• The Guardian
  6 Friday 30 August 2019

Shut up and

take your

amphetamines!

The fi lm Judy

is a reminder of

the most tragic

eff ects of child

stardom. What

are directors

doing to make

things better? By

Danny Leigh

PHOTOGRAPHS: REX/SHUTTERSTOCK; GETTY; ALLSTAR; PATHÉ

less well is Lindsay Lohan. And

then there are the disappeared. Had

they lived, Brittany Murphy would

now be 41, Corey Haim , 47, and

River Phoenix , 49.

Marbled through cinema history

are the same awful stories, of girls

bullied, as Garland was, into self-

loathing ; child actors of both sexes

abused and commodifi ed. As adults,

they become punchlines. In the era

of #MeToo, we have got used to the

uneasy reappraisal of our favourite

movies. A similar impulse kicks in

with child stars. How comfortably can

we watch the fi lms of Tatum O’Neal

or Drew Barrymore, without dwelling

on how many responsible adults

watched them plunge into rehab?

But then, where would the movies

be without ET or Clueless or The

Wizard of Oz? We always need the

kind of fi lms that need child actors.

Recently, there has been the glorious

The Florida Project , the director Sean

Baker’s bittersweet portrait of life

in the budget motels next to Disney

World, starring Brooklynn Prince ,

six when it was fi lmed. For the hard-

to-shake Room – with a boy and his

mother held captive by a sociopath

• Lenny Abrahamson cast seven-
  year-old Jacob Tremblay. Both
  directors aimed to make their movies
  ethically, a fi lm-making spin on the
  Hippocratic oath, “fi rst, do no harm”.
  Abrahamson emails from his
  Dublin offi ce. There was, he writes,
  a commitment to “best practice.
  I wanted the experience to be a good
  and happy one for the young actor at
  the centre of the story.”
  For Baker, speaking on the phone
  from Vancouver, old Hollywood
  loomed large. “I was incredibly
  aware of the unhappy history of
  child stars. So we went into the fi lm
  very cautiously.”
  Children in movies are so routine,
  you have to sometimes take a second
  to remember how fl atly weird it is
  that, in this one corner of life, they
  exist in adult workplaces – which all
  fi lm sets are. In any other context,
  it would be the stuff of comedy (or
  child labour outrages), building sites

Judy Garland

in The Wizard

of Oz; Renée

Zellweger

as Garland in

Judy (below)

work with kids who actually like kids

should be a given, but it isn’t.”

One problem is that a fi rst step

on set tends not to lead to a creative

magic kingdom, but fraught

commercial reality. At auditions,

a fi lm-maker is desperate for the

face who could make or break their

project. Traditionally, there is little

chance for refl ection on how they

might handle the next 20 years. Baig

says that psychological assessments

of child actors are sometimes carried

out in British TV, but mostly to

mitigate sensitive subject matter.

Abrahamson spent considerable

time with Tremblay before shooting

Room, until he was satisfi e d that

Tremblay would at least fi nd this

fi lm healthy and rewarding. “The

bigger question of whether a child

will benefi t long-term from being in

fi lms is largely unanswerable.”

Baker made eff orts to de-stress the

set of The Florida Project. “We would

make a point of saying: ‘This is not

fi lled with schoolkids, pre-teens in

meeting rooms on swivel chairs.

The formal response has been

regulatory: limits on working hours,

constraints on the kind of scenes

they appear in. But regulation only

goes so far. The British casting

director Shaheen Baig has spent

much of her career working with

child actors, including on early roles

for Jamie Bell and Tom Holland.

“Productions are good at covering

themselves legally,” she says,

“but doing the right thing needs

something else. Hiring people to

Brooklynn

Prince in The

Florida Project

J udy Garland was

a walking ghost story. Watch footage

of the patron saint of child stars from

any time after The Wizard of Oz,

made when she was 16, and you see a

woman haunted by the girl she never

had a chance to be. How that haunting

ended is the subject of a new movie,

Judy , starring Renée Zellweger as

Garland in 1969, middle-aged in

London, broke and addicted. She was

doomed long before then. The details

• an adolescent starlet destroyed by
  studio executives – remain less ghost
  story than horror movie.
  For generations, Garland has been
  a cautionary tale for kids who might
  venture on to the big screen. But the
  comfort of Judy, in theory at least,
  is that of a story safely in the past.
  How terrible the old times were;
  how long ago it was. Well, maybe.
  This summer, BBC One aired the
  mini-series Dark Money , concern ing
  a 13-year-old British actor abused by
  a Hollywood producer. The message
  came as a jolt, the suggestion of a fi lm
  business that feeds on the young.
  Did we need reminding?
  Brutalised child stars still appear
  in our fi lms and TV shows. A few
  sustain robust careers: Natalie
  Portman is now open in her fury
  at the sexualisation she was put
  through as a teenager. Some fall but
  then return – how joyful to see the
  Netfl ix series Russian Doll after its
  star and co-creator Natasha Lyonne
  went missing for years. For others,
  the comeback is pending. In the next
  episode of the Terminator franchise,
  Lyonne’s 90s boyfriend Edward
  Furlong is due to reprise his role
  in the series that he fi rst starred in
  at 14. In between there have been
  decades of substance abuse and
  legal problems ( including charges
  of domestic violence).
  Some no longer get involved.
  Given to wryly mocking rumoured
  reboots of Home Alone, Macaulay
  Culkin is now, in eff ect, in retirement
  in Paris, the consensus being that
  here is someone doing OK under
  the circumstances. Generally doing

Macaulay
Culkin in
Home Alone
and in 2018;
(top) Drew
Barrymore

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