Shirley
Temple in “Bright Eyes” (1934)
The
Unread Kid
by
Jamie Jobb
Our
new neighbors’ son is named after the protagonist of “Catcher In
The Rye” – although the boy has never read that famous novel, nor
anything else for that matter. He just turned five. While he’s
too young for school, his pre-literacy hasn’t squelched his
creative instincts. At his family’s recent open house, he proudly
showed off a shelf full of Lego transformers he’d assembled with
only video instructions he found posted on YouTube.
His
dad says the boy also has built functioning lightsabres and has
taught himself how to devise intricate pop-up storybooks without any
use of written words. Our granddaughter who lives in Tokyo also was
drawing and making her own full-color origami books long before she
could read or write either Japanese or English.
Who
cares to distinguish nouns from verbs when you can “write”
a book simply by observing objects and actions with no need to “read”
them? Our neighbor calls his child a “maker” and we agree
the boy is a budding genius who understands patterning, but I think
he’s also behaving like any observant “child actor”.
What
is “acting” if not “… Action!” – the
last word a director says after “Quiet on the set”? Anything
observant actors actually do beyond their dialog is often more
telling than any written lines they may speak. Good actors know
their concentrated action in a scene provides an audience with a
direct handle for subtext, what’s actually going on inside their
characters -- no matter what they might say in dialog. Actors know that if an action can be observed and
studied, it again can be replicated – on stage or on a set. Any
repeat performance or new take may be reshaped like a Lego
transformer in the hands of a creative child.
* * *
When the kids were little, we
went to a parents’ meeting at their school and I asked the teacher
why all her students were geniuses in the second grade? Look at the
first grade. Blotches of green and black. Look at the third grade.
Camouflage. But the second grade – your grade. Matisses everyone.
You’ve made my child a Matisse. Let me study with you. Let me
into second grade! What is your secret? And this is what she said:
“Secret? I don’t have any secret. I just know when to take
their drawings away from them.”
With
so much to occupy his acquiring mind, our neighbor Holden has no
current concern for what his fictional namesake in J. D. Salinger’s
book called the “death of the imagination”. The boy’s
own imagination is quite proactive, thank you very much! Indeed, his
precocity doesn’t seem unique. In our same neighborhood, an art
studio/school recently featured an exhibit of the flamboyant cartoon
paintings of a seven-year-old who seems to be a young Roy
Lichtenstein. All the boy’s works sold at the opening except for
one -- the one he didn’t want to sell!
Opera
prodigy Alma Deutscher, 12, was recently featured on "60
Minutes" and discussed her unique work with an astonished
Scott Pelley. Alma told the CBS Correspondent that when she comes to
a particularly difficult part of a composition, she will consult her
“imaginary composer
friends” to work
through that passage. How many kids have friends like that?
Then
there are exceptional YouTube kids like Iain Armitage who grew up
with Broadway folks who coaxed him to post his first theater reviews
five years ago when he was four. Now the child has the lead role in
“Young Sheldon”, an outstanding new prime-time sitcom on
broadcast television. The self-made critic became the self-made star
(more below).
Armitage
is not alone as a budding performer. And this glorious glut of
screen talent has an obvious origin: these young actors are able to
study their own work, and that of their colleagues, right on their
tablets and smartphones in a new kind of on-line selfie-exploration.
Trick
question for any pre-school actor: Where’d you go to acting school?
For young thespians of the 21st Century, the answer seems
to be “anywhere we get wifi”. Kids also may shoot video
rehearsals as part of their acting practice. Who needs a camera when
you’ve got a movie studio in your pocket? Who needs public or
charter schools when you can teach yourself almost everything on YouTube?
Not
unlike athletes, actors also study “film” of other players
on line. This study is no mere matter of style but of technique,
footwork, reactions, timing – one actor mirroring or mimicking
“takes” of other actors. Video scene practice helps a
young actor learn to observe how another player develops a character
from the outside in.
Role-playing
opportunities abound for young actors who may appear not only on
television, but also on stage. A recent one-act festival at our
community theater featured an evening of plays for families with
several child actors standing up to the challenge of live performance
before an audience of strangers. In fact, some in that talented
young cast appeared a little over-eager to, in the words of Mickey
Rooney, “put on a show!”
With
prompting and rehearsal, young actors can “read” any lines
directors feed them – even if they can’t actually comprehend any
words appearing on the page. As playwright David Mamet often points
out, after a script is complete, all an actor need do is simply say
the lines. And a good director can “feed” dialog to any
child actor who can’t yet read her script.
