Word: kid
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Directors of movies with kid actors have to be parent and disciplinarian, coach and coaxer to their young stars. But there are limits to how much children can be helped. And as movies with kid protagonists become more popular, and our understanding of children's psyches becomes more sophisticated, child actors are asked to carry a lot more of the emotional freight of a story. How then to find and direct kids...
...producers have hopes of cash coming in, they also know there will be less going out. Some Hollywood stars make $20 million a picture. First-time kid stars typically get union scale: about $20,000. Some child actors might inch into the six-figure range. It's only the very rare tot, like Dakota Fanning (see box), who makes more than $1 million...
Child actors have been stealing scenes and hearts at least since Jackie Coogan teamed with Charlie Chaplin in the 1921 weepy The Kid. For three years in the '30s, Shirley Temple was Hollywood's biggest box-office star; she was just 6 when the Motion Picture Academy voted her a special Oscar. Since then, the Academy has honored 16 actors under 14 with nominations or Oscars. Keisha Castle-Hughes, 14, the Maori charmer of Whale Rider, was cited last year. Tatum O'Neal (Paper Moon) and Anna Paquin (The Piano) won supporting-actress Oscars on their first acting jobs. Standards...
Different media have different demands too. The kid market is big business on TV, with full-time factories like Nickelodeon, ABC Family and the Disney Channel churning out moppet entertainment. Nickelodeon has 14 scouts traveling the country trying to find the next young stars. But the show-biz sass that works on sitcoms may look grotesque on the big screen. Those reflexes anticipate what a director wants, when maybe what he wants is to be surprised. "You don't want some actor child who does everything perfectly and doesn't have a childlike aura," says Campbell Scott, who directed...
Never has a kid had such a well-planned path to becoming a serious actress. She reportedly took a pay cut from her million-plus fee on Hide and Seek to get her name above the title right next to De Niro's. She took the movie, she told reporters, because she had "never done a psychological thriller before." On Feb. 23 she got a camcorder for her 11th birthday from Spielberg. "I used to say she was 30," says her agent, Cindy Osbrink. "Now, after Hide and Seek, I say she's 105. She gets more mature and thoughtful...