NewEnglandFilm.com

As I talk with David Giancola of Edgewood Studios, his Hollywood sense of promotion surfaces as he frequently inserts the title of his soon-to-be-released documentary, Addicted To Fame, into our conversation. The film shows the behind the scenes of his film Illegal Aliens, executive produced by the actor John James, starring Anna Nicole Smith, and Joanie Chyna Laurer. Giancola’s voice is immediately welcoming, open, and down-to-earth. Along with the fire of a still-in-the-game filmmaker, I hear the laid-back dad who calmly greets his eleven-year old daughter when she returns home, and who has to pause to take a call from his hockey-playing son. I can overhear Dad, sounding more like a house-husband than a busy filmmaker, ask if pizza’s okay for supper. David Giancola, film director, father and husband, seems to have it all, including: a career where names like “Deniro” and “Norman Lear” have shared dinners along with insights and anecdotes with him, a wife (who loathes the film business but understands her husband’s need for it), two children, one athletic and one creative, and two dogs. One is a black lab, the other a golden retriever. David Giancola’s life is, in fact, a study in dichotomies, one that has led him on a unique path to discovery his new documentary Addicted To Fame in a highly unusual way.

Comfortable with Hollywood glitz, Giancola lives almost as far in mileage and in sensibility as one can be from L.A. Even this mid-November release, Addicted To Fame, is the opposite of what the project started out to be. The film he set out to make and that is now on hold, Illegal Aliens, is a fun take-off on the Charlie’s Angels genre. Addicted To Fame— revealing, among other things, Anna Nicole Smith’s behavior just prior to her death — ultimately shows something more serious and reveals a much darker side of humanity.

Addicted To Fame was shot with a full time three-man camera crew, initially put in place to “cover our asses” as Giancola tells it. With the erratic behavior of Anna Nicole Smith resulting in havoc behind the scenes, everyone signed off on the idea of the possibility of getting a reality show out of the footage, in case Illegal Aliens never reached completion. Even Smith, whose television show in 2005 originated the reality show concept, agreed to it.

Ironically, though typical of the dual-sidedness of Giancola’s world, he finds many aspects of reality television disgusting — don’t get him started on Jersey Shore — unless the viewer is gleaning useful information such as HGTV offers. His reality show, if it was ever to be pulled out of the can, was to be a lighthearted look at an aspect of the film business — just as Illegal Aliens was — with Addicted To Fame (originally titled Craptastic) aiming for a humorous look — albeit frustratingly funny — at the trials and tribulations of dealing with a “star” in the biz. Even with all of Anna’s trials, Illegal Aliens did manage to wrap but quickly became anything but funny when she overdosed just as the film was premiering.

Suddenly, the very exploitation that filmmaker Giancola despises, he was being accused of. Timing, as they say, is everything. The man who has such disdain for most ”loosely scripted” so-called “reality” television shows found himself accused of capitalizing on Smith’s death. Stunned by how he was perceived and characterized by the press, and also dealing with the passing away of his lead actress, Giancola retreated from filmmaking for a year. In ways, Giancola was already in retreat.

Giancola is a filmmaker living in Rutland, VT, which is not exactly Tinsel Town. He appears remarkably principled for someone who’s been on the slippery slope called the film business for over twenty years and is promoting a film involving one of the media’s most exploited subjects. Foregoing college, he watched his artsy friends go off to schools like Emerson College where, he says, “They weren’t able to hold a camera until their sophomore year.” He’d grabbed camera in high school; he was admittedly the video geek who knew how to run the projector when others didn’t. A child of the seventies, influenced by the big-blockbuster-mentality era of Lucas, and Spielberg, he wasn’t about to backtrack, so he set off to start filming in the world, immediately. (He also concedes, his choice left gaps he had to learn on his own.) Though his aim was for an academy award in ten years, weddings, legal depositions and even an occasional funeral provided his first paid filmmaking gigs. One day a client refused to give him his full payment because, despite shooting the bride, the groom and all the usual memory-filled moments of a wedding, he’d failed to photograph the expensive hors d’oeuvres before they were eaten. That was the day he decided he was done with weddings.

Giancola had grown up in Rutland with family roots there, so Rutland seemed the logical place to start a film studio. Really? When Nutri-Systems vacated a fair-sized building in l987, Edgewood Studios was born. He’s been making documentaries, industrials, made-for TV-movies and films ever since, and he’s won awards along the way, initially with a series of partners (mostly for the business side of things). Now he’s flying solo again as Founder and President of Edgewood Studios, located in the historic Hunt Center. Asked how he figured back then that he could be discovered or even just get work from Rutland, VT, he said, “We were young and crazy. You sold yourself as the thing they needed you to be. You went, sent reels, and did whatever you could.”

Eventually, that New England perseverance paid off in Hollywood — where he often traveled for work — when in the early nineties he was given an 8 movie contract for one million a film — to be completed in 2 ½ years. “DVDs were just taking off and everyone wanted “product” fast.” His first million dollar film, Time Chasers, has a cult following, and he mentions, devoid of ego, that people either think it’s great or crap. The next movie in the multi-million deal, Icebreaker, starred Sean Aston, Bruce Campbell and Stacy Keach. Half way through his contract the business imploded, caught up in credit defaults, and Giancola was on his own again.

Giancola has no regrets. He and Edgewood productions now have scores of industrials, low budget films and high profile television work to their credit. And he’s managed to maintain his career and please the wife who keeps him grounded, while raising his children away from the often-unreal existence of LA and instead, in the small New England town he grew up in. His dichotomous life has now led him to the premier of Addicted To Fame; a film that one might approach thinking of as another piece of Hollywood exploitation, but from Giancola’s explanation, is actually “a warning parable of how things go wrong in society and the dangers of celebrity.” As I hear him tell it in his earnest but low-key style, I believe him. Giancola learned about such dangers first hand when he experienced the loss of objectivity and the “spin” on the truth the media put forth in the days and weeks after Anna Nicole Smith’s death. His own words were manipulated to mean something other than what he intended. Now, four years later, I can still hear the disbelief and resentment in Giancola’s telling of how his words were twisted. Giancola sounds sincerely troubled, (perhaps colored with a twinge of guilt, though he says otherwise), as he admits what he claims was negligence on his part when talking to the press during the making of Illegal Aliens. At the time he opted not to divulge the full truth of Anna Nicole’s involvement with drugs. I hear the concerned father in Giancola when he tells me he feels Addicted To Fame is his opportunity to shed light on what he observes to be a devastatingly harmful direction in society — our worship of celebrity. He sees Addicted To Fame as his chance to be honest. This time he wants to tell the truth. He is, also, once again, hoping for another success while the rural existence he has created for himself and his family, remains in tact.

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