Aaron Gillespie Will Make You a Star

By EMANUEL LEVY

A Maga production. Produced by Stefano Gallini. Directed, edited by Massimo Mazzucco. Screenplay, Mazzucco, Michael Capellupo , Scott Trost, based on the play by Capellupo and Trost.

The future looks bleak for the U.S. feature debut of Italian director Massimo Mazzucco, as "Aaron Gillespie Will Make You a Star" is an irritating, not very funny dark comedy about acting schools in Hollywood. Marred by frequent changes in tone, this rambling pic is not likely to entertain any segment of the audience, least of all acting coaches and their aspiring students.

Based on Michael Capellupo and Scott Trost's play, which was staged at the Playhouse West acting school, film revolves around Aaron Gillespie (Trost), who promotes himself as "the Buddha of Buddhas" but is basically a sadistic teacher who takes pride and derives abnormal gratification from torturing his innocent students, emotionally as well as physically.

Headed by a naive small-town boy (played by Scott Caan, son of James Caan), the ambitious group is diverse enough to include a young single mom (Holly Gagnier), a punk girl (Christine Cavanaugh, who provided Babe's voice), a handsome macho surfer who suffers from having a small penis (Mark Pellegrino) and a fat boy (Eric Edwards) who becomes the target of the fiendish teacher and eventually the catalyst for a "rebellion" against the coach.

Meant to be a wild satire that dissects inflated aspirations for stardom and exploitative acting coaches who take advantage of gullible would-be actors while using Stanislavski and Method acting, "Aaron Gillespie" is a verbose psychodrama that veers abruptly from black humor to sentimental melodrama to sheer pathos. Unfortunately, a good deal of the humor is based on the students' physical attributes, such as the size of their bodies and genitals.

Confined to a single set, with some excursions outdoors in a futile effort to open up what is still fundamentally a stage production, "Aaron Gillespie" is claustrophobic to the point of suffocating not only its actors but its audiences. It may be intentional on the part of the filmmakers, but most of the thesps, particularly Trost, severely overact, making the experience more intense and less pleasant than it should be.

Camera (color), Charles Rose; music, Andrea Centazzo; production design, Gustave Alsina; sound, Lawrence Fried. Reviewed at Montreal World Film Festival, Aug. 26, l996. Running time: 94 MIN.

With: Scott Caan, Holly Gagnier, Scott Trust, Eric Edwards, Christine Cavanaugh, Mark Pellegrino.

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