And for whoever’s hammering my inbox, no, when I was Hollywood I did work with a management company that had a line in...
And for whoever’s hammering my inbox, no, when I was Hollywood I did work with a management company that had a line in kids/teens but really I didn’t see any dirty stuff
the “dirty, exploitative” gossip I heard was how aspiring stage moms would pay to go to “talent expos” in, like, Hawai’i, where agents would be paid to fly in and sleep with EACH OTHER and have a vacation and AT BEST some of these kids would get a chance to move to LA to try to make money for the agents
for all that there WERE hypersexual 14-year-olds with moms who vicariously enjoyed the attention
and the most earnest stage parents who would bend their morals - I remember an evangelical family who didn’t want their elementary-age angel in stuff that said mild curses, but when Scientologists solicited him for an internal campaign that paid, and I called up saying “you probably aren’t interested but it’s my job to ask?” they were like “welllllll”
honestly MY biggest moral “oh jeez” was this family from Orange County who wouldn’t pull their daughter out of school and drive her up for every casting because she has a life there and the school officials were obviously complaining
and I was assigned the task of calling them up and saying hey we’re not an after-school enrichment program, were a business that gets paid when you book shoots and you book shoots by going to auditions and if you don’t go to auditions we’ll drop you and she’ll know you fucked up her dream
and I was terrible at it and the principals had to do it themselves and that’s probably part of how I got fired but cmon it’s hollywood I expected to get fired by assholes
the counterpoint to “why are all the teenage characters played by 28 year olds” is would you rather they are played by actual children
no, it’s “California regulations limit the amount of filming per day by age bracket and runts who can play younger (but more sexually aware) have an edge”.
That’s why the Olsens, at the infant level you needed twins to meet a sitcom schedule.