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Showbiz Kids


Showbiz Kids
Alex Winter, the young actor whose onscreen work pretty much came to a standstill after the Bill and Ted franchise, has had some success behind the camera and really impresses as the writer and director of an intimate, moving, and surprising look at the trials and tribulations of being a child star in 2020's Showbiz Kids, a documentary which offers viewers to form their own opinions about questions that are posed.

This has always been an endlessly fascinating subject on which everyone has different opinions, the most primary of them are addressed here and every viewer of this HBO film will probably see something different but this is what this reviewer saw.

Was being in this business the child's idea or were they forced into it? The impression I got here is that Todd Bridges (Different Strokes) and the late Cameron Boyce, former Disney star who died at the age of 20, wanted to be in this business and never had any interest in doing anything else. Henry Thomas (ET), Evan Rachel Wood, Milla Jovovich, Wil Wheaton (Stand By Me) seemed to have had no interest in stardom and were shoved into it by their parents, but there is no doubt that everyone who watches this film will not feel the same way. I also got the impression that even though she wasn't forced into the business, Mara Wilson (Mrs. Doubtfire) became uncomfortable with the trappings of stardom and sometimes longed for escape. The parallels of the career of Jovovich and Brooke Shields were also a little eerie.

We get a balanced look at child stars and beginning child stars and their parents as we watch Jada Pinkett share the joys and fears of her children following in her footsteps. We also meet the mother of a young newcomer named Marc Slater and a young girl named Demi Singleton and her mother at the beginning of their careers (both Slater and Singleton do have IMDB pages). And again, Slater appears to be a little confused and bored by it all. His blank expression during a session with an acting coach speaks volumes. Singleton, on the other hand, is focused and determined and doesn't want to do anything else.

Though the film does eventually become a bit of a downer as the subject turns to the sexual abuse that child stars must endure (more males than females believe it or not) and how drugs and crime ended many of their lives before the age of 21, this film was a sad but riveting experience that will probably affect individual viewers differently.