The kid is alright

You may never have encountered the name Jennifer Venditti before. You may not have heard tell of JV8, the New York based casting company she founded in 1998. But chances are, you’ve seen her influence at work.
A former fashion stylist and model for such rag trade greats as Calvin Klein and Karl Lagerfeld, Jennifer’s curiosity about the intriguing nexus between style and self-expression inspired her to become a pioneer of street-scouting, her use of mere mortals like you and I in fashion, commercials and movies is a trademark. It has seen her company become the first port of call for such photographers as Terry Richardson and the late Richard Avedon. Other clients include Vanity Fair and W Magazine and iconoclastic director Spike Jonze.
Speaking from her offices in Soho, Jennifer insists her eclectic approach is more than a marketing gimmick.
“Nobody is saying that these 6 feet tall models aren’t beautiful,” she tells me. “But it’s crazy to think that’s the only standard of beauty or the only thing that people find attractive.”
During a regular recon, while scouting a Maine High School for her friend Carter Smith's short film, Bugcrush, Ms. Venditti came across Billy Price, a hyper-articulate teenager with certain behavioural eccentricities.
“I sat in a lunchroom everyday and started noticing how all these kids always sat at the same tables with the same people,” she says. “It amazed me that it was the same old cliques I could remember from my school days. So I started asking kids why they sat where they sat and whether they ever let anyone new sit there. These tough kids told me about one time when they invited another kid to sit with them but he freaked out." I asked them who he was and they pointed to Billy who was sitting at a table all by himself. I walked over there, he opened his mouth and I was like, ‘My God, this kid is incredible! Why is the whole school not sitting over here?’"
As apt to quote Robert Frost as he was The Terminator, Billy’s charms were so persuasive that Jennifer not only cast him in Bugcrush, she made him the subject of own her award winning debut film, Billy The Kid. A classic piece of people watching in the manner of Capturing The Friedmans or Stevie, Billy The Kid has since bewitched audiences at Edinburgh and SXSW where it took the Jury Prize.
Shot in small-town Maine over eight days during the summer and winter of 2005, one of the film’s most endearing facets is as One Boy’s Love Affair with the camera. Emboldened by Jennifer’s presence, our hero, a 15 year-old outsider, visibly blooms in confidence. In what may prove a defining moment for ‘hanging-out’ verité filmmaking, Jennifer was on hand to witness Billy’s first kiss. It is, for this writer’s money, the most affecting scene of its kind this side of The Diary Of Anne Frank.
“It was a great privilege,” Jennifer rightly gushes. “But it was also typical of the way in which Billy became my co-director. He decided the movie needed a leading lady so he went out and found one. He found Heather. It’s not surprising. Billy has been the director of his own movie his whole life. It’s as if he sees his life through a cinematic lens. I just wanted to create this space for him to be himself. Then the whole Heather thing happened.”
Billy has been ‘officially’ diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome. But during the eight days Jennifer spent shooting him for the documentary, she surreptitiously contrives to ‘delabel’ the disorder and debunk our need to pigeonhole all but the dullest of people.
“I am guilty of labelling myself,” she says. “When I first met Billy I asked his teachers and peers about him because I wanted to put a name on what I was seeing. I’ve come to realise that diagnostic labelling may be useful for somebody to understand themselves but it only brings negative connotations in the wider community. That’s why I didn’t bend to pressure to include a stupid end card explaining away Asperger Syndrome. Billy should be allowed to be himself not a poster child.”
Not everybody is convinced. The film provoked a bizarre rant from John Anderson in Variety. Mr. Anderson’s fantastically dismissive notice accused Ms. Venditti of employing a ‘freak-show aesthetic’ and charged that Billy himself “functions, but not well.”
Billy, suggests Anderson, is “an awkwardly charming, though obviously disturbed, teenager, whose every tiny triumph is treated like the discovery of the genome.”
“It was so upset to read it,” admits Jennifer. “I was shaking for days afterwards. I was terrified that Billy and his mom would read it and see words like ‘freak’. I think that the review says far more about the person who wrote it than it does about Billy or myself.”
Contrary to what Mr. Anderson’s witterings imply, Jennifer speaks with what can only be genuine fondness for her muse and her marvellous, affecting film, by extension, is a testament to her sensitivity.
“Billy is like my hero,” she says. “When I was his age, I couldn’t speak my mind. I belonged to the popular group and I needed to be accepted. Any deviations from normality, any wacky inner voices were suppressed in order to belong. It’s a struggle we all face to some degree. And here's this kid who's wired in such a way, that none of those things matter.”

Billy The Kid is screening as part of the Belfast Film Festival