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Precious, Precocious, and able to cry on cue, these underage actors mean business. By Marshall Heyman.

Decon Alan is what Hollywood types refer to as an actor on the verge. Until recently, he'd had mostly supporting roles in made-for-TV movies like Firestarter 2: Rekindled and Secret of Giving with Reba McEntire. But 2004 was a big year: He starred opposite Dermot Mulroney and Josh Lucas in David Gordon Green's Undertow, a stylized Southern gothic. The role won him critical praise and took him to the New York and Toronto film festivals, providing priceless exposure to the people who matter. Now Alan is in a holding pattern typical of a star about to break through. He's waiting for the release of The Iris Effect, a movie he filmed in Russia with Anne Archer in 2002, five months before Undertow, and, of course, for the next great script for come along. And waiting can be hard, especially when you're 13.

"It's the holidays, so it's really slow right now," says Alan, sitting on the couch with his fluffy white mutt, Psycho, in the Los Angeles apartment that he shares with his mother, Diane.
"I don't want Devon to be known for doing B movies," Diane interjects. "There have been some with devil worshippers, and I just said, 'This is ridiculous.'" Alan's road to stardom has already been a long one, from the days he would act our make-believe scenes with him mom (he was the king, she the princess) to the two months he waited, on pins and needles, to find out whether he'd snagged the role in Undertow. "It took a very long time - like seven years - to get where I am right now," Alan says, quite seriously. "We've been doing this for so long," Diane adds. "He can barely remember anything else."

The world of child actors has a lurid reputation: trained seals with jazz hands hamming it up at auditions, desperate stage moms pushing their offspring into the spotlight, early burnouts and massive maladjustment. But underage showbiz has become increasingly sophisticated of late, with arecent host of heavyweight performances from the junior set. There was Alan's sickly Souther youth in Undertow and Cameron Bright's portrait of piercing desperation in Birth. The tragically underseen Mean Creek, a high school drama set on a boat trip gone awry, reacquaintned us with Rory Culkin, at 15 the youngest of the Culkin clan, just as indelible as he was four years ago, in You Can Count on Me. The same film introduced Carly Schroeder, an eighth grader heretofore known for her soap work on Port Charles and a supporting role on the Disney Channel's Lizzie McGuire. This May will see a brave and tender performance from 16-year-old Brady Corbet in the child-abuse drama Mysterious Skin. And there was the star turn of Freddie Highmore as the young Peter Llewelyn Davies in Finding Neverland. Some insiders have him pegged for an Oscar nomination. This new generation of child actors is more than just a bunch of precocious adolescents with dimples. These days, in order to make it as a kid in Hollywood you need to be able to hold your own against De Niro.

Highmore is a prime example. "Freddie is just pure truth, pure honest," says Neverland director Marc Forster. "He has a scary, beautiful gift. I've never seen anything like it." In the film's final scene, Highmore weeps on a park bench. "I actually didn't expect him to cry," says Forster. "That just happened."

Highmore, 12, shrugs off any talk of method or craft. "I was just thinking about what Peter was thinking," he says from London, where he's filming a remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, also with Neverland star Johnny Depp. "I was thinking, Your mother is dead, your father is dead. I wasn't really thinking about what I looked like." Freddie says that what he likes about acting is working with costars like Depp and Kate Winslet, but he's not ready to commit to a lifetime of it. "It would be nice to see the rainforest at some point," he says. "It's disappearing very quickly."

As for Bright, he fell asleep during the premiere of Birth, in Vancouver, where he lives. Still, says his mother, Anne, "He's the talk of L.A. right now." Thought he has done a few lower-rent movies, one recently in Hong Kong with Milla Jocovich, he's never wanted for work. "They asked Cameron to play a young Ted Bundy, and I said no way is he going to be associated with a serial killer."

"I want to play an action-movie role," says Bright, soundling like a grown-up Hollywood actor until he adds,"Oh, my dog just farted."

Directors - especially risk-taking directors - like working with children because, at their best, they're refreshingly natural. "Kid actors are inexperienced, which means they don't have a lot of bad habits stored up," says Jacob Aaron Estes, who directed Mean Creek. "It's much easier to get them to believe in the given circumstances of a scene. The kids aren't thinking about the big paycheck or their status in the industry."

But natural doesn't mean effortless: Whether you're 13 or 30, getting to the top of the marquee takes work. Schroeder, for instances, reads six scripts a weekend. This obviously cuts into her social life, not to mention her homework, which she sometimes gets up at 5 a.m. to finish. Her mom, Kelli, has an equally hectic schedule. Having taken over as her daughter's business manager, she does the accounting, reviews one or two potential projects a day and chaffeurs her daughter the 40 miles from Thousand Oaks in Los Angeles nearly every afternoon for auditions. The traffic can be murder. "Who really wants to drive to L.A. at four o'clock?" she moans. She and her husband left their extended family and newly built house in Valparaiso, Indiana, seven years ago, after Shroeder was spotted in a Shake 'n Bake commercial and offered a recurring role on Port Charles.

