Kid Acting: Parents

Video Transcript

"SCOTT DUPONT: Scott DuPont, welcome back on behalf of Expert Village. The reason I'm laughing is my producer and I, we were just talking about our next segment in between our break on stage parents, and we've all kinds of stories. We can go on and on for hours. But I'm just going to give some general advice here. What you really need to do if you're the parent watching this, okay, and you're doing this for your kid, you need to find out if this is something your kid really, really wants to do and is going to enjoy. Because if you never got into acting and you want your 15 minutes of fame and you're really doing this for yourself and you're kinda pushing your kid a little bit, it's going to create all kinds of problems. And as a producer, I've cast many DVDs, feature films, which have included kids, I can usually tell when a kid walks in that audition room whether or not he's happy to be there. And if they're not happy to be there even if they give a good performance, we're usually not going to consider them because there's just going to be problems on set. So that's the kind of a number one rule of thumb is don't push your kids into something that they're not going to enjoy. Let them go play soccer. Let them play--let them just be kids, okay? Maybe this isn't for them. Now, the other thing about stage parents is if you and your kid are lucky enough to book a job, when you get to set, it's absolutely positively okay for you to be there when you check your kid in, okay? Do the paperwork, any information, make sure when you leave your kid in the hands of one of the assistant directors or the production assistants, you're 100% comfortable. Then what you want to do is go off to the corner of the set and don't get in the way. I can't tell you how many productions I've seen the parent walk up and talk to the director while he is trying to direct a commercial or a film. It's just a nightmare, and it's going to create a lot of friction for you as a parent. But the bad thing is you might think that you're trying to help; in reality, I've seen a lot of kids never get asked back because of the parent, so don't be a stage parent, okay? Just be cool. On behalf of Expert Village, that's my take on stage parents."