped to be the closing night film at this year’s festival.

Schumacher, a Park City newbie, talked with TheWrap about branching into independent cinema at an age when many of his contemporaries are thinking about retirement.

How did you become interested in “Twelve”?
I was in the Taorimina Film Festival getting ready to premiere “Phone Booth,” when my agent at CAA sent me the galleys to Nick’s book. I tried to get the rights, but someone had already bought them and they didn’t want me for the project. So it came out, was a huge sensation and bestseller and time passes.

Nobody, though was able to get it made until [producer] Charlie Corwin got his hands on it and offered me the job. Can’t say it came back to me, because I never had it to begin with, but I always wanted it. Through various incarnations it strayed very, very far from the book. We threw that all out and just pasted Nick’s novel back in.

Is this your first time at Sundance?
Yes, I’ve never been here before. I’m the oldest living student filmmaker. I’ve made some low-budget films before like “Tigerland” and “Phone Booth,” but they were always backed by studios. I started off as a $200 a week costume designer and worked my way up into directing. So I really came through the studio system.

It’s really a thrill for me to be at Sundance at this point in my career. It feels like I’m expanding and not shrinking. I’m not just sitting around Hollywood trying to make a buck.

Has the independent filmmaking been a big adjustment?
There’s always been a misconception about my career, because I’ve been fortunate enough to have some really successful films. I think when “Car Wash” and “St. Elmo’s Fire” hit the zeitgeist there was this tendency to think of them as huge Hollywood films. That’s not true. I’m not a maverick independent director, but we made those movies on the outer edges of the system. The studios didn’t know what we were doing.

People see the [John] Grisham movies and the Batman movies and they think I only do blockbusters, but I made “Phone Booth” in 12 days with an unknown Irish actor — Colin Farrell — so I had pretty good preparation for doing a movie like “Twelve” when we only had 23 days to shoot the whole thing.
Read more here!

And check out this clip from the movie!