Babies on the Set, Laws on the Books

After five years of working with babies on the set of “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” nurse Laura Simmons was troubled last month when year-old twins were brought to work on the show at 8 a.m. and didn’t go home until 9 p.m. The law required that the babies be on the set for no more than 4 1/2 hours.

For a recent cable movie, a mother says that she brought her 3-month-old triplets to work as extras at 10 a.m. and said she was allowed to take them home at 7 p.m.; the babies were limited by law to two hours on the set.

But these incidents are trifling compared with the alleged use of premature month-old twins on the top-rated “ER” last year. The babies, born two months early, were smeared with cream cheese and jelly and used to depict a live birth scene, according to Paul Petersen, a former child actor who appeared as Jeff on “The Donna Reed Show” and is now a children’s advocate trying to get the entertainment industry to adopt a set of tougher guidelines to protect infants.

“They were still four weeks short of their due date, and they were brought in to work,” he said. The nurse caring for the infants on the set lodged a complaint with his watchdog organization, A Minor Consideration. “If you have any feeling whatsoever for infants, you would see that this is sick,” he adds.

In theory, babies who work in the entertainment industry are well protected under California law, but in practice they are subject to the demands of production companies working under tight schedules and parents eager to push them into the business. Nurses and children’s rights activists say that weeks-old infants who were born prematurely--still fragile and highly susceptible to infection--are commonly used to depict newborns, and twins and triplets are often made to work in back-to-back shifts, resulting in up to 13-hour days on the set.

“We’ve done a lot in terms of enforcement, but the industry has to come around here,” said Rick Rice, a spokesman for California’s Department of Industrial Relations. “There are child labor laws across the board, but it’s a very complex issue, especially when you usually have parents standing there saying, ‘OK, sure. Whatever.’ ”

“Since I came into the business 22 years ago, it has definitely gotten worse,” said Rana Platz-Petersen, Petersen’s wife, who is a nurse at CBS and a business representative for Local 767 of Studio First Aid, part of the industry’s largest union. “It used to be that if the call time was 10 a.m., we couldn’t come through the gate until 10 a.m. Now the parents bring them in a half-hour, 45 minutes early. . . . They stay four and five hours. I have nurses calling me and saying, ‘The baby’s still here.’ ‘

“ER” was investigated last year by the state Division of Labor Standards and Enforcement for allegedly working a set of 5-month-old twins for six hours. The show was not cited or fined, Rice said, because it was unclear if the studio lot legally constituted the workplace.

Productions generally provide a trailer near the set with cribs where the babies wait with their parents, nurses and guardians before their scenes. Critics say the sets, strewn with cables and equipment and filled with the frenzied activity of shooting, are unsafe environments for infants.

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A spokesman for “ER” said the allegation of using premature infants was false. “We never knowingly used premature babies, and it is the policy of the show [executives] as responsible parents and producers to not use premature babies,” David Stapf said.

But the attitude of industry professionals toward infants is often callous, reflected in a request by a production coordinator on CBS’ “Chicago Hope” in 1994 to sedate an infant in order to depict an anesthetized baby for an episode. Production workers called the 20th Century Fox medical department to see if this would be possible.

The medical department immediately refused, and fired off a memo signed by Janet Fisher, the supervisor, that said: “It is not advised by this department that any infant or child be sedated by any means for nonmedical purposes. There is an element of danger in sedating an infant or child at any time.”

Fisher told a local trade newspaper that she was “really astonished. . . . They thought that perhaps if a pediatrician was standing by that it would be all right. But it’s never appropriate to sedate a child for any nonmedical purpose.” A spokeswoman for “Chicago Hope” said the production staff is on hiatus and cannot be reached for comment.

Petersen, who has spent years trying to raise industry awareness on children’s issues, submitted a set of protective guidelines in April to the Labor/Management Safety Committee. Co-chairman Carmine Palazzo said the guidelines are under consideration, but he didn’t know when the committee, an industrywide coalition that has adopted new safety regulations during the last decade, would vote on the guidelines.

Among the proposals under consideration is a proviso that twins and triplets be treated as individuals with separate records of their arrival and departure times and one that stipulates that the use of prematurely born infants for birthing scenes is “strongly discouraged.” Television and movie productions typically use multiple-birth babies so they can alternate children if one is cranky.

“People have known for decades that kids are getting the raw end of this deal, and they refuse to fix it when the fix is so simple,” Petersen said. “The rules are fudged so often that it’s become standard practice. It’s going to stop.”

But the shows involved in the instances of alleged disregard of labor laws say there was either a misunderstanding or a misrepresentation of events. Tim Johnson, a producer on “Dr. Quinn,” insists that his show goes well beyond the demands of the law regarding infants, providing a hotel room for babies to rest with their parents if one baby works in the morning and another in the afternoon.

Simmons, the nurse on the “Quinn” set, agreed that the family-oriented series is generally considerate of babies’ welfare, providing them with a nurse beyond the age requirement of up to six months, but said that overworking occurred in this instance. “The first twin was on the clock from 8 to 12. The second baby was on a ‘will notify’--meaning, they will use him later--and they didn’t put the second baby on the clock until 5 in the afternoon. That baby worked until 9 o’clock at night,” she said. “When I told them, they were mortified. I said, ‘Excuse me, do you realize what you did to these babies?’ ”

Under California law, babies from 16 days to 6 months old may be on a set for a maximum of two hours and in front of the cameras for 20 minutes; babies 6 months to 2 years may be on a set for a maximum of four hours, and in front of the cameras for two. But a California Labor Department memo recently interpreted the law to allow an extra half-hour for lunch for each child. Each child must be accompanied by a parent or guardian, and a studio representative must be present to oversee the child’s welfare.

Petersen, nurses and producers say that the fault largely lies with parents, who are seduced by the entertainment business, and casting agencies, which scour hospitals looking for parents of preemies or multiple births.

“The parents are so enamored with the set that their eyes are not on their children all day long,” Simmons said. “It’s like Disneyland for them.”

Petersen said she was told of one mother who said she was instructed to keep her twins up all night so they would sleep soundly during a scene, then was upset after they were startled awake in the scene by a loud noise. But she refuses to talk on the record. “She said to me, ‘Well, if I complain, won’t that jeopardize the children’s careers?’ That was what she said--we’re talking babes in arms.”