Television Reviews : A Sobering Look at the Rough Life of One Child

No one will mistake “Children of the Night,” a “Frontline” report airing tonight (9 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15, 10 p.m. on Channel 50) for Valentine’s Day fluff. This documentary on teen-age runaways is sobering, hard material--life in the raw, brutal to watch.

“Children” focuses on the rough life of Iain Brown, a suicide at 19, a child/man fleeing the comfortable world of his middle-class family in Walnut Creek, a suburb of San Francisco. For five years, Brown lived as a street hustler in San Francisco and Los Angeles, returning to his family every so often and then disappearing again for months at a stretch.

At 13, Iain, while working as a camp counselor, was caught experimenting with drugs. Unable to face his parents, he and a friend ran away to Los Angeles, where they were initiated into homosexual prostitution. Once he was in the life, Iain seemed drawn to it, eventually becoming the leader of his own “family” of street kids.

Iain left quite a record of his short, troubled life. Producer-reporter Ray Telles interviewed and filmed him on the streets while doing an earlier show about runaways; a neighbor, Bill McIntosh, had taped hours of interviews with Iain, Iain’s story in his own words. Telles skillfully uses the film and audiotape, mixing it with interviews of Iain’s mother, friends, social workers and street kids to provide a glimpse of the runaways’ world of prostitution and drugs through the focus of Iain’s life.

Unfortunately, Iain remains a puzzle. Nobody knows exactly why this intelligent youth could not surmount the trauma of his life, what it was that made him repeatedly return to the cruel life of the street over the comfort of home and family.