"I thought maybe this was just a phase, that we'd be home in six months. We still say that we're on vacation here," Kelli explains between sips of a caffe mocha at a strip mall coffee bar not far from her rented condo. "When we came here, the main thing I told Carly was, "They love you today, they may not love you tomorrow.'" So far they're still loving her: Carly was recently cast in The Wrong Element, an upcoming movie with Harrison Ford and Paul Bettany.

A pixieish 14-year-old who says she's just discovered the opposite sex - the boy she likes in her algebra class looks, she insists, "like a Shetland pony" - Shroeder prepares for her roles by observing her classmates. Her character in Lizzie McGuire, whom she describes as "pure evil," was based on an especially nasty girl at school. "I'm just going to watch this kid," Shroeder recalls thinking. "I know she's mean, so I might as well figure out how to do it right."
Kelli always knew her daughter was special. "She 's different than my husband and I," she says.

"I was the strangest kid because I really didn't want to talk to other kids," Shroeder confirms. "I didn't get why they couldn't sit down and talk - they'd rather chase each other around and play tag and hide-and-seek. I preferred hanging out with adults, so being on set was actually better for me."

It's that old-soul quality that Cindy Osbrink, who runs her own talent agency in California that mostly represents actors younger than 18, says she looks for. If a potential client comes into her office and talks more than she does, "everybody knows he's a winner," Osbrink says. "If the parents come in and don't talk as much as me, then it's really a winning combination."

Osbrink got into the talent field when her two youngest sons tried to break into the business. (They stopped at four and six, respectively, when they became more interested in sports.) "I don't want to be responsible for anyone's mortgage," she explains about her decision not to represent adults. "I get the best hugs every day, and that's my thing. I tell the kids they booked something first, before I tell the parents. I say, 'Get my client on the phone.'"

Osbrink has 80 clients, who now include Dakota Fanning, Shelbie Bruce from Spanglish and actors on the television series Summerland, Quintuplets, and The Bernie Mac Show. She has previously represented Raven-Symone and Jena Malone, who have since moved onto bigger agencies like ICM. "We're great at starting them out," Osbrink says. Though she has mostly positive stories to tell about kids in the business, there are some depressing exceptions. Malone, a particularly sullen actress who appeared in Cold Mountain and Saved!, "divorced" her mother in 2000, after deciding her mother was mismanaging her career and her income. Jake Lloyd, another client, quit the business. The brouhaha of starring as the young Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menage was too much for him, and he ended up moving out of state, Osbrink says, "so he could become Jake again."

"It hasn't happened with Dakota, thank God," she adds. The 10-year-old, who burst on the scene three years ago opposite Sean Penn in I Am Sam, has projects with De Niro, Glenn Close and Kris Kristofferson coming out this year. She's currently filming War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise and will play Fern in a live-action version of Charlotte's Web for Paramount.

Osbrink is sitting with Dakota's six-year-old sister, Elle, at the Fanning home in Studio City. Elle lives in the Victorian-style house with her grandmother, who homeschools her. (Her mother travels with Dakota; their father works as an electronics salesman in Los Angeles.) Toys are strewn everywhere - minature pianos, life-size Barbie dolls, toy horses. There are far more toys, in fact, than furniture. Elle's mother planned to furnish the house in earnest this spring, but that's been pushed back since Dakota will have to travel to Australia to shoot Charlotte's Web.

The sisters arrived in 2000 from Conyers, Georgia, after their local agent sent a tape to Osbrink, who convinced them to head west. They have barely looked back. As Dakota's career is shifting into high gear, Elle's is only just beginning. She's had bit parts in Daddy Day Care and I Am Sam, and last year she scored her first starring role, opposite Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger, in The Door in the Floor. It's a bittersweet film in which she plays Ruth, a young girl whose parents are getting divorced.

"Every day [my character] is just depressed, depressed, depressed," Fanning says. It wasn't difficult to convey that sadness: "You don't really do anything. You don't smile, you don't laugh. You think how Ruth would really feel."

Still, Fanning's age (and the proclivity of her parents and Osbrink to protect her) means that she hasn't seen the film in its entirety - only her scenes. "I can see it when I'm grown up, like 30 or something," she says.

In person, Elle comes off as an adorable teacher's pet type, always echoing back the question you've asked in the answer she gives. ("What's the best part of a movie? I love to know what my name is," she says, repeating, "I love to know what my name is. It's just so fun. That's the first thing I ask. It's just fun because you have a different name in every movie.") She's also indiscriminate when it comes to acting. "I'll do anything," she says about her work. "There's nothing I don't want to do." Her parents and her agent are obviously more cautious.

