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.â€.
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.â€.
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 filmâ€), 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 Ârecalls 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.â€
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.â€