It's hard to get 16- and 18-year-olds to take you seriously when you're trying to talk about what they plan to do with their lives.

Unless, perhaps, you're a hip-hop mogul or a movie maker.

So a group called New Yorkers for Children: Network to Success assembled 18 music and movie heavyweights at N.Y.U.'s Kimmel Center last night to give 100 high school and college aged foster children a sense of the career possibilities before them.

When the event began, audience members seemed more interested in doodling on their notebooks, checking text messages, and whispering jokes to friends than listening to a bunch of adults.

Even if those adults included Academy Award-winning screenwriter Bill Goldman, music-video director Hype Williams, actress/model Joy Bryant, NBC producer Meryl Poster, and Leslee Dart, C.E.O. of the movie marketing firm 42 West.

But the party was underway when the panel of media power players took turns reflecting on how they saw the future when they were 16 — and how they got to be where they are today.

"If you want something bad enough, you'll get it," MTV News anchor Tim Kash said, before adding: "I thought you could use entertainment to get girls, and it works."

Roughly 17,000 children live in foster care in New York City, New Yorkers for Children estimates. New York City Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta, who founded the group, knows what it's like: he grew up in a foster home from the age of five.

"A lot of successful people in New York were in foster care, some of them don't like to admit it. I call it 'staying in the closet,'" he said. "We're here to show these kids, you can turn around a lousy start."

David Koepp, the screenwriter of Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, and the new installment of Indiana Jones series, told the audience last night that the secret to beating the odds was persistence.

Koepp said he was driven to keep writing scripts because he believed that "eventually everyone else trying to write a screenplay would drop out."

Violator Records C.E.O. Chris Lighty, who launched the careers of 50 Cent and Missy Elliot, echoed this sentiment. "Persistence overcomes resistance," he said.

"I was doing what you guys are doing now: Trying not to get stabbed and killed," said Lighty, who grew up in the Bronx. "It was a really hard time growing up in the Reagan Era, like it's hard for you now growing up in the Bush Era."

It can also be hard, of course, to address star-struck teenagers.

Alex Orlovsky, producer of the independent hit movie Half Nelson, drew blank stares when he described what he does for a living, though he took it in stride.

"They all want to be actors and singers," he shrugged. "They don't want to be producers."

by Andrea Chalupa