TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010791/0107460.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.6 KB | 188 lines

                                                                                SHOW BUSINESS, Page 81

Kid Power Conquers Hollywood


A spate of juvenile movies draws crowds of all ages -- and
shows just who is the boss at the box office

By RICHARD CORLISS -- With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland and
Janice C. Simpson/New York


    Kevin McCallister, world's champion kid, has just
vanquished the burglars who would violate his Winnetka, Ill.,
home. He has hot-wired the doorknob, iced the front steps, made
killer hairnets out of pillow feathers and plastic wrap,
transformed tree ornaments into land mines and paint cans into
Stealth bombs. Your basic all-American home-front ingenuity. And
now this eight-year-old Indiana Jones stands triumphant at his
front window waving bye-bye to the two manacled stooges. He
flashes them a beatific smile that radiates the wholesomeness of
a Norman Rockwell imp-angel, yet hints at the cunning that made
Kevin a hero -- and Home Alone the undisputed conqueror of the
Christmas movie season.

    The smile says, Kid power!

    A year ago, what cinema swami would have predicted success
for John Hughes' unassuming comedy about an accidentally
abandoned child who proves his manhood by parading his boyhood?
Certainly not the executives at Warner Bros., who said no to the
$15 million project and let it slide over to 20th Century Fox.
But spurred by the manic charm of young Macaulay Culkin, Home
Alone started at the top of the box-office winners and perched
there for six weeks. Like Kevin besieged by burglars, Home Alone
fended off challenges from the big guys: Robert Redford
(Havana), Clint Eastwood (The Rookie), even Arnold
Schwarzenegger in a youth movie of his own (Kindergarten Cop).
The kid was king.

    As the the long New Year's weekend approached, Home Alone
had earned more than $120 million, placing it fourth among the
year's releases, just behind another kids' picture, Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles ($133 million). Both films follow last
year's surprise hit Look Who's Talking -- one more movie about a
chatty, resourceful child. Perhaps not since the Depression
'30s, when Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney were the cinema's
biggest stars, has Hollywood been so in the thrall of the small.

    Movies aren't the only beneficiary of kid power; in every
medium children are big business as performers and purchasers.
Preteen girls make pop stars of the New Kids on the Block;
preteen boys goose the sales of heavy metal and rap artists.
What is Vanilla Ice, the white rap artist who is pop music's
flavor of the month, but a perfect hybrid of girlish fantasy and
street-boy snarl? And what are America's theme parks --
especially Florida's Walt Disney World, America's premier
vacation spot -- but lavish day-care centers for the kids who
want everything? And if they want to go to Disney World, their
parents will take them. According to a 1989 Roper Report study,
kids decide 74% of the time what leisure activities their
families will pursue.

    At the parks kids see the Disney characters, the Muppets,
the Ninja Turtles, then fly back home primed to consume more of
the same. Or they watch Bart Simpson and his fractious family
on prime-time TV, then rush out and pick up a black-market Black
Bart T-shirt. Now the cartoon clan is monopolizing the airwaves
with a hot-selling album, The Simpsons Sing the Blues, and its
nifty rap single, Do the Bartman.

    The new kid boom is a child of the postwar baby boom. A
decade or so ago, the boomers finally hunkered down and had
kids. And as they've tended to do about everything from rock to
radicchio, they've become obsessed with parenting; it's the
aerobics of emotions. "There are fewer children per parent,"
explains James McNeal, a professor of marketing at Texas A&M,
"and less time spent with our children. So we try to make up for
it. And one way is economic."

    That one way is a big way: some $50 billion a year in
household spending is influenced by children. For a start,
parents are spending more on their children, even during
recessions. Parents also give their kids more to spend.
According to McNeal, the average allowance (now $4.42) keeps
rising at 10% a year in real-dollar terms. All told, kids
control about $8.6 billion in discretionary income and spend
perhaps $1.3 billion of it during the Christmas season. Nice to
know somebody still has money.

    Hollywood certainly knows this. No longer is it surprised
when an unheralded terror-tot comedy like this summer's Problem
Child grosses a quick $50 million. This December nearly every
mogul could be heard praying for some of that copious kid cash
in his studio's Christmas stocking.

    But movies, like toys, may have deceptive labels. Already
parents are learning that Edward Scissorhands, which sounds like
a horror movie, is really a wry, pastel fable about a childlike
misfit, and that Kindergarten Cop, which sounds like Arnold
Schwarzenegger meets Mister Rogers, is too violent and traumatic
for some youngsters. Even the milder comedies may require
kidproof caps. In Look Who's Talking Too, a not-all-that-bad
sequel, a toddler copes with toilet training and a slew of
toilet jokes. In Three Men and a Little Lady, a trio of bachelor
studs (Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg, Ted Danson) trade in
Pampers for pampering. They ooh and coo as their five-year-old
ward -- a true junior American princess -- pertly asks, "Do you
have a penis?"

    Home Alone doesn't waste its time on penis jokes,
contenting itself with such amiable insults as puke breath,
sheep face and phlegm wad. To his older brother, Kevin is just
"a disease." But to parents horrified that their children's role
models for 1990 are four weapon-wielding turtles and a sassy
underachiever with a paper-bag head, the elfin Kevin offers
reassurance at first sight. He is never a problem child; he is
just in the way. And left at home, he has a chance to prove
himself to himself. To be a hero, he has to be on his own.

    But the movie taps something deeper, even in its title. To a
'90s child, home is what he wants, and alone is what he too
often is. "The movie is a true mirror of our society," says
Allen Bohbot, whose advertising firm specializes in the kiddie
market. He estimates that two-thirds of all children Kevin's age
are alone at home after school. "That child has to grow up
quickly. Kids love Kevin, and Bart Simpson, because they do it
with humor and irreverence. You've got to be cool, but you can't
be bad."

    Nobody in movies knows this better than Hughes, who began
Home Alone by asking himself, "What is the scariest thing that
can happen to a child home alone?" and answering, "A bad guy, a
robber, coming into the house. I figured he had to take
responsibility for himself in two areas: he had to do all the
things his parents usually did for him, the domestic side; and
he would have to provide for his own security. `This is my
house! I have to defend it!' I used to do that when I was a kid:
`I'm not afraid, you hear me? I'm not afraid!' Then the door
would slam shut, and I'd scream." And when John Hughes screams,
America jumps -- and then smiles.

    In mid-'80s comedies like Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast
Club, Hughes proved he could speak to and through teenagers.
Paramount's Ned Tanen aptly called Hughes "the Steven Spielberg
of youth comedy." His later films -- Uncle Buck, National
Lampoon's Christmas Vacation -- have shown him to be Stephen
King's benign twin. Both deal with worst