Tales From A Hollywood Child Wrangler

One child Jody worked with had just a few lines and knew them perfectly, so after rehearsal, the two of them relaxed a bit with some Radio Disney. The girl's mother batted the radio off and insisted they do the lines again. Kind of a red flag. When the shoot began, Jody said, "You got this." The mother said, in a smiling singsong voice, "Be perfect. Nothing less." Buckling under pressure, the girl flubbed her lines, and the director called for a break.

The mother pulled the girl to another room, and Jody followed. (Part of her job is to never let a child out of her sight. She once lost track of one for a couple of minutes at a mall shoot and was surprised she wasn't fired.) "She looked dead in her eyes," says Jody, "and said in a gruff voice that came out of nowhere, 'You do this. You do this. Do you WANT to go back to our old shithole of a home? No? Then you do this.'" The girl was on the verge of tears. Then when they returned to set, the mother was bubbly again. "Oh, she's ready," she said. "Just needed a pep talk."

After more flubbed lines, they had to let that child go. Yep, if the kids don't perform, their asses get fired. The mother accepted the news with a smile, leaving Jody to only imagine what the car ride home would be like. Other times, she's seen stage moms react to firings by showering everyone in sight with F-bombs, child actors included. Either way, it's not the wrangler's place to criticize. "If there's any violence, you better believe we'd report that," she says, "but if we see a kid who obviously doesn't want to be here, and a stage mom pushing them into the audition, we can't do anything about it besides use it as a possible factor in not hiring them."

The best stage parents, says Jody, have had their own experiences in show business. That gives them more advice and knowledge to share, obviously, and also gives them perspective. They know child actors need balance. "Like, 'You can try some acting, but also play with your friends and go to school,'" says Jody. Parents in the business say I don't want him to be the next Macaulay Culkin or I don't want her to be the next Amanda Bynes. "One parent in particular carried around Natalie Wood's biography. I had to ask her once during a break, and she said, 'So I can keep myself from becoming that.'"

Natalie Wood's mother killed a butterfly in front of her to get her to cry.

Lots of times, that's due to legal limitations on when and how kids can be used.

Babies are only allowed to work for 20 minutes a day, for example, and they can only be in the studio at all for two hours per day, tops. That's the law in California. Things are looser elsewhere. In Louisiana, babies can act six hours a day, six days a week. But the epicenter of the entertainment industry has a whole lot of restrictions on how much you can wring out of child stars (and yes, those laws were passed after decades of horrific mistreatment).

School-age kids can work a total of 9.5 hours a day. That might sound like plenty, but that clock is ticking even if they're not on camera and are merely in the makeup chair texting. "There was a commercial I was working where a young girl needed her hair a certain way," says Jody. "When they finally got it right, the crew had gone out for a break, and by the time everyone was back, half of her allotted shooting schedule that night had passed. She literally got half of her pay by sitting and waiting."

That 9.5 hours also includes the three hours they spend in class. Child actors still have to get an education, in the extremely unlikely event that they don't continue to act into old age. This is often done with a "studio teacher," a private tutor who has to cram in lessons in between scenes, tweaking the class schedule around the director's whims and when the light is perfect. They might miss out on the social side of school (the Walking Dead prom is always a dull affair), but they learn fine, by most accounts. ( "A child I was watching went up to a member of the lighting crew for a science question," says Jody, "and he helped him nail it.")

If this is the case, it kind of makes us wonder what the other five hours of our school day was for.

"They're going to sit or stand somewhere, not saying anything or smiling," says Jody. "They'll be by themselves in complete silence or going over lines, sometimes with their mom or dad right by. These 'professionals' try to get in the zone ... Ever see a M. Night Shyamalan movie? The kids in those don't act like real kids. It's because their parents push them on Stanislavski or method acting at an early age, so they act more like adults early on."

For a cereal commercial, Jody was filming a boy and girl reacting to a cartoon that hadn't been made yet. That's easier than it sounds. To get actors laughing at nothing, she tells them to imagine the person reading the script is a golden retriever puppy. This trick worked on the girl, who said her lines with glee. The boy -- a more polished actor -- struggled to express the pure childlike wonder that you'd think would come naturally.

"He's used to being in dramas!" said the boy's dad. "Give him time." But after several takes, this serious child actor still didn't get it. The next boy up for the part was no pro, but managed it right away. It's kind of like how Daniel Day-Lewis would probably suck in the role of a wacky bumbling husband in a yogurt commercial.

When the kid's real mom told her to pretend the actress beside Santa was her mother, the child looked hurt. "It wasn't said," says Jody, "but you could clearly see that she was thinking that Mom didn't want her." This is a recurring thing with actors that age, no matter how familiar you'd think kids are with playing make-believe. "They've never said anything like 'Are they my new mom?' but it's gotten close."

The crew solved that problem by getting the girl's real mother into the shot not far from Santa, so the kid ended up pointing in the correct general area. Other times, there's even more risk of messing a kid up because shoots can be terrifying. 13-year-old Jodie Foster needed psych tests to prove that she understood Taxi Driver was only a story.

And when kids are younger, they have to face an even scarier menace: incomplete special effects.

Jody worked on a TV pilot about a giant friendly monster, but since the monster was all CGI, its stand-in on set was an eyeless green mess of padding. The horrified parents of the young actress complained to the wardrobe department (wardrobe wasn't responsible and had no power to fix it, but the parents just really wanted to vent, apparently). Jody told the girl, "This is a nice man pretending to be a big kitty, but we haven't put the rest of him on yet ... He doesn't feel good about himself for not looking like the others. Can you make him feel better when you see him?" The girl ran to the homunculus, hugged him, and said, "You're pretty to me." The show never got picked up, but that take was gold.

At a non-professional level, acting can still be a fun activity for kids before they grow up and learn how dumb and gray the world can be sometimes. Here's a book of monologues for kids to try out.

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For more tales from the youth of Hollywood, check out 6 Ways Being A Child Star Is Way Darker Than You'd Think and 5 Things I Learned As A Child Star Of The Worst Movie Ever.

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