*
* *
Of
course talent scouts admit that one of the first qualities they seek
in an actor is literacy. So,
eventually
every
child
actor must
learn to read.
East Coast Talent Agency’s
Barbara Garvey
clarifies:
“Children
who can read and who read a lot make the best actors, in my opinion.
It makes everything a lot easier if the child can read and understand
his script without a lot of help from an adult having to feed lines.
It also gives them a larger worldview when they explore other worlds
through books, and helps to develop their imaginations.”
In
early Hollywood long before home schooling, precocious child actors
were tutored in studio facilities like MGM’s Little Red
Schoolhouse. Class size was limited to a maximum of ten students,
with instructors enforcing strict rules developed by the Los Angeles
School Board which required student-actors to put in three hours of
daily study off the set. There on Lot One, MGM housed its iconic
child stars – Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Jackie
Cooper, Lana Turner – when they weren’t needed in front of
cameras.
Long
studio hours, amphetamine routines and other allegations of child
abuse dogged the studios and tested the tolerance of talent at the
time. While some young actors – Rooney and Garland in particular –
had difficulty adjusting to the rigors of adulthood outside studio
walls, other child stars like Shirley Temple left Hollywood behind in
later years to become a UN General Assembly delegate and ambassador
to Czechoslovakia.
Twentieth
Century prime-time programs like “The Brady Bunch”, “The
Partridge Family” and “The Cosby Show” were notable for their
large casts of young actors. Broadcast television still runs on the
assumption of an assembled family at home all watching tv together at
night. The network sitcom has survived and in the last decade a new
crop of astonishing young talent began to emerge on Hollywood sound
stages.
Let’s
peek at some of the most impressive young actors now appearing on
these four outstanding network shows – “Modern Family”, “Life
in Pieces”, “Black-ish” and “Young Sheldon” – currently
running in prime-time.
*
* *
“Modern
Family”
Jeremy
Maguire plays “Joe” – youngest in cast of ABC’s “Modern
Family”
No
network program has a stable
of more thoroughbred actors
than "Modern
Family", ABC’s
prime-time offering which
raised the stakes
for seriously funny sitcoms
when it premiered
in 2009.
The mockumentary series
follows three intersecting household storylines tracking
around an aging patriarch and his extensive family in suburban Los
Angeles.
Now
in its ninth season, the show
immediately distinguished itself with production design patterned
after so-called
“reality tv”.
Hand-held cameras shoot
scenes on
“real
sets”
with actors-facing-us
in “confession room”
moments where their
characters comment directly
on the story in progress as
it unreels. The show’s
creators Christopher Lloyd
and Steven Levitan also allow
actors the
discretion to glance at
cameras
for “Say-what?”
effects
when a
moment allows it, breaking tv’s
comic taboo of the "fourth
wall").
The
series centers on Jay Pritchett (Ed O’Neill), a retired “closet &
blind” magnate who lives with trophy wife Gloria (Sofia Vergara, a
modern Lucille Ball) and their two children, Manny (Rico Rodriguez)
and Joe (more on him later) in a big house not far from his four
grandchildren who live nearby in two other households.
Jay’s
two adult siblings, Claire Dunphy (Julie Bowen) and Mitchell
Pritchett (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) moved out of Jay’s house long ago
to form their own households. Claire works full time running
Pritchett Closet & Blinds while raising “four kids” – Haley
(Sarah Hyland), Alex (Ariel Winter), Luke (Noland Gould) AND
Phil Dunphy (slapstick master Ty Burrell), her true-goofball husband
and impractical joking real estate salesman.
Jay’s
son Mitchell is a gay attorney raising adopted daughter Lily (Aubrey
Anderson-Emmons) with his husband Cameron Tucker (Eric Stonestreet),
a football coach and professional clown. Indeed, every actor in this
cast seems a performer gifted with fearless funny bones as they
perform their own comic stunts.
Often
cited as Michelle Obama’s favorite show, “Modern Family” has
won numerous Writers Guild, Golden Globe and Peabody Awards to add to
its growing rack of 21 Primetime Emmys. One clear reason for this
on-going success is an extremely talented cast of child actors who
literally grew up on the show.
Long-time
viewers know that as
“Modern Family” progressed,
Rodriguez
and Gould
became better actors
once they learned to slow down
and savor their lines,
whereas Hyland and Winter
seemed to be solid from the series start.
Hyland (a
young Natalie Wood)
and Winter have appeared in a total of a
hundred film and video productions
between them. Rodriguez and Gould also have become seasoned pros,
winning Screen Actors Guild, Teen Choice and Young Hollywood Awards.
