The Age-Old Tendencies of Tinseltown

So, we’re, like, sitting around the TV, watching one of those dramas about kids. Serious kids. Kids who talk dramatically. Like this. Kids who look like they’re 25 and are stunningly beautiful, but all the other stunningly beautiful kids treat them like dweebs, except when they’re having sex with their high school teachers or each other or each other’s parents. Because that’s how life is now. On TV. For kids.

So we wonder, because, compared to these TV kids, our kids are, like, children. We wonder: How does Hollywood come up with stuff like this? Do they know the first thing about real-life kids? If you didn’t already know the answer, you could have deduced it last week, in the wake of the lame Hollywood story of the year.

The short version is that the entertainment industry is up in arms over an actress-writer named Riley Weston, who until last Wednesday was the Next Big Thing. She’s 32, but she’s so young looking that she managed to con her lawyers, her agents and, Lord help her, her producers into thinking she was a whiz kid of 19.

Naturally--and this is probably her real offense-- these people now feel like idiots. (It takes a lot more than mere B.S. to get you this vilified in an industry where people lie the way birds warble at dawn.)

But who could fault them? Weston--who until last year was known as Kimberlee Kramer-- would bring her mom to meetings and dress in baggy pants and complain that the roles she was getting were “sucky.” How much more teenage-seeming could you get? The ruse landed her various parts on sitcoms, where she played teenagers for 12 years, nevermind that that’s about twice as long as an actual teen-hood lasts.

Of course, lying about your age is a Tinseltown tradition. It was only when Weston tried to branch into script writing, to peddle herself as literate, that things backfired. Turned out she wrote like someone who was 19 going on 33. And rather than wonder whether she actually might have been going on 33, the TV people jumped to the obvious TV conclusion: Hey! Sex-kitten child prodigy!

*

Before she could think of a way to ‘fess up to her real age without ruining her chances of ever playing a teenager again, Weston had a contract writing scripts for the new (and unusually well-written) WB network teen show, “Felicity.” Entertainment Weekly dubbed her one of Hollywood’s 100 Most Creative People. Disney’s Touchstone TV signed her to a six-figure writing contract. “Touchstone TV Inks Teen Scribe,” trilled Variety.

Finally, at the urging of tipsters, “Entertainment Tonight,” of all people, asked questions. Now, though she’s come clean and apologized profusely, Hollywood is shocked--shocked!--at her deed. Disney is rethinking her contract. Imagine TV, which co-produces “Felicity,” has pronounced itself “saddened by her dishonesty.”

Excuse me while I fall down laughing. This is the industry that gave us Zsa Zsa Gabor’s driver’s license. This is the town where people book face lifts in the tone with which my grandpap used to say, “shave and a haircut, and just a little off the top.” Eight years ago, when a local TV news station dialed his home thinking it was the Panamanian consulate, the son of a prominent Beverly Hills lawyer donned thick glasses and a fake mustache and went on the air as “Arturo Valdez,” an expert on Panamanian affairs. Trust me when I say no one in the industry was “saddened by his dishonesty.” The guy is now a real estate agent to the stars.

Nobody likes to be made a monkey of, but Hollywood was cruising for this. When people lie, it’s usually because they feel they have to; Riley Weston had good reason to have the feelings she did. The fact is, Hollywood has set itself up so that ya gotta have a gimmick. Mere talent isn’t enough. And you only need to take in an episode of “Dawson’s Creek” or “Beverly Hills, 90210” to know what gimmick the TV execs want.

*

Onstage and offstage, the pandering to old male fantasies about young women has acquired a runaway life of its own. Only in Hollywood would everyone from the bosses to the press corps buy into the notion of cute, sexy teenagers who churn out scripts full of marketable life wisdom. They were hoisted on their own ageist, sexist hype, and, as a parent of girls, I’m glad.

If I were writing this script, I’d give it a happy ending in which all the bad publicity would win Riley Weston a starring role. On the big screen. Like, as an adult. And in which some smart TV exec would make a mint with a lineup of hot, new shows that, for once, didn’t depict impressionable young girls as they aren’t.

*

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com