They Wanna Be in Pictures : TV Pilot Season Transforms Complex Into Boot Camp for Child Actors

Brandon French hit town four weeks ago, one more aspiring actor aiming to make his mark in the cutthroat, high-tension world of Hollywood.

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But he had to bring his mother with him.

Setting up shop at the Oakwood apartments near Burbank, the blond-haired Coloradan spends long afternoons tirelessly stalking auditions from studio to studio, meeting countless rejections from movie producers and commercial casting directors with poker-faced aplomb.

Each morning, aided by Mom and her laptop computer, he studies things like algebra and American history. Brandon is an 11-year-old boy with a briefcase, who sees himself as an actor first and a sixth-grader second.

Like so many other up-and-coming young actors, he’s a well-mannered kid who some say has mortgaged a piece of his childhood for something he considers much more valuable:

Stardom.

“I know I’m just a kid, but I know what I want,” he said softly, pausing from his studies in the Oakwood’s cafeteria. At that, Sheryl French looked up from her morning paper.

“Speak up, Brandon.”

The boy leaned forward: “I want to be an actor. What’s wrong with that?”

It’s pilot season in the television industry, the busy months between January and May when the networks stage massive casting hunts--or kiddie cattle calls--in search of that new face and attitude, the lucky youngsters who will populate the fall season’s new shows.

Each year, some 350 out-of-town child actors--from 9 months to 18 years--transform the Oakwood apartments into a sitcom boot camp, converging on Tinseltown with sparkly high hopes.

And those, of course, of their parents.

The Burbank Oakwood each year mails brochures to some 700 talent agents nationwide advertising the sprawling apartment complex, located within walking distance of Warner Bros. studios, as headquarters for visiting child actors and their families, and makes available a range of extra-fee programs that include tutoring, acting and singing lessons.

Youngsters are enticed to follow the lead of child stars who bunked at the Oakwood while taking their first shot at Hollywood, including Fred Savage of “The Wonder Years,” Neil Patrick Harris from “Doogie Howser, M.D.” and the child stars of hit films like “Little Rascals” and “Honey, I Blew Up the Kids.”

“Pilot season is a zoo, the best time for a newcomer to come to Hollywood,” said Judy Savage, owner of the Savage Agency, which handles child actors.

“Usually, when a producer has a guest star role, his budget is so small and his schedule is so fast-paced, there’s no way he’s gonna audition a new kid for the role. He . . . goes to someone he already knows, somebody proven. But pilot season is different. . . . instead of just seeing five kids, that same producer will see maybe 300.”

And so, year after year, the wide-eyed kiddies come--some torn between a sense of professional duty and an instinctive drive to be carefree children. Many weigh the longing of missing Fido and their best friend back home against the hope of doing that daylong commercial shoot that will pay enough money to put them through college.

On slower days, they look critically at the Hollywood culture “that just makes you want things,” comparing the picturesque back roads of, say, rural Kentucky with the L.A. smog and gridlocked freeways.

“Heck, back home in Kentucky we get on the freeway to go to another state,” observed 14-year-old Susanne Shropshire. “Here you do it to go down the road and visit a friend.”

By day, young actors turn the Oakwood’s two clubhouses into a jam-packed study hall. After dark, teen-age dance parties break out around the clubhouse pool--a scene of booming rap music, good-looking girls flirting with star-quality boys while 8-year-olds play tag.

For these driven young professionals, it’s a rare moment of childish exuberance, a break from the quest to be anointed the next Macaulay Culkin. They know that morning will bring the pressure of another audition, heightened by Mom’s hand-wringing.

And for some, success is more than just a dream, it’s a necessity. Some mortgage their homes to fund the Hollywood trips, local agents say. Mothers quit their jobs, leave their remaining children with friends, all for the frenzied audition months.

Probably for nothing because agents warn that only one child in 100 will realize the goal of regular work. Come May, the others return home to Denver or Seattle, exchanging their dream of stardom for the all-too-mundane work of being just a regular kid again, at least for this year.