Meanwhile
Anderson-Emmons, who was outrageous as an
unbridled preschooler, seems
to have become much more
shy as she’s matured. This
three-and-a-half minute clip
illustrates
how Lily’s on-camera presence has lost
its sparkle over the seasons.
The
show’s writers have noticed her hesitation and now the outrageous
scenes she once commanded, seem to be written for Jeremy Maguire.
Currently only six, Jeremy is the youngest player in this incredibly
gifted youth ensemble. When he turned four, Jeremy took over the
role of Fulgencio Joseph Pritchett – or just “Joe” –
replacing toddler Pierce Wallace, who’d held the role as basically
an unspeaking parental prop for three seasons. Young Maguire is
already a consummate performer who doesn’t need prompting to slow
down his line “readings”.
Jeremy
may be too young to comprehend scripts, but not too young to deliver
complex lines in his own peculiar style of sophisticated “baby
talk”. So the show’s writers began to stretch the child’s
limits, giving him primary speaking roles in some
scenes. Soon they
realized his comic chops could handle more funny material, like "ice
cream soup", and
mouthfuls of monolog like these “adult” lines from
the
1942 screenplay of
"Casablanca":
“If that plane leaves the
ground and you’re not with her, you’ll regret it. Maybe not
today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life …
It doesn’t take much to see the problems of three little people
don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday
you’ll understand that. Not now … Here’s lookin’ at
you kid.”
*
* *
“Life
In Pieces”
Giselle
Eisenberg stands-up for Sophia Hughes in “Life in Pieces”
Although
it employs
a much smaller roster of youthful
actors, the CBS’ series
"Life
In Pieces" rivals
“Modern Family” in its cross-hatched
storylines which do not
overlap as they do on the ABC series.
Most of the actors on the
CBS program are
masters of messy slapstick
and
recoiling
reactions that land somewhere
just short of ridiculous.
So, “Life
in Pieces” is an apt description of this crazy comedy.
Tagline
for the show is “One Big
Family, Four Short Stories”.
Not unlike Jay Pritchett, grandparents
Joan (Dianne Wiest) and John (James Brolin) Short also are wrapped up
in the frequently messy familial details of their
“kids” (the so-called
“Short Stories”).
It seems everyone occupies
the same zany household,
although they live in different places:
their sons – Greg (Colin
Hanks) and Matt (Thomas Sadoski) and their mates Jen (Zoe
Lister-Jones) and Colleen (Angelique Cabral) are
always hanging around;
as well as their grandson
Tyler (Niall Cunningham)
and his young wife Clementine (Hunter King) who live in a tiny home
in the backyard.
Alpha
Kid on the series is Giselle Eisenberg, 10, who plays Sophia Hughes,
the cracker-jack “middle” child of Tim (Dan Bakkedahl) and
Heather Hughes (Betsy Brandt), the other Short sibling.
Australian-born Holly J. Barrett, 15, plays Sophia’s sister
Samantha while Cunningham, 23, is their married brother who lives in
the tiny home.
Young
Giselle is a “listening”
actor of the Sanford Meisner school, obviously observant in her
interactions with other cast
mates. She also seems to
have a supreme sense of timing to
counter her quick wit. She
certainly knows when to use a
her pause
for great effect.
Like Audrey Hepburn or Irene Dunne, young Eisenberg exudes
an inner calm and
maturity that
belies the fact she’s only now completed her first decade of life.
Before
she turned ten,
Eisenberg had appeared in five tv shows, four films and lots of
commercials. Her film work landed her on sets with Martin Scorsese,
Al Pacino, Leonardo DiCaprio and Margot Robbie. Her youthful
self-assurance challenges
the show’s writers to devise storylines that support her unique
presence in a scene. Here’s Sophia in a quick bit
with her uncle Matt that attempts to answer the musical question:
"Why
are rock stars so skinny?" (55
seconds)
*
* *
“Black-ish”
Miles
Brown and Marsai Martin shine as twins on “Black-ish”
With
five children including a newborn all
living under one roof, ABC’s
serious sitcom
"Black-ish"
could be seen
as a one-household
“modern family” in the
Huxtable mode – with
privileged
kids of privileged parents and
grandparents all living in a
privileged steady-state
of suburban privilege.
However,
now in its fourth season,
the series is
blessed with creators who
keep challenging themselves
to take
on difficult
issues
for situation comedy.
