Scooter Braun, the stubble-cheeked 29-year-old who serves officially as Justin Bieber's manager and sometimes unofficially as the baby sitter of his legions of young admirers, was having trouble getting them to behave.
Standing in front of a theater packed with tween- and teenage girls in Times Square, Braun was attempting to cajole or threaten them to take their seats promptly. If they did not, he warned, the evening's preview screening of "Justin Bieber: Never Say Never," a 3-D concert documentary, would not begin, and the floppy-haired 16-year-old pop-music sensation of its title would not join them in the theater.
"If you spend the entire movie turned around staring at Justin, he's going to get really weirded out," Braun said. "I promise if you watch the screen, you're going to see him a lot."
Bieber, who according to Nielsen Soundscan has sold more than 4.5 million copies of his albums "My World," "My World 2.0" and "My Worlds Acoustic," and more than 10 million digitally downloaded singles, did finally make a brief appearance before the film. Dressed in black designer clothes and a purple bow tie, he shouted a quick "Wassup?" to the stunned, squealing masses and said, "I just want this movie to, um - to start."
True to Braun's promise, Bieber was visible throughout the night, in on-screen incarnations that were sometimes as revealing as the differing versions of him that showed up at the movie theater.
In "Never Say Never," which is directed by Jon M. Chu and will be released by Paramount today , Bieber is shown during his recent U.S. tour singing innocuous hits like "Baby" and "One Less Lonely Girl" in 3-D performances as he seems to extend his hand directly to you or your daughter.
The home movies, documentary footage and YouTube clips that make up the rest of the film reveal more intimate facets of Bieber: the infant raised by a teenage mother in Stratford, Ontario; the 5- or 6-year-old whose innate sense of percussion is revealed by the Christmas gift of a bongo drum; the 12-year-old commanding sizable crowds as he busks around town with a guitar and a yearning little boy's voice; and a 16-year-old traveling the U.S. at the center of an entourage of grown-ups.
At a recent red-carpet event held in a narrow cinema hallway, Bieber was exhibiting the same kind of preternatural poise he would show throughout the week on comedy programs like "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" and "Saturday Night Live." Facing a firing squad of paparazzi, he stared down the cameras one by one, shaking out his famous coif and blinking his eyes in rapid, robotic succession.
Chu, 31 and a director of the "Step Up" dance movie franchise, described his first meeting with the subject of "Never Say Never," which occurred during Bieber's summer tour.
"Justin doesn't have any idea who I was," Chu said. "So I walk in; I'm like, `Hey, I'm making your movie.' And he's like, `What movie?'"
Bieber offered a slightly different account.
"I knew they were making a movie about me," he said. "I just didn't know who was doing it or what it was all about."
"Justin Bieber: Never Say Never"
Genre: Documentary
Running Time: 105 min
MPAA rating: G
Release Date: Feb 11, 2011
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