Evan Rachel Wood Shares Theory of How Hollywood Abuse Proliferates in Showbiz Kids Doc
EntertainmentTV

On Tuesday, HBO premiered Showbiz Kids, a documentary directed by Alex Winter (best known as Bill in the Bill & Ted movie franchise). Through a variety of interviews with entertainers who rose to prominence in their youth, including Milla Jovovich, Jada Pinkett Smith, Wil Wheaton, Cameron Boyce (who died last year as a result of his epilepsy), and Mara Wilson, the feature-length doc attempted to illustrate the wide-ranging effects that early fame can have on a person’s life.
While never less than arresting and handsomely assembled, Showbiz Kids wasn’t exactly a trove of new information for anyone who’s been paying attention to the havoc fame has wreaked on countless young recipients. For one thing, horror stories were glossed over. Interviewee Todd Bridges’s (Diff’rent Strokes) story about being molested by his publicist when he was 12 (and his father subsequently siding with his abuser) was blink-and-you’ll-miss-it brief, and the real tragedies/tragic figures (like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Jackie Coogan, and Bridges’s co-star Dana Plato, who died of a drug overdose in 1999 at age 34) were often presented as a ticked-off laundry list of worst-case scenarios. Those who sat for interviews were sometimes rattled and seemingly traumatized by their time in the public eye, but their overall clarity and determination to survive cast a sunny sheen on a way of life that has been responsible for so much misery. Though not nearly as well made, Corey Feldman’s documentary from earlier this year, (My) Truth: The Rape of Two Coreys, I thought was a way more harrowing and raw account of the pitfalls of childhood celebrity and ultimately more effective.
At best, Showbiz Kids was a series of vivid sound bites that articulated particularly well things we already knew. Wilson, I thought, was the most eloquent (perhaps owing to the fact that she wrote a memoir on her life as a kid star, 2016’s Where Am I Now?). On the bad habits that life on movie sets instilled, Wilson recalled: