As a viewer of Law & Order:SVU, I’ve seen many of those interviews where the little kid (and some look really young) has to tell Olivia that “the bad man hurt me down there,” or “made me touch his thing.” Yikes. One cringes at such crimes, but I was wondering about the effect on and potential trauma to the child actors who might be finding out for the first time through this dialogue that there are bad people in the world who hurt little kids down there, etc. How does the director or parent handle this?
Not sure if this is the right forum. It’s about TV, sort of, but not the entertainment aspect. Move, if necessary.
I’m sure that there are child psychologists, etc, who are hired to counsel or coach children who have to say or act out certain things. However, a lot of these scenes are the result of movie magic via clever editing.
A very simple illustration of this is your example: “He touched me there.” During filming, an actor could be coached to look scared and say, “He touched me there.” and then point to her arm. Later, she is asked to point to the floor. Edited and spliced together, it seems as if she’s saying, “He touched me there” and then pointing to her groin. All the while, the actor is completely oblivious to the storyline.
In another scene, a child witnesses a man stabbing his mother. The camera freezes on him looking shocked and terrified. In reality, they filmed the stabbing scene completely separately from the reaction shot, and the child’s reaction is captured with innocuous prompts, "How would you act if a bee just stung you? or “How about liver and onions for lunch?”
In fact, most movies/tv shows are created via heavy editing. Filming is done completely out of sequence of the storyline, so that it’s quite possible that two actors have to film their first lovemaking scene before they film their first meeting scene. Actors are to repeat the same scene over and over again, so that they capture several different angles with different lighting. Actors of all ages are filmed in front of blue screens, and made to react to imaginary things such as t.rexes and aliens, which are created separately and spliced in.
This. If you watch TV or film where children - usually really young children, but sometimes into pre-teens - are in danger, being assaulted verbally or witnessing something awful - you’ll see that there are two or more sequences being edited together. The child is not really seeing, hearing or participating in what the audience sees.
This is even more evident in non-US productions (like Lillyhammer) subject to European sensibilities about such things.
For instance, you might see the Bad Guy from behind, yelling at the kid, intercut with face shots of the Bad Guy. In the two shot, the actor might actually be saying, straight out “Now look scared! Now flinch! Now cover your face!” In the close-up, shot solo or with a stand-in you don’t see, he delivers the real, four-lettered, smoking, threatening dialogue that’s edited over the other shot. The child actor never hears or sees anything worse than, oh, a gaffer dropping a light stand on his foot.
I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I seem to recall Linda Blair was majorly fucked in the head after filming The Exorcist. I think she had to go through counseling.
Not necessarily arguing (some directors are definitely - or were, in prior eras - known for abusing cast of all ages to perfect their vision) but I’d like to see a cite that pins this down instead of leaving it in the realm of promotional BS. It sounds a bit William Castle-ish, like having a nurse on standby in the lobby etc.
Not true. There was a bit of a media panic when the movie came out over a young girl being in such a frightening movie, that she must be mentally scarred by it, but it was pure tabloid journalism. Blair herself says she didn’t really have any idea what was going on in the movie. All of her “possessed” dialogue was done in voice over, and most of the really disturbing actions were done with body doubles. She was mildly hurt by the rig used in the levitation scene, but has always denied any mental issues stemming from making the movie, which she generally recalls very positively.
Linda Blair couldn’t have possibly been too scarred by The Exorcist, considering the fact that she willingly came back and did a parody of it in Repossessed(which I seem to remember loving when I was a kid, but looks like it has really bad reviews… hmmm)
I don’t know about the kids in episodic TV like L&0, but a few years back Anjelica Huston adapted the novel Bastard Out of Carolina (involving physical and sexual child abuse) for TV (Showtime?). Jena Malone played the little girl Bone (the character was 11 and Malone was roughly that age), and Rod Eldard played her abusive step-father. The behind-the-scenes interviews broke down how they handled the physical abuse (I don’t remember if they addressed the sexual abuse, but that scene was pretty violent so it may have been all rolled together).
Basically, Eldard and Malone got to know each other pretty well and early on in production got into the practice of play-fighting, so that Malone would be used to that kind of handling and would be comfortable with it. She herself is interviewed reassuring viewers that she knew it was pretend and that the fake blood she had to hold in her mouth tasted like mint and she was okay with everything.
I remember this because I only saw this behind-the-scenes stuff on Youtube maybe 10 years after I had seen the movie, and I had spent those 10 years periodically flashing back to the movie (which was really intense) and wondering if Jena Malone had been treated okay.
If you watch Whitest Kids U Know (not that it compares to a lot of what else is being discussed here) they do this a lot. They have plenty of scenes with kids or even in classrooms and their edits tend to be a bit rough and easy to pick out, but it’s a skit show on par with Kids In The Hall, they’re not spending tens of thousands of dollars to make the edits seamless.
Also, SAG rules require that parents be allowed on the set, so the kid’s mother or father is right there. Also, while it might look like a room on screen, in actuality it is a set with lots of people standing around. The action might be filmed in little snippets to get different camera angles, and often there is a significant break between shots.
After the Twilight Zone movie there was a lot more attention about protecting kids working in smoke, and I expect this kind of scene is treated similarly, though I have no direct experience with this kind of scene.
An 11-year old would clearly know play-acting from the real thing. I’m thinking more of the teeny kids I see on L&O:SVU who look like they’re about 5, saying lines like, “He hurt my mommy!” which would be pretty hard to wrap a happy context around. I’m sure SAG has it covered and the parents are there, etc., but geez, imagine a kid doing this as a pre-schooler and then catching a re-run 12 years later when they’re 16 and seeing what the show was REALLY about. “Yikes, when I said ‘He hurt me down there,’ I thought I was talking about <whatever>, not Down There!” :eek: There have been episodes where fairly young children had dialogue wherein they described parents being murdered in great detail. Maybe the thought that those residuals will put the kid through college down the road is some compensation.
I cringe too, and watching those episodes really hits a nerve with me, I fail to see the entertainment value in tv shows that resort to renacting violent perverted crimes week after week. so what that the kid actor is protected from the content of the script, the viewing audience still gets to get upclose with the “victim” .
Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998) has a horrific scene in which the father carefully explains to his small son how it feels to be a child molester. I’ve read the two actors were filmed separately, and the boy didn’t know what was being discussed.
Well, one alternative way to look at it is a lot of abuse/assault victims find shows like Law & Order: SVU to be really validating of their own experiences. The crimes are treated like the horrible things they are, and they happen in a magical world where perpetrators are actually brought to justice and where someone actually believes your story. It’s almost as if SVU is a team of superheroes and you’re rooting for them to save the day.
I’m not saying everyone should love it, I’m just saying, not everyone views it as exploitative.
You should also realize that these kids audition for these roles. Their parents are there at the audition and the requirements of the role are known before you ever audition.
It’s not like the get a kid waiting inline for ice cream and say “Do you want to be on TV!”