So far in
four seasons, they’ve
tackled
these tough
topics:
health care, gun control,
charity giving, postpartum
depression, corporal
punishment, race
relations, school bullies, jury
selection, diabetes, diversity,
witchcraft, religion, law
enforcement, and the
controversial US
presidential election of
2016.
“Black-ish”
posits
a world where “race” is
not a simple competition
in black-and-white,
but a complex and diverse
daily dance of profound
public consequence.
Indeed,
the series
pulled out all stops for its
Season
4 premiere this
October, when the cast
challenged itself on stage
with an
absolutely thrilling
song-and-dance
production, a virtual
Broadway
musical with
prime-time production values
to match anything ever dished
out by "Glee"
or "Smash".
The
program was titled “I Am A Slave: The Roots Meet Schoolhouse Rock”.
Like
other programs
mentioned here, “Black-ish”
also suffers
from an abundance of superior acting talent:
Laurence
Fishburne is Pops Johnson, another
at-home
grandfather
who
lives with grandkids whom
he loves to provoke.
The
outrageous Jenifer
Lewis sparkles
as Pops’ ex-wife Ruby
–
mama
of Andre Johnson
(Anthony
Anderson) and foe of his wife Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross). The
hilarious Deon
Cole plays Charlie Telphy, a single father with a recurring
memory
problem, while
Peter
Mackenzie is Andre’s boss Leslie Stevens, a
white-ish
member,
if ever there was one.
Two
older Johnson children – the “teens’ of the family -- seem
destined for their own promising acting careers, given their
performance so far on the series. In fact Yara
Shahidi who
plays Zoey Johnson
is such
a self-assured talent,
she’s now
set to star in her own
lead role on ABC’s
new spin-off
“Grow-ish” next
season. Yara, 17, has appeared in over
a dozen other tv shows and six films so far.
Marcus
Scribner who plays Andre Junior, is the black sheep of “Black-ish”.
An incredibly easy-going slapstick talent, Scribner seems a goofball
in the Buddy Ebsen mold. But the 17-year-old’s comic demeanor
belies his serious side. He’s also a humanitarian high school
honor-student dedicated to animal protection and higher education
opportunities for disadvantaged youth in undeveloped nations.
Obviously,
it’s hard to upstage righteous talent like that, but the young
actors who steal the
“Black-ish” spotlight
are twins Diane (Marsai
Martin) and Jack
(Miles Brown) Johnson, both 13. Jack-and-Diane
are quickly becoming a
modern version of Nichols
and May, the classic
comedy duo of the Twentieth Century. It
would be fun to watch Miles
and Marsai improvise!
Miles
Brown takes full advantage of being the shortest member of the cast.
Proclaiming his stage name “Baby Boogaloo”, the young actor,
rapper and dancer started performing at age four and had appeared on
The Ellen DeGeneres Show, America’s Got Talent and Justin Bieber’s
“Believe” before landing in the “Black-ish” cast.
Born
in Plano Texas, Marsai has
been acting professionally in front of cameras since she was five,
when she
landed her first national commercial. Ms. Martin makes
no bones about her ambitions: “I
want to be a legend!”
Watch her in a
scene and it’s not difficult
to imagine Marsai as a modern Shirley Temple!
*
* *
“Young
Sheldon”
Iain
Armitage is “Young Sheldon” Cooper
Creators
Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady knew they’d struck a creative Mother
Lode when they conceived their brutally-honest character Sheldon
Cooper (Jim Parsons) as the precocious savant and alpha-nerd on their
popular CBS series “Big Bang Theory” now in its eleventh season.
Although the writers didn’t care to burden Sheldon’s backstory
with autism or Aspergers Syndrome, they understood their character
was an avowed genius with an eidetic memory who could say almost
anything and it would be believable … from his point-of-view. Any
strange line of dialog tossed out in the writer’s room could be deemed “in
character” for someone so absent in his own presence, a
socially clueless genius who can’t tell sarcasm from a joke,
sincerity from a sneer.
Television
hadn’t known such characterized nonsense since the demise of Mork
from Ork, the role that introduced Robin Williams to an awestruck
broadcast audience in 1978. Before then, tv viewers had only known
strange sketchy characters fashioned by do-anything-on-tv crackpots
Ernie Kovacs and Jonathan Winters. Mork was the first recurring
prime-time character who could say and believe almost anything.
Chuck
Lorre Productions
seems
to have hit more buried treasure when they developed Sheldon’s
backstory in the “Big Bang” prequel, "Young
Sheldon" a CBS
prime-time series which premiered
this fall with Iain
Armitage – age 9 – in the
lead role of Sheldon Cooper
as a child at home growing up
in Texas.
The
program supports an inspired cast, led by Annie Potts as Meemaw,
Lance Barber as father George Cooper Senior; Zoe Perry as mother
Mary, Montana Jordan as brother George Junior and Raegan Revord as
Sheldon’s twin sister Missy.
It
certainly helps Armitage to have Parsons as the
Big Sheldon producer/narrator
of
the show, to coach
the young talent while they
continue to apply
nuance to this
complex character’s deep
backstory. Armitage is no stranger to the footlights and it
certainly helps to have this young actor’s connections: His mother
is theater producer Lee Armitage and his dad is actor Euan Morton,
mostly recently in the cast
of “Hamilton”.
Iain
himself gained fame as the "child
theatre critic" in 2012, when he posted his first YouTube video on his channel which mostly features his after-show
reviews outside the theater from
which he just emerged. His
videos have not gone
viral, but did came
to the attention of Perez Hilton and
The New York Post’s Michael Riedel. Hilton
invited the child to work the red carpet at the Tony Awards, and
that earned Iain
the attention he deserved
from casting agents.
The
boy has never taken an acting
class but tap dances, likes long walks, collects
playbills and executes
magic tricks. “I
love watching theater and being in some shows,” Iain
admits. “But when I
grow up, I want to be a magician.”
Well,
as Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) famously said at the end of
“Casablanca”:
“Here’s
lookin’ at you, kid!”
*
* *
The
Well-Read Actor
“Sanford
Meisner on Acting” by Sanford Meisner and Dennis Longwell. Fifteen
months of Meisner classes transcribed and edited for actors who
listen. Vintage. 1987.
“The
Presence of the Actor” by Joseph Chaikin. Origins of “devised”
playmaking. Theatre Communications Group. 1993.
“Joseph
Chaikin and Sam Shepard: Letters and Texts, 1972-1984” Edited by
Barry Daniels. New American Library. 1989.
“An
Actor Prepares” by Konstantin Stanislavski. Classic Method Acting
text for actors who like to talk, talk, talk. Taylor & Francis.
1936.
SAG/AFTRA
guidelines for young performers:
“MGM:
Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot” by Steven Bingen, Stephen X.
Sylvester and Michael Troyan. Eye-opening picture book and insiders
peek into the motion picture industry. Santa Monica Press. 2011.
“The
Catcher in the Rye” by J. D. Salinger. The original coming-of-age
novel. Little Brown. 1951.
The
“death of the imagination” monologue from “Six Degrees of
Separation”:
“Casablanca”
script (1942):
The
Well-Written Actor
Ten
Actors Who Write (Ben Affleck, Woody Allen, Joel Edgerton,
Christopher Guest, Desiree Akhavan, Billy Bob Thornton, George
Clooney, Lake Bell, Edward Burns, Orson Welles)
And
five more (Daniel Radcliffe, James Franco, Matt Damon, Carrie Fisher,
Steve Martin):
And
13 more not listed above (Charlie Chaplin, Eric von Stroheim, Spike
Lee, Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando, Kenneth Branagh, Sylvester
Stallone, Kevin Smith, Noel Clarke, Helen Hunt, Johnny Depp, Tyler
Perry, Clint Eastwood)
Plus
four more forgotten above (Miranda July, Lauren Graham, Tom Hanks,
B.J. Novak,
And
13 others: Justin Theroux, Paul Rudd, John Cusack, Emma Thompson,
Owen Wilson, Kristen Wiig, Rashida Jones, Seth Rogen, Busy Phillipps,
John Francis Daley, Gene Wilder, Wentworth Miller, Thomas Lennon,
and
Stage
Study
Post-Doctorate
theatre education on YouTube:
and
and
Keep
current on West End productions:
and
Broadway shows:
The
TV Shows
“Life
in Pieces” (CBS)
and
and
“Black-ish”
(ABC)
“Modern
Family” (ABC)
“Young
Sheldon” (CBS)
and
Six-year-old
toothless reviews of Tony Picks
https://youtu.be/PKceCc489Sg
(4:18)
and
Iain’s
Theatre Traditions! “dressing up for the theater” “an electric
spark of happiness”
https://youtu.be/6PUyzcddm58
(1:13)
“collecting
playbills” https://youtu.be/W0h4c6gXLAk
(1:15)
“Being
nice at the theater” https://youtu.be/CaQKCHy2sLg
(1:29)
Four-year-old
Iain signs “Stars” from “Les Miserables”
