Child Acting, Child Labor

Jackie Coogan was one of Hollywood’s first child stars. He starred opposite Charlie Chaplin in the classic The Kid (1921) and in Frank Lloyd’s 1922 adaptation of Oliver Twist. However, when he became an adult, he learned that his mother and stepfather had squandered his lifetime earnings of millions of dollars. This led to the creation of the Coogan Act, which required employers to set aside 15% of a child actor’s earnings in a trust (called a “Coogan Account”) and also specified the actor's schooling, work hours, and time off.

In the 1940s, Bobby Driscoll was a major child star and starred in such films as Song of the South (1946), So Dear to My Heart (1949), and Treasure Island (1950) as well as providing the voice and model for Disney’s animated adaptation of Peter Pan (1953). However, as he aged opportunities for adult roles became few and far between. Driscoll later became addicted to drugs, and his body was discovered in an abandoned building in Manhattan’s East Village. He was 31.

I recount these grim stories because not much has changed in the decades since as Hollywood never really learned how to manage a child labor force. The latest exposé on the industry comes from Jennette McCurdy’s 2022 memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died. In the memoir, McCurdy is really telling two stories: one is a story about her tortured relationship with her mother, Debra, and the other is about working in Hollywood as a child with the knowledge that both your identity and your income is based on pleasing authority figures, which is a fairly damaging lesson to impart to a child.

I found one of the book’s earlier anecdotes particularly striking. McCurdy recalls landing a job as one of many child actors in an episode of The X-Files where they’re all supposed to be suffocating to death. The day (which begins at 5:00am) has the kids going between a couple hours of schoolwork and a couple hours of doing the same scene of pretending to suffocate to death (McCurdy notes that the camera position keeps changing every time they come back, so it was likely to get different shots rather than something to do with the kids’ performances). This seems stultifying for a kid, especially one like McCurdy who didn’t particularly enjoy acting but wanted to make her mom happy.

As she grows older, McCurdy develops an eating disorder (first anorexia and then bulimia), and also works under the abusive and manipulative “The Creator” (a way to imply her show’s producer Dan Schneider). Being an actor, McCurdy is consciously aware of her own body, how she’s viewed by others, and that has been her frame of reference for entire childhood: “How do I look, and will others approve of how I look?” You can lay some of that on McCurdy’s mother, but the industry encourages the Debra McCurdys of the world who will do whatever it takes to make their children famous. This pressure was exacerbated for Jennette since her success made her the primary earner for a family that was scraping to get by.

Child acting forces us to consider two things we’d prefer not to think about. The first is that we can’t conceive of movies without child actors. They’ve been a part of Hollywood since the beginning, and they provide a valuable connection point to young audiences. It’s difficult to think of a world that doesn’t have E.T. or The Goonies. But if you want to get darker, you also have 12-year-old Jodie Foster playing a teenage prostitute in Taxi Driver. We know that Hollywood is a brutal system and that the child actors who “make it” seem to either be Type A personalities who thrive in the industry (Foster, Natalie Portman, Daniel Radcliffe) or they fall into miserable tragedies (Driscoll, Brad Renfro, Corey Feldman)1.

The second is that acting is an industry where we don’t particularly think of the job as labor despite the notoriously long hours, demanding work (see how many times you can make yourself go to an emotionally difficult place to create a “convincing” performance before you feel burnt out; also, you’ll have no control over how that performance comes out in the edit), and no job security. Now ask all of this of a child. People are (rightfully) up in arms about Arkansas’ new child labor law that allow businesses to work younger children for longer hours, but in California you can take an eight-year-old on and off set all day to pretend like they’re suffocating (this wasn’t even a high-paying job for McCurdy; this was background work, which was meant as a stepping stone to featured work).

Proponents of the industry will argue that there are protections in place like the Coogan Act that limit how long kids can work, that they must have education, etc. But clearly these protections now exist as the bare minimum for an industry that wants to work everyone (not just children, but everyone in a production) to the bone. You can argue that adults can at least choose if this arrangement is one they want to maintain, but for children, they’re at the mercy of their parents, and as I’m Glad My Mom Died shows, studios are more than happy to work with parents who push their children beyond a protective environment.

The question then becomes, “Do we abolish child acting?” If you believe that the entertainment industry is unsafe at any speed, then it can’t have children. Some entertainment products have been fine without child actors or even child characters (the gaming industry has thrived without featuring children in its games). But at the same time, we know that children enjoy seeing themselves on screen. Although movies have largely wiped away children from the big screen (or if there are child characters, they’re animated), there’s still plenty of television featuring children (McCurdy’s body of work largely came from the Nickelodeon show iCarly and its spinoff, Sam & Cat). We also have to account for all the movies in the past that made an impact because they were stories about children starring children. We watch E.T. and The Goonies and try not to think about how Drew Barrymore and Corey Feldman, respectively, are in for a rough time after these movies hit.

I wish I had a better answer here than simply, “More regulation.” I don’t think the answer is deepfake child actors where you take a short adult and plaster a computer face on them (I imagine the result would look something like this). I also don’t think the answer is to never make a movie or TV show about a child ever again. But we have to acknowledge that acting is labor, filming is an arduous process, and the industry has accepted the damage against children as the cost of doing business since, as long as the kid doesn’t die on set, the studio can claim it wasn’t their fault.

As we’ve seen for a century now, children are part of the collateral damage of an industry looking to maximize profits, and while other industries have banned child labor, it doesn’t seem like that will ever be the case for Hollywood. My hope is that in order to get to more regulation, more child actors, regardless of their fame, speak out about their experiences and how the industry can create better protections for children going forward.