Having 12 kids does require steel nerves

A movie set is like an intense yet boring summer camp. There’s a camaraderie that arises from a cast and crew working and practically living together intimately for a few months. Friendships, rivalries and yes, even affairs unfold. But at the same time, there’s the endless, stultifying waiting for the lights to be right, the sound, the set and the myriad other elements that must all come together to get a shot on film.

Cast and crew do their best to keep busy during the down time, taking up knitting, crosswords, gossip to wile away the dragging hours until someone calls “action” again. But on a movie set with a dozen kids running through it, action is always calling. Here, the camp doesn’t get boring. The noise level reaches the level of a birthday bash at Chuck E. Cheese and the time is passed with magic tricks, skateboards, Nerf bats and basketball in the house. Welcome to the wild world of “Cheaper by the Dozen.”

The 20th Century Fox movie, with a budget of $35 million to $40 million, opens on Christmas Day opposite Universal’s bigger-budget, higher-visibility “Peter Pan.” But Fox says it isn’t worried about the competition from another family film, noting they are marketing “Cheaper by the Dozen” to a broad general audience rather than targeting children or families. They’re hoping it can play to a Steve Martin audience, like the one that made his “Bringing Down the House” a $133-million smash for Disney.

The movie is not, the publicists repeat not, a remake of the popular 1950 film of the same name starring Clifton Webb, which was itself based on a beloved memoir by Frank Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey. The new “Cheaper” simply took the title, and the idea of having 12 kids, and created a contemporary version with new plot and characters. This time around, Martin and Bonnie Hunt play Tom and Kate Baker, the heads of the clan. Piper Perabo, Tom Welling and Hilary Duff play the three oldest children (Nora, Charlie and Lorraine Baker, respectively) while Ashton Kutcher has a small role as Hank, Perabo’s boyfriend who is despised by the rest of the family. The other kids in the cast range in age from 5 to 14.

The family lives a happy small-town life until Tom, a high school football coach, gets offered his dream job coaching a Big Ten team in Chicago. At the same inopportune moment, Kate sells her first book and heads out on tour to promote it. Between the move and the conflicting challenges of each parent’s career, the family’s life is thrown into a state of upheaval. The film’s director, Shawn Levy (“Big Fat Liar,” “Just Married”), hopes the results are as comical as they are poignant. He modeled the film after Ron Howard’s 1989 family comedy “Parenthood,” which also starred Martin as the head of a family on the brink of chaos.

“I’ve been getting these parts since I was 20,” Martin joked.

When it came to casting the littler Bakers, Levy wanted children who were new to film. As a result, about half of the kids have never been in front of the camera before. “It has created a massive amount of chaos on set,” Levy said, “but the result is honest performances that one often has trouble getting from kid actors who are so indoctrinated with the tricks of being a kid actor.”

Levy employed his own set of tricks to work with them. “With kids, rarely does it get better after five, six, 10 takes,” he said. “Every time the kids say the lines, it’s that much less fresh.” Instead, he took to shooting the rehearsals to catch them at their most natural. In choreographing the chaos on camera, Levy ran plays like, well, a football coach.

“I look at the shot and position each kid in their own zone, and give them a task -- whether it’s break dancing or trying to puncture an inflatable doll with a hatchet, whatever it may be,” he explained. “They can be as insane as they want as long as they stay in their zone.”

His first glimmer of the challenge of working with a posse of kids came at their first rehearsal. “Several of the kids got bored after 20 minutes and wanted to walk out,” Levy recalled. “So what are you going to do? They’re 5.” Just corralling the bodies was a full-time job. A massive assistant director and a raft of production assistants were needed to get a few seconds of uninterrupted quiet on the set. A visiting reporter, watching the on-set bedlam overheard one exhausted PA murmur, “Oh, the humanity,” before saying loudly, in a cheerful voice, “Come on, you little monsters.”

Levy knew the feeling. “At the end of each day, we [the crew and I] can’t get to that glass of white wine fast enough,” he confessed.