“The biggest gambles are taken by the first-timers whose parents sell furniture and borrow money from friends to bring their child to Hollywood without knowing what to expect,” said Joni Rodenbusch, the Oakwood’s entertainment account executive, whose desk is framed by a wall of publicity shots featuring kids with the well-oiled smugness of miniature adults. “For them, the potential for rip-off is great.”

Like the Seattle families who were swindled out of several thousand dollars by a shady local agent. “It was a nightmare,” Rodenbusch said. “They had no money left. (One) mother and her 10-year-old daughter had to sleep in a local church hall. They had to borrow money just to get home.”

Savage has a stern word of advice for child actors and their parents planning such a trip: Even though you get regular acting work back home in Tuscaloosa, make sure you have a good local agent. Because it’s a different world out here.

“They flock here without proper training or guidance, spend thousands of dollars to sit at the Oakwood and nothing happens.”

And yet at the Oakwood, long timers say, the scene is repeated time and again: Mothers scolding their children for lack of enthusiasm. And rebellious kids who tell their overbearing Moms: “Look, I don’t have to clean my room or do anything else I don’t want to do. Remember, I’m your meal ticket out here.”

But moms say they can’t be blamed for the pressure of their kids’ careers.

“For the months that you’re here, this is all you have, you have no other life,” said Kim Biel of Boulder, Colo., who accompanied her son and daughter, 9 and 13, on the audition trip. “The after-school soccer games and talking to friends over the back-yard fence back home, that life is gone. All you can do here is wait--sit around waiting for that telephone to ring with news of the next casting call.”

Add in that getting work is a crap shoot: For one, nobody knows how many pilots will be made. Four years ago, Savage said, 150 television pilots were made. This year only 53 are slated and most don’t call for child actors.

Even when an actor gets the audition nod, it’s anybody’s guess as to whether they’re searching for that wholesome 10-year-old girl or the street-talking Fresh Prince look-alike.

Such competition breeds tension--not among the kids, but among their mothers.

“It’s a feeding frenzy here,” said Vickie Cohen of Jacksonville, Fla. “Picture a scene of a bunch of mothers lounging out by the pool. When one of them gets up to go, the others chime out in unison ‘Where are you going?’ If you tell them you have an audition, they’ll ask ‘Oh, what’s it for?’ Of course, you then have to say ‘Oh geez, I can’t say.’

“Because if you do say, you’ll have five mothers scattering at once for the nearest pay phone, all to call their agents to complain ‘Why wasn’t my child cast on this?’ It’s hilarious and sad at the same time.”

And some auditions are exercises in the absurd. One teen-ager was asked to roll potato chips from her cheek into her mouth.

Consider the tryouts Brandon French has had over the last few days:

There was the commercial for plastic fighter toys that he had to play with, demonstrating exaggerated boyish delight while exclaiming “Take that, Skullmaster!”

Or the paint commercial in which he and another kid looked at a house painted in stripes and polka dots and had to laugh a perfectly innocent childish laugh. French had to think long and hard for his inspiration for that one.

Then there was the tryout for a snowboarding movie, for which he had to say just two lines: “Hey, Uncle Brandon, radical fall!” and “Ambient, dude!”

The consummate professional, French takes these embarrassing little moments in stride.

“It’s the business,” he says. “It’s what’s called for. You don’t ask questions. You do what you have to do to get work.”

But 11-year-old Phillip Carroll of Cleveland recently drew the line at using profanity.

“Phillip just has a hard time with that--he was brought up not to swear,” said mother Kim Carroll. “And so when the audition called for him to use the F-word, he asked the director if he could just say the word awesome .

“He didn’t get the job, but I was still very proud of him.”

In the end, many child actors say they have sacrificed little in their search for stardom. “Most of my friends complain they have nothing to do, that they have no life,” said 9-year-old Justin Biel. “With all those scripts to read, I always have something to do. I have another life from just being a kid.”

Still, like a lot of other moms, Kim Biel keeps the Hollywood experience in perspective.

“I find myself questioning my family values on almost a daily basis,” she said. “Are we doing the right things with these kids? . . . I tell my kids that Hollywood is not the real world. There’s so much hype, so many house-of-cards deals made on a smile and a promise.

“I tell them that back in Colorado with their brothers and sisters and their Dad, where their self-esteem isn’t based upon money and image, that’s the real world.”