![]() We can harken back to the days of ancient Greece when males played all of the roles, and just let Steven Spielberg go ahead and slash his wrists. ![]() And if, indeed, the child acting profession is nothing more than a benign-looking environment for the growth of all things most foul, the theater of the cruel, we are left with two choices. Someone, however, has got to play the kid. But would Mickey Rooney be the spouse-discarding warthog he is today if the responsibility for cheering up America during WWII hadn’t depended at least a little on the irascible spirit of a 40-year-old being locked in a 15-year-old’s body? Not that the moviegoing public can be held accountable for Corey Feldman’s alleged reliance on heroin. We are the doting relatives who one or two times a year hear the scripted quips, see the irresistible mugging when the reports of drugs and nude arrests reach us, we are suitably shocked. We coax the kids into on-screen maturity and then when they’re offscreen, they’re expected to behave like adults in real life too. The children audiences love most are the ones who affect adult behavior. With all due respect to the ruinous aspects of early fame, not to mention the tyranny of ambitious and controlling parents, my guess is that it’s something else that turns the kid who once charmed our socks off into the monster that now holds up a video store with a pellet gun. Still, for all the crash-and-burn victims, there are the Jodie Fosters and Ron Howards who’ve learned to live with their pubic hair. But when his first box-office flop comes along, or when he learns that facial hair doesn’t wash off as easily as chocolate, whichever comes first, he’s gonna look for a crack pipe and go for a highspeed chase through lower Brentwood. Does tinsel really stunt your growth?Īn adjunct to the child abuse matrix is the speculation that, sure, Macaulay Culkin is the picture of youthful propriety now while he’s a big star. But having gobs of money and toys up the wazoo, traveling to exotic shooting locations, receiving attention reserved for royalty, and not having to attend school while still netting a better education than 99 percent of the rest of the planet (child stars have full-time tutors) is hardly the most pernicious form of child endangerment. And when virtually the entire kid cast of “Diff’rent Strokes” winds up pregnant, in court or in jail, it’s hard to argue. The sentiment du jour proclaims the profession of child acting to be a one-way trip on the road to ruin, a form of child abuse. What we’ve learned is that kids not only say the darnedest things, they do them as well. The Clearasil chronology of thespians in braces is spiked with suicide, substance abuse, criminal behavior, mishandled careers and bitterness. But when you can line the number of child actor hospital wristbands end to end and span the distance between Disneyland and The EPCOT Center, well, now we’re not so sure. Spanky and Our Gang, The Dead End Kids, Dopey Opie, “The Brady Bunch,” Andy Hardy, “A Family Affair,” E.T.’s fervid little confederates–what Shirley hath wrought! Nothing short of Lassie was as irresistible as a kid in pictures. From the first moment that Shirley Temple’s heliotropic, Christmas morning smile (and God, those sturdy little legs!) put the sunburn of unvarnished precocity on the cheeks of movie audiences, we were hopelessly hooked. ![]() There was a time, of course, when we wanted someone to play the kid–just ask our present U.S. Haul in the mothers with their lambkins and let’s get this over with, pronto. ![]() The casting call is out: We need 60 pounds of cute and a side order of sass. (That one kind of answered itself.) And Lukas Haas was in between jobs at the time. Sara Gilbert dodged questions about why she didn’t have a boyfriend. Poor Edward Furlong was in the middle of his tragic childhood, but tried his best to hide it. Movieline writer Michael Angeli caught up with three young actors in the March 1992 issue of Movieline. Once the fame ends and the fortune is spent, child actors frequently turn into cautionary tales. Hollywood is a tough town for anyone, but it can be positively brutal for kids. ![]()
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