But when things got too out of hand, there was always one last resort. “ ‘Don’t make me call Mom in’ is a phrase I often use,” Levy admitted. “I’m slightly ashamed of it, but it works.”

A looser Martin

To be fair, it’s hard to expect order from a bunch of kids when the setting was as inviting as this one. The working two-story house set on a stage in Culver City was packed with toys, games, knickknacks and snacks at every turn. Hallways were large enough to skateboard through. A basketball hoop was set up in the foyer. Production designer Nina Ruscio said the place looked lived-in after five minutes on the set, calling the kids “a natural distressing crew.”

The kids weren’t the only ones helping out. On a day without children in sight, Levy filmed Martin in a reaction shot. Between takes, director and star shot hoops in the foyer, attempting ever more difficult baskets from various spots around the set. Martin has a reputation for reticence with the press, appearing as private off-camera as he is unfettered on; the juxtaposition can be jarring. With the kids, however, he was openly delighted and delightful in his interactions. Behaving more like a fun dad than a famous jokester, he listened to their stories, showed them magic tricks and played games between takes.

Hunt, who stars in her own family-style ABC sitcom, found the big family atmosphere comforting, because she was raised in a similar environment herself. “I’m 6 of 7,” she said. “In fact, that was my name for a few years.”

Hunt said she found working with the children refreshing. “When you’re around children every day at work you have a different perspective on your job. It really is pretend, and it is playful.” Martin was equally charmed: “I love these young kids. They’re really quite quick, fun, genuine.”

His method of relating with the kids involved letting them go at their own pace. “I try to not be too in a hurry, I stay back a little bit and let it happen naturally, otherwise they’re afraid of me for the whole three months, and I’m afraid of them,” said Martin, who has worked with kids numerous times, including “Parenthood” and the “Father of the Bride” movies. “You can’t force it.”

Play time

In those surroundings, the kids felt comfortable sharing their ideas with the grown-ups, as on one afternoon last summer when they were assembled for an interrogation scene. As they stood at attention in height order, Martin walked behind them, looking for the perpetrator of a practical joke involving meat and underwear (don’t ask).

During a break, Jacob Smith (who plays Jake Baker) and Alyson Stoner (Sarah Baker) came up with a funny bit for Martin -- to pass his hand over their heads as if it were a lie detector, beeping wildly as he waved it over the culprit’s head. Martin relayed the suggestion to Levy, while giving full credit to the kids. Levy loved it; the lie detector went in.

Such respect from the adults was a plus, but the biggest draw for the young actors was the chance to play together every day. Smith got to show off his skateboarding skills in the house. “I’m usually doing movies about like I’m sick or have an evil power, so this is just fun to be a kid and stuff,” noted the young actor, who had a role in “Dragonfly.” Though 6-year-old Blake Woodruff (Mike Baker) found it hard to calm down on command, “the pluses is you get to hang upside down, and that’s pretty fun, and you get to rappel out of the windows.”

The older on-screen siblings had a blast too. Duff (TV’s and movies’ “Lizzie Maguire”) loved going to the set because there was never a dull -- or quiet -- moment. A youngest child herself, she relished the chance to play with the little kids.

Welling (the teen dream Clark Kent of “Smallville”), whose top three reasons for choosing “Cheaper by the Dozen” as his first film were “Steve Martin, Steve Martin and Steve Martin,” loved playing with the twins, Brent and Shane Kinsman (Nigel and Kyle Baker). “They aren’t actors, they’re 5-year-old boys. The last thing in the world they wanted was to sit still. I relate to that; I’m still like that.”

One of Welling’s favorite shooting days was when the whole family had to film reaction shots while having scrambled eggs blasted at their faces (don’t ask).

Perabo (“Coyote Ugly”) had her own favorite moment that summed up life on the set. While on location, she was impressed to see Liliana Mumy (Jessica Baker) “walking through the dust, Hula-Hooping with seven Hula Hoops and eating an ice cream cone.

“I thought, ‘This is really a kid movie: smeared ice cream cones, Hula Hoops and dirt.’ ”