It’s More Than Just a ‘Fluke’

My son Max has had four mothers in addition to me. There’ve been some extra dads, too--though one tried to kill him and one plunged over a cliff to his death. This rapid rise in my family’s size started only three years ago. At 7, Max went Hollywood.

My only contact with the silver screen had been to plunk down $7.50 at the Cineplex, and occasionally sneak a peek at a tabloid while on line at the supermarket. And Max had not displayed a spark of interest in acting. But one day he was “discovered.” A casting agent spotted him at school, and Max quickly moved from the playground to the soundstage. Within months, my previously anonymous child was the star of his first movie--”Searching for Bobby Fischer.”

Max loved being in front of the camera, working crazy hours, seeing himself on the screen. “I want to do it again,” he said as soon as shooting ended. And I suddenly had a new role--the stage mother, a female occupation second only to mother-in-law in the bad reputation department.

Any parent knows how hard it is to make the right choices for a kid--to pick a school, a summer camp, to decide when they can start wearing black. Suddenly Tinseltown has been added to the confusing mix of decisions my husband, Abe, and I have to make. I have to choose the right script for my child, when I’m not even sure he should be making movies at all.

But whenever the next hand-delivered script arrives from the William Morris Agency, it’s exciting. Never more than a day or two goes by before I begin to read it. “Do you like it, Mom?” Max will ask several times before I’ve even finished. “Any good?” my husband wants to know.

Soon some ancient maternal protective thing kicks in and I look for flaws--something wrong with the story or a character--so I can report, with great relief, “No. No good.” OK, so I passed on the role of Forrest Gump as a child (“Who’s going to believe this crazy story?” I said). But during that time, instead of making a movie, Max got to play a season of soccer with his team in Riverside Park.

There were times, however, when it was harder to say no.

Max was offered a part in a TV movie with Rosanna Arquette after the director saw him in “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” and I figured, hey, what the heck?

I weakened again when a young Italian director, Carlo Carlei--whose first movie, “Flight of the Innocent,” had just received a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign film--insisted on meeting Max. I’d passed on the script several times. Max’s agent was pushing very hard. We continued to say no--the time wasn’t right for any of us. Just meet him. No. He loves Max. No. “Blah, blah, blah,” as they say in Hollywood, and we scheduled a meeting.

On a blizzardy Sunday afternoon, Abe and Max left home (and a Giants game) to meet Carlo. They arrived to find no director, and no message. “That’s Hollywood, babe,” I said when they telephoned with the news.

But we didn’t know he was flying from Rome to New York for only one reason--to meet Max. Weather had delayed his flight, but upon landing at JFK he got in touch immediately. “Too late,” I whispered to my husband as he spoke to Carlo on the phone. “Skip it,” I insisted. “OK, we’ll see you soon,” I heard Abe say as he hung up.

Carlo Carlei was coming over.

An hour later, a very young person arrived at our door, bearing gifts. Chocolates for the mama, a watch for Max. He chatted with us for a while, speaking with contagious joy and passion about the movie he planned to make. Then, not knowing what else to say, I suggested Carlo spend some time alone with Max.

Ten, 15 minutes passed. Carlo returned. “I love this boy,” he gushed in heavily accented English. “I must have him in my movie.”

“Thank you, Carlo,” Abe and I said in unison, standing in our living room, wide-eyed.

After Carlo left, we found Max in his room playing with Legos.

“Did you like Carlo?”

“Yeah, a lot,” said Max. “I want to do his movie. He’s really nice. Please?”

And we decided to let Max make his second feature film, “Fluke” (though I’ll never know if Max wanted to make another movie or was just hoping for another watch). As soon as shooting began in Atlanta last June, Max got right back into the Hollywood thing without a hitch. One day he was going to fourth grade in New York, the next he was memorizing lines in a hotel room in Georgia, co-starring with Matthew Modine, Nancy Travis and Eric Stoltz. He had to learn to work with a big floppy golden retriever and to spend hours keeping still as synthetic snow practically buried him alive.

“I love this,” he said, as the retriever slobbered a kiss on his baby-food-covered face. The day after shooting ended, Max was back in fourth grade--happy, holes in his jeans, and still preferring stagehand status in class productions.

Since making “Fluke,” Max left fifth grade behind to play the lead in a “Hallmark Hall of Fame” TV movie called “Journey,” which stars Jason Robards and Max, and will be shown on CBS at Christmas. My husband and I sat on a sunny California set and watched the kid we know as a carefree jokester play a poor, troubled farm boy who has been abandoned by his mother and father. He did a heart-wrenching scene, then charged off to play a practical joke on one of the electricians in the crew.

“What were you thinking when you did that scene?” I asked him later. “Nothing. I just did it.” So much for Method acting. For Max, making movies is just another game he plays--and it certainly pays better than Nintendo.

As we flew home from Los Angeles in January--sitting in our movie-star first-class seats--Max looked over at me and said, “I’m 10 years old and have four movies in the can. Not bad.”

No, Max. Not bad at all.*