A Hostage of Fortune — Child Stars Yesterday and Today
The recent death of Diana Serra Cary didn’t make too many headlines but her life story should have. A child star in silent films of the 20s, she appeared in her first film aged just two and a half and was signed to a $1.5m contract by the time she was three. The fortune however was not hers. Her parents both pushed her to a punishing workload including doing her own dangerous stunts and then torpedoed her career by falling out with the studio which then cancelled her contract. By the late 20s the family was broke.
There are of course many more recent examples of similar stories. These include the well-known — at age 15, Home Alone’s Macaulay Culkin took legal action to remove his parents’ names from his Trust Fund and have them replaced by an Executor from his 18th birthday; Diffr’rent Strokes star Gary Coleman successfully sued his parents and financial advisor for appropriating his earnings. There are also lesser known cases too but with familiar themes — 17-year-old US Olympic athlete Dominique Moceanu successfully sued for independence from her parents who she accused of controlling and abusive behaviour as well as squandering her fortune.
What is at the heart of all this of course is the extraordinary sums paid to kids at the top of their game. It’s this that creates the hunger in adults. No child at that stage would naturally have it. Even back in the 1930s, stars like Shirley Temple and Jackie Coogan earned mouth-watering figures (at their coming of age these were estimated at $3.2m and $4m respectively) so it was a shock to both to find that the amounts they actually saw were just a tiny faction after their parents had ‘managed’ them away. Today, Modern Family’s Ariel Winter is reportedly earning $100,000 per episode which is certainly relevant context to her successful battle to win control of her earnings from her reportedly abusive mother in 2014 in favour of guardianship and control by her elder sister.
It might seem that victims have no protection. That’s not so today and certainly not in Hollywood. The California Child Actor’s Bill was created way back in 1939 and requires parents to put aside 15% of all earnings into an account that only the child can access from their 18th birthday. Leaving 85% unprotected may seem imbalanced but the original rationale was logical — that this was to cover taxes and fees etc. It was never for the living expenses of parents.
This legislation is also known as ‘Coogan’s Law’ because it was instigated by legal action taken by Jackie Coogan against his parents. So an 80-year-old law applied in one state (albeit the most relevant one in terms of Hollywood and Silicon Valley) in one country appears to be the main bulwark against abuse in an environment that has changed beyond all recognition.
This change matters. The legislation has been updated to cover what we would now call ‘working conditions’ such as limitations on working hours and specific bars to work impacting education. There have also been extensions of scope (including one as recently as 2004) beyond performers (actors, dancers, singers and comedians) to a far broader range of areas such as writers, composers and choreographers — and even Intellectual Property Rights. Whilst the original legislation primarily related to film stars within the old Studio system then, it is no longer the case.
Even these updated roles and terms still have the look of ‘old school’ entertainment in a world where much of the big noise and big money is playing by altogether different rules. It’s not on TV or in California or managed via studios — income is not from studio contracts but from ads and sponsorships generated solely by the size of an audience. It lives on social platforms especially YouTube and Instagram which now enable children to become influeners (or kidfluencers if you will) and reap significant incomes from sponsorship — a revenue stream like nothing that could have been foreseen even 15 years ago let alone 80.
Whilst most of us will recognise Macauley Culkin or Shirley Temple, there are other names that may be less familiar but are more relevant today. Ryan Kaji (although he’s more usually known just as Ryan — a mark of his Kylie and Madonna level of fame) has headline-making income. The 9-year-old is reported to have made $26 million in 2019 from sponsorship deals including one with Walmart on content presented via his Ryan’s World (formerly ToysReview) channel that has total views of over 37 billion.
Clearly this is big business and some people have recognised the need to reflect it in protective legislation. In 2018, a bill to amend the Coogan Act under California law to include “employment of a minor in social media advertising” passed into law but in a very watered-down version that reflected the difficulty in payments that are made in kind rather than solely in currency. Moreover, many arguments about the responsibility for ensuring fair play and protection head into the perennial cul-de-sac argument of the platforms — i.e. “we don’t produce the content; we are merely the platform on which it’s published.” This is further exacerbated by the question of jurisdiction of course — YouTube may be Silicon Valley based but the producers of content are generally not.
In fact, in this instance the issue is even more splintered because, although advertising deals are done via YouTube, sponsorship deals are normally done outside of the platforms directly with the parents of the starring kids. Just like back in the 30’s then, the parents have a hold on the purse strings.
These parents include Bee and Josh Fisher whose Fisher Family Feed is a successful Instagram channel in which the couple invite viewers to look through a window to their life. The three kids play wth their two nine stone dogs as they travel around their Californian home and beyond in their RV. It produces cute pictures and uplifting stories that’s for sure. Its success has made the family well known faces and the kids of course take centre stage. In a Wired interview in 2019, mum Bee addressed the question of how much of this is simply filming a natural (play)day when she said “if there’re days they’re totally not into it, they don’t have to be. Unless it’s paid work. Then they have to be there. We always have lollipops on those days.” That surely is the crux. When the impulse to film a few family moments migrates to a business, the line between the old world and the new one has the potential to become blurred.
