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Former child stars reveal sex abuse, emotional trauma of Hollywood - New York Post

Former child stars reveal sex abuse, emotional trauma of Hollywood - New York Post

Former child stars reveal sex abuse, emotional trauma of Hollywood - New York Post
Jul 11, 2020 3 mins, 3 secs

For Todd Bridges, it all started with “Sanford and Son.” Recalling the acerbic comedy about a junk dealer and his offspring, the San Francisco native told The Post: “I wanted to be like Redd Foxx.

But like most former child actors profiled in the new documentary “Showbiz Kids,” premiering Tuesday on HBO, he also got more than he bargained for — and not in a good way.

But he also had to deal with the consequences of money-stealing team members, a sexually aggressive publicist and systemic racism: “I had a gun pulled on my head when I was 12 — an officer told me that my bike was stolen.”.

After learning to drive, he added, “I was pulled over every day, for four years, by the same officers.

The odds of Bridges succeeding were daunting — according to the doc, each year some 20,000 children audition for Hollywood acting jobs and 95 percent fail to land a single one — but the likelihood of thriving after growing up on the small-screen was even dicier.

“If you are going to be in showbiz as a child, make sure you have a secondary business as an adult,” said Bridges.

But I prefer real life,” Bridges said.

“I don’t know a 7-year-old who says they want to go to work.”.

Evan Rachel Wood, who starred in the sexually provocative “13” when she “was 14, on the verge of becoming a woman,” talks in the doc about growing up in a small-town acting family.

“It would be disappointing to people if I didn’t want to do this because I was talented,” said Wood, 32.

“If I didn’t want to do this, the vibe would have been ‘what a waste.’ I didn’t feel that I could stop because I was good.

“It was a fantasy come to life,” Winter, who does not appear in his documentary (“I would have overtaken the film”), told The Post.

“I didn’t feel safe talking about it for 25 years,” Winter said, adding that the incidents left him with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Explaining that he spent years working on the latter, Winter added that appearing in 1990’s “Bill & Ted” was actually therapeutic.

he said.

“Suddenly I felt like a commodity that needed to be monitored and groomed and I had to present myself in a certain way,” Wood ­recalls in the documentary.

She added: “Nobody asked me how I was doing.

My emotional state was equated with how I was doing in my career.” Due to “the way [she] was raised,” Wood now goes far to keep her young son with her ex, former child actor Jamie Bell, out of the public eye and off the Internet: “If he doesn’t want his image out there, I don’t want to put it out there for him,” Wood said of her child.

He recalled being heartbroken when Roger Ebert trashed his performance in the 1984 rom-com flop “Buddy System.” As he explains in the documentary: “People forget that they are not just talking about an actor; they are talking about a child.”?

and called me ugly online; they were mocking me for going through puberty,” said Wilson, now 32, who recalls that she had a special gift as a child actor: the ability to cry on command

I’ll never be an A-list actor and I am happy with that.”

In making “Showbiz Kids,” Winter said, he uncovered a universality of experience that he had not expected

“I didn’t expect to find out that the experiences of Diana [Serra Cary]” — a child star from the 1920s who supported her family and saw her career end after her father angered a studio exec — “would be the same as mine.”

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