What's interesting about the Fanning sisters is that they have a sense that there is life outside of the film industry. When I interviewed Dakota 18 months ago, she said that she wanted to be an interior designer when she grew up. (The young male actors tend to talk about sticking with acting; Schroeder has professed excitement for being everything from a veterinarian to a gas station attendant. "Oh look, they're having such a good time talking to all these people," she told her mother on a recent trip to fill up the car.) Elle would like to be a chef on a cooking show. "I'm going to call it Elle's Cookebook, she says. "Dakota would be in the audience. She's not allowed to be on the show because it's not her show."

One can easily see how the Fannings have succeeded in the business. They are charming, wide-eyed and loquacious in person, at press junkets and even on Letterman. But whether they can sustain the momentum is another question entirely. Most child actors in mainstream movies disappear: Haley Joel Osment, who hasn't done a film since 2003, when he hit puberty, is just one example.

One issue is that, while children can be quite malleable, they can't really adapt their appearances onscreen. "As a grown-up, you can gain weight or have facial hair," says Forster. "As a child, your facial expressions arae limited. You start repeating yourself."

There's also the matter of attention span. Osbrink says that it's been difficult to find projects to keep Dakota excited. "We always want to challenge her," she explains. "I would love her to do something with a female lead like Meryl Streep or Susan Sarandon. It's just something she hasn't done." (According to Osbrink and Kelli Shroeder, both Dakota and Carly are going for the protagonist of The Lovely Bones.)

Like their adult counterparts, teenagers Rory Culkin and Brady Corbet have found more options on the fringes of Hollywood, in independent films. Corbet had a supporting role in vThirteen, and this spring he'll play the victim of molestation in Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin. Corbet is exceedingly well read for a teenager; over brunch in Los Angeles, he talks about growing up on a steady diet of French New Wave cinema and Haruki Murakami novels. "I've been a film nerd since I was four years old," he says.

His first foray into big-budget cinema, Thunderbirds, a children's movie based on the British television series, didn't quite work out as he'd hoped. He agreed to the project because he wanted to work with Ben Kingsley. "If he can play, I can too," Corbet remembers thinking. But spending five months in London and the Seychelles, while eye-opening, was lonely.

"The character was written as a petulant brat, and I was trying to make him likeable," Corbet says. "I was trying to let go of it being a job, even though it felt more like a job than anything I've ever done." Ultimately the film, which came out last summer, tanked. "Anyone over the age of 11 totally hated it. It had a $70 million budget and was a huge Universal picture, but I know more people who've seen Mysterious Skin at film festivals and it's not even in general release. You can't just assume that because a studio is involved it's good."

Corbet qualifies that he has "overly choosy taste," which may hurt him in the long run. He's like only to work with directors who inspire him. "I read, like, four good scripts this year. Literally four," he says. "And one of them was Mysterious Skin."

Culkin, who has thus far mode one film in the studio system, the blockbuster Signs opposite Mel Gibson, feels similarly. As of late, he's finding himself more engaged by directors who'll let him colloborate a bit.
"Rory made a point of coming to me with criticism of the script or the scene," says Estes. "he really wanted the movie to be as good as it could be."

Culkin says he's spending much of his time lately writing; it's hard for him to find a project he likes wholeheartedly, so he's trying to write his own. As for his ability to navigate Hollywood with more ease than his brothers Macaulay and Kieran, he insists they gave him no advice whatsoever. "I learned to take risks from Mark Ruffalo on the set of You Can Count on Me," he confides over lunch at Ruby Foo's not far from the Upper West Side apartment where he lives with his mother. "It's not you up on the screen, it's the character." Though he attended the Professional Children's School for a year (he now does classwork by correspondence over the Internet), theater classes were no for him. "I failed drama," he says.

Strangely, most of these child have had similar experiences. Very few of them actually go to the movies - Highmore refused to name his favorite movie and couldn't even remember the last film he saw; Schroeder barely has time; Culkin hasn't been to the cinema all year; only Bright confessed to have seen the kinds of movies kids his age like, including Blade: Trinity, Ocean's Twelve and The Incredibles - and none of them participate in school acting programs. Part of this reticence, insists Osbrink, is due to the time commitments involved, but Devon Alan's mother thought acting lessons were messing with her son's technique. "This acting person had him doing stuff and I could see the difference," she says. "He was taking the naturalness away from him."

Despite all of her bubbly confidence, for some reason the pressure of performing live in middle school gets even Schroeder down. "I just don't like getting up in front of a lot of people doing drama," she explains. "I think I'd just rather learn a script. Drama at school, you've got kids in the stands booing you if they don't like you," she goes on. "You can't do that on set."

Transcript taken from W magazine (February 2005 edition). All rights reserved.

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