The worst headlines include the case of Machelle Hobson who was arrested and charged with mistreating her 7 adopted children in coercing them to perform on her YouTube channel. The sickening list of charges included starving, beating and pepper spraying. Police were alerted to the abuse by Hobson’s adult daughter. The children told police that they were punished if they did not remember their lines. Police reported that the children were malnourished and had been withdrawn from school for a period of years. Hobson’s ‘Fantastic Adventures’ channel attracted some 800,000 subscribers and so was lucrative at least until attention from Hobson’s arrest led to it firstly being stripped of revenue and then closed. Hobson didn’t complete her trial as she died of a brain injury sustained whilst in county jail.
Hobsons’s abuse happened behind the camera but Mike and Hannah Martin’s YouTube channel is a quite different case. Originally set up to show family pranks ‘just for fun’, the pair upped the ante to the point where Mike Martin was seen to encourage his kids to abuse their younger siblings often to the point of injury. It seems downright odd that this should be openly shown but maybe it is a measure both of the sheer scale of YouTube and the pressure to become more extreme — pranksters have of course injured themselves or even died in this pursuit. These however were kids with few — if any — choices. With 176m views and 750,000 subscribers at the height of their popularity, the Martins clearly had enough reasons to continue. The alarm was raised by Philip Defranco in 2017 when he posted a video compilation of clips which itself generated over 3 million views. In August 2017, the Martins were sentenced to five years of supervised probation for two counts of neglect of a minor.
For YouTube this is another example of the abuse of its platform and in the US the company has agreed to work with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to find users who are abusing children. It commits to terminating any channel run by those convicted. For many this will be seen as too little too late.
Of course these appalling stories are the exceptions. Most parents take seriously their obligations to manage the business side of their kids ‘play.’ And it is generally seen exactly that way. The kids are not working or performing.
In its purest sense this may be so. A kid ‘unboxing’ a new toy and trying it out is playing — the ‘review’ element simply comes from the impact that that experience and opinion has when seen by millions of viewers. This assumes of course that such opinion and experience is genuine rather than the result of sponsorship. As the children grow older this idea that play can become a lucrative career is understandably enticing and best illustrated by a 2017 survey by First Choice in which Brit 6–17 year olds voted overwhelmingly for YouTuber as their career choice — it was six times more popular than becoming a Lawyer and three times more than becoming a Nurse. In the face of such evidence it would be hard to argue that many kids need much convincing.
It is likely that many of today’s social media child stars have plans to become tomorrow’s mainstream stars. In this regard, YouTube and Instagram are increasingly being seen as just part of a wider media ambition as evidenced by Justin Bieber and Dua Lipa both of whom started out on YouTube (at 12 and 14 respectively) but have now achieved success in more traditional old school channels. Less well known so far but likely following a similar path — via a TV series — is Matthew David Norris (or Matty B) who started out doing fun covers but whose first ‘proper’ single achieved 87m views and whose YouTube channel surpassed a billion visits by 2014 when he was 11. His dad and manager is Blake Morris who has overseen this transitioning from 7-year-old funster to 17-year-old corporation (MattyB LLC owns trademarks in dance/music entertainment/education services, streaming of audio/video and merch such as baseball caps/sweatshirts etc.) As his son approaches adulthood, the question of autonomy and independence presumably looms larger; he claims to ask his son every year if this is something he enjoys doing and how he feels about being MattyB? Any negative answer, says Morris senior, would mean that the YouTube career stops.
What the Hobson case showed is that sometimes the children aren’t given any sort of choice. What was true in 2017 was true in the 20s. Diana Serra Cary’s parents insisted that their child was simply having fun and that she didn’t know it was work but the child star herself, when grown, put paid to that convenient myth — “it was work. We went to work at 8 AM and worked 6 days a week like everyone else. Why would I think it’s playing? I didn’t know what playing was.” Perhaps this theme of coming to know what you don’t know is telling — Macaulay Culkin similarly defines part of his realisation of the unreal treadmill he was on came when he asked to be allowed to go to school.
In the end what is remarkable about many of these stories is how people come out the other side. The unique mix of the upside of fame and fortune with the downside of entrapment and servitude could break some people. Today though, Macaulay Culkin is keen to tell the world to ‘stop acting so freaking shocked that I’m relatively well adjusted.’ For a man whose struggles with what many see as the definitive ‘pushy parents’ led to a well-publicised crash, he is very clear — “I’ve had a lot of fun without being happy and I’ve been happy without necessarily having fun. You can have it all but just don’t confuse the two.” Similarly, after her film and Vaudeville career as a child star had dried up, Diana Serra Cary educated and reinvented herself as a film historian and writer, wife and mother. As if this wasn’t remarkable enough, there is one other lesser known name behind the lobbying that resulted in the Coogan Law — Diana Serra Cary. Let’s hope that any victims of today’s childhood manipulation have just a fraction of the extraordinary fortitude and courage of this woman.
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Sources
Emma Grey-Ellis, Wired, Feb 2019
Claudia Koerner, BuzzFeed, November 2019
Katie Mettler, Washington Post, November 2019
Julia Carrie Wong, The Guardian, April 2019
Ryan D’Agostino, Esquire, Feb 2020
The Week Obituaries (including quotes from the New York Times), 2020
YouTubers by Chris Stokel-Walker (Canbury Press), 2019
Destiny Lopez, MyBankTracker/Business Insider, 2014
Yahoo Movies, 2016
Babaygag.com, 2017
Katherine Webb, cheatsheet.com, June 2018
Bryn Elise Sandberg, Hollywood Reporter, August 2018
Wikipedia
