Sometimes the process of making a movie can be fun, collaborative, and interesting, but not every on-set experience is bound to be a good one. Especially while making coming-of-age films when many young actors have not yet adapted to the Hollywood scene, there are growing pains to be had and lessons to be learned about becoming a star in the spotlight. Along with mishaps and mistakes made by actors on the sets of coming-of-age movies, there are also plenty of dark behind-the-scenes details about the films being made as well.
Whether it is having real troubled teens playing that same archetype in a film but not being able to control their behavior behind the scenes, dealing with age-inappropriate content in a film that stars minors, or the unfamiliar process of movie-making causing issues for young actors, these films deal with all kinds of trouble on coming-of-age movies.
If you were a kid in the mid-2000s, then odds are you watched and were lightly scarred by Bridge to Terabithia. The family-oriented fantasy drama was full of recognizable names and child stars Josh Hutcherson and AnnaSophia Robb, but while the film starts out feeling fun and like a standard youth adventure movie, it certainly doesn’t finish that way. The movie is about a young boy and girl who befriend each other and create an imaginary world to escape from the harsh realities of their lives. In their magic land called Terabithia, they can face their fears head-on.
But the film takes a somber turn toward the end when Jess (Hutcherson) returns home one day to find that his friend Leslie (Robb) had fallen while swinging across the rope that leads to Terabithia, and as a result, hit her head and drowned in the creek. But did you know that this dark ending is really based on the childhood experiences of one of the screenwriters, David L. Paterson, whose mother Katherine Paterson wrote the novel the film is based on?
Just like in the film, a new family had moved into town, and the youngest girl Lisa quickly befriended the author’s son David. The two were inseparable and would often play fantasy games in the woods behind their house, which would later inspire Terabithia. However, tragedy hit when Lisa was killed by a lightning strike at the beach. David fell into a deep depression at only eight years old as a result, and his mother struggled to come to terms with the senseless death of a child. Writing Bridge to Terabithia was her attempt at understanding the random act of nature that took such a young and innocent life, and surely the experience of adapting the screenplay so many years later was cathartic for David as well.
While it may not be shocking to learn that Bridge to Terabithia was in part inspired by The Chronicles of Narnia novels, it isn’t simply the concept of children escaping their realities by going to a magical land that the book-turned-movie borrowed. While author Katherine Paterson was at first confident that the name of Terabithia was entirely original, she later realized that in the third Narnia book written by C.S. Lewis, TheVoyage of the Dawn Treader, there is an island named Terebinthia.
But while this may seem like a disaster to accidentally plagiarize a name from another novel, it actually ended up working in Paterson’s favor, as one of her main characters, Leslie, is an outspoken fan of the Narnia books and even lends them to Jess. So while it wasn’t on purpose, this happy accident totally fits in the story - considering it would be likely for a child to borrow a name from a book series they are a fan of when they go to name their own imaginary land.
Odds are by now you have heard something about Brooke Shields's troubling teenage years, in which her mother subjected her to extreme sexualization at a disgustingly early age. The Hulu documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields brought to light the complicated relationship between Brooke and her mother, and the constant negligence in protecting her child by allowing her to participate in projects far too mature for her young age. Perhaps the worst of the work young Shields was subjected to was when her mother had her pose nude for Playboy at only 10 years old.
The issue didn’t stop in Shield’s early film work either, with one of her first controversial roles being that of a child prostitute in Pretty Baby, but that wasn’t all to come. A few years later, when Shields was a mere 14 years old, she appeared in The Blue Lagoon, a film about two teenage cousins getting shipwrecked onto an island and falling in love. The movie involves lots of graphic nudity, and her character remains shirtless for a large part of the film with only her hair covering her chest. The Blue Lagoon also includes the cousins having sex, scenes featuring masturbation, and later Shields giving birth to a baby. After the film was released, Shields had to testify before Congress that it was a body double performing the sexually explicit scenes, and while that may be true, it doesn’t make her involvement in such mature content - starring opposite an 18-year-old co-star - any more acceptable.
Everyone in some way, shape, or form has likely terrorized a babysitter when they were younger. Maybe you wouldn’t shut up or kept causing a fuss, or possibly you did something a little worse like broke a window. Whatever you did, just know that it is probably better than what Jerry O’Connell put his babysitter through on the set of Stand by Me. The Stephen King short story that was adapted for the big screen by Rob Reiner deals with four boys going on an adventure to find a rumored dead body in the woods. The kids in the story may not outwardly be trouble-makers so to speak, but they certainly get into all kinds of mischief along their journey, and O’Connell got into some real-life mischief when he tied up his babysitter and took off for the local fair.
That’s right, Jerry O’Connell at 11 years old tied up his babysitter and fled the movie set for a fair, where he just so happened to buy some cookies that contained a secret ingredient the child wasn’t expecting: cannabis! As Kiefer Sutherland explained, it turned out the fair was really a “hippie fair,” and so after O’Connell ingested the laced cookies, he was later found in a park while crying and totally disoriented. The poor kid just wanted to sneak off for some fun and wound up getting so stoned on his fair snack that the production of Stand by Me was shut down for two days as he recovered.
To be an actor is to put yourself in the headspace of the character you are playing, and when the role is of a mentally disturbed person, it can sometimes take a toll on the actor’s psyche. Stanley Tucci was tasked with playing a horrific child murderer in the film adaption of The Lovely Bones, and he has gone on record stating that he would never play that role again. He even stated that he tried getting out of playing the serial killer, despite being desperate for the work. He earned a Supporting Actor nomination at the Oscars for his portrayal of the incredibly creepy George Harvey, and watching the movie, it is hard to even tell that it is Tucci at times.
The experience of “becoming” someone who murders with ease and preys on children would be tough to handle, and for a person who always seems so cheerful and full of life like Tucci, it is probably even harder to deal with. He normally cooks delicious-looking Italian food and lives life to the fullest with his cute family on his social media, so it might be extra difficult to start trying to get inside the head of a serial killer in that kind of environment.
Kids is a nightmarish coming-of-age movie that details a day in the life of a troubled group of New York City teens who are constantly breaking the rules and taking whatever they desire. The movie is as dark as they come and shows the scary reality that some kids find themselves in when they are left with too much freedom and too many bad influences. The film has a distinct naturalistic feel, one of the contributing factors being that this was several of the teenage actors' (including Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson) first movies. And while the film is fictional, some of the kids may not have been too far removed from their respective roles.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that these kids who are out scoring drugs, having sex, and stealing booze aren’t fans of authority figures and struggle to live according to the laws of society, but you might not have realized the actors might feel this way too. The chaotic character Casper was played by Justin Pierce after he was discovered while skateboarding in NYC, and nearing the end of shooting, Kids production was delayed due to his getting into a fight with a bouncer that resulted in him breaking his wrist. So, after that, he was held in jail for a few nights, and when he was let out, he was forced to wrap up shooting without a cast for continuity reasons. A painful mistake to make with reportedly only one day left of shooting before getting himself arrested.
