Ready to Talk about Hollywood's Kids Yet?
Ready to Talk about Hollywood's Kids Yet?
Our complicity in the stain of child labor. Plus: AI & IP, and lessons from a celebrity billionaire
Is it time yet to get serious about protecting Hollywood’s Children?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m incredibly grateful for Quiet on the Set — and hats off to Max for airing it. In my eight years of writing this column and caterwauling to the heavens about the catastrophe of child labor in Hollywood, this is the very first time that the topic has gotten any traction. Any at all.
And that is through the ups and downs of the #MeToo movement. People are outraged to learn about Dan Schneider now . . . even though much of this stuff was reported in 2018 when he was ousted by Nickelodeon, resulting in headlines like:
Deadline’s article at the time included the sentence, “Among other things, I hear there had been multiple complaints of abusive behavior against Schneider filed by members of his staff.”
You would think that abusive behavior — in a workplace that contains many children — would set off some pretty loud alarm bells that would then force us to ask some broader questions and deal with them.
But no, Schneider was sidelined. Problem handled, and it wasn’t a question anyone needed to care about beyond that.
Child exploitation continued not to be anything anyone needed to care about when Jennette McCurdy wrote a book that stayed at the top of the bestseller list for a year in which she detailed her journey through an industry that seemed designed to strip mine any traces of humanity from her childhood. In the process, it also shared stories of extensive creepy behavior from Schneider.
No, not even a national best-seller could spark any “Gee, maybe this is something we should take a look at” feelings in the industry.
So I’m very glad that something finally set off a bit of interest in the subject. But still, I’m not quite satisfied with the reaction.
As I’ve mentioned a few hundred times, we are using child labor here — and using it a lot. Encouraging children to sacrifice their childhoods to work professionally amidst a community that on its best days isn’t exactly renowned for its sterling moral clarity.
While the infractions reported in the show are deserving of all the scorn and outrage they are receiving, it’s sort of like noting how a thief in the course of a bank robbery behaved inappropriately with some of the hostages. The fact that he may have done so ought to be condemned and punished, but the answer isn’t just to have better-behaved bank robbers.
If you’re looking for infractions, the whole thing is an infraction. Children should not be working full-time and living on sets. The best version of that is dreadful for them. The average version is going to attract every kind of lowlife on Earth looking to make money off parents desperate to promote their children. And we don’t even have to go to the much worse than that — which certainly happens — for that to be horrible.
There is no good child labor system.
If you saw a headline like “Auto Industry Revealed Using Child Labor” — it wouldn’t take anything more than that to provoke outrage. You wouldn’t have to wait to hear how the foremen behaved.
Here is an actual story from last year —
You don’t need to read more than that to rise up in anger. It doesn’t take more than learning that the meatpacking industry is employing children in its factories to set off investigations, Congressional hearings, fines, you name it. (And that is what happened last year, though the practice unfortunately continues.)
There’s no “As long as tutors are on set and they have healthy options at craft services.”
There have been precious few studies (if any?) of the effects on children working full-time in Hollywood. The industry that employs them somehow doesn’t seem terribly interesting in systematically studying their impact on their employees. Can’t think why . . . .
So here’s my comprehensive academic study. Read every memoir ever written by an actor that deals with a childhood spent on sets and show me a single, solitary one of them in which it doesn’t sound like a total f-ing hellscape. Like the sort of environment which if you can separate out the lust for fame, you wouldn’t be absolutely horrified if your next-door neighbor told you they were putting their children through anything like this.
And these memoirs are the ones written by the winners! Below that are the ones who stumble around existing on the margins for God knows how long, but never quite making it. If the realities of the child stars are terrifying, the realities of the child also-rans holed up on Barham with their demented parent/managers are no walk in the park, and no one is even glancing at what’s going on there.
In all likelihood, this round of outrage will fade without anything changing. Nickelodeon can’t sideline Dan Schneider again, so . . . crisis resolved! But let the interest in this, as well as McCurdy’s book, show how potent this fury can be. It will be coming back, and things would go much better for everyone if we could actually say we were doing something about the issue before the firestorm comes again.
Child labor isn’t getting driven out of Hollywood anytime soon, but we can do much much more to clean up the stables. Once again, here’s my three-point plan: