It’s not child’s play spending a superstar’s salary

Rob Long asks: should young stars really have access to huge amounts of money?

Should young stars like Justin Bieber have access to millions of dollars? (Mario Anzuoni / Reuters)

The hardest part about casting a television show or movie, as anyone who has done either will tell you, is casting the children’s roles.

Casting children shouldn’t be complicated. You simply assess which child is the most adorable and give him or her the role. The tricky part, of course, is that every child comes accessorised with a parent, and the kind of parent who not only allows a child to work in the entertainment business but actively encourages it is, as you might imagine, a handful.

The child actor, in my experience, is mostly a mature and professional employee. The child actor’s parent, on the other hand, is usually a highly irrational and tantrum-prone creature. In other words, it’s the child actor’s parent, and not the actual child, who is the most childish.

Once, after a long casting session – we were looking for a four-year-old child – I heard the mother of one of the unsuccessful auditioners for the role take her toddler by the wrist and say in a cutting and merciless voice: “Mommy is very disappointed in you! She brought you all the way to the studio and when you got into the room with the producers you didn’t even shine.”

What on Earth does a child of four know about “shining” or auditioning or the requirements of show business? Nothing, of course. Young children don’t know what being famous means, and they certainly don’t know what earning tens of thousands of dollars per episode adds up to.

And this is the problem. It’s hard – even for those of us who write and cast roles for children, despite knowing how awful their parents are going to be – to accept that a child might earn millions of dollars a year and that the parents will maintain a studious and careful disinterest in the piles of cash that accrue during the child’s peak earning years.

There is a law in California called the “Jackie Coogan Law” that protects child performers from their own parents. When a child in Hollywood starts to make enormous sums of money, the temptation to loot the tyke’s earnings must be immeasurable.

Jackie Coogan, for any of you who are somewhat shy of your 90th birthday, was a child actor in the early days of silent film. He appeared most famously with Charlie Chaplin in the 1921 masterpiece, The Kid, and near the height of his career was worth about $65 million (Dh238m) in today's dollars.

His parents, according to the lawsuit he filed against them when he was 24, spent it all. They didn’t save any of it, or put any of it into a trust – they squandered it as if it was their own.

The result – other than a life of hard scrabble and financial insecurity for Coogan – was the California Child Actor’s Bill, colloquially known as “the Jackie Coogan Law” in Hollywood. It requires a studio to set aside a certain percentage of a child actor’s earnings in a trust that’s out of reach of their parents and other interested parties.

All of which is a good thing. Mostly, anyway. The parents who berate their toddlers outside of a casting session are probably best kept on a very short legal leash.

Although when you consider the vast sums that, say, Justin Bieber, the Canadian-born pop music heartthrob, earns – and what he spends on his lavishly self-indulgent lifestyle – it’s hard not to wonder if the 21- year-old megastar might not, in the long run, be better off if his parents had spent all of his money.

Or, for that matter, if Lindsay Lohan – now 28 – might have been spared the past five or six years of legal trouble, addiction struggles and general personal mayhem if there wasn’t any money in the bank to fuel her misadventures. Being flat broke tends to clarify one’s choices. It’s awfully hard to careen down a Miami Beach street in a bright yellow Lamborghini, as Justin Bieber did, if it’s owned by your embezzling father along with everything else your money can buy. And don’t get me started on Britney Spears.

The Coogan Law, which was designed to protect the earnings of young stars from their greedy parents, has the unintended consequence of making certain that young stars – never the most cautious or thrifty types to begin with – have unfettered access to all of their money at any time. Maybe it’s better for everyone if the kids are put to work earning vast sums of cash for their parents to spend, as Jackie Coogan’s parents did almost a century ago.

As Coogan’s mother said at the trial: “No promises were ever made to give Jackie anything. Every dollar a kid earns before he is 21 belongs to his parents. Jackie will not get a cent of his earnings.”

If only Justin Bieber’s parents had the same attitude. Think of all the things we might have been spared, including the sight of a 21-year-old driving a chrome-plated Maserati.

That car would be so much more acceptable if it was in his father’s garage.

Rob Long is a Hollywood writer and producer

On Twitter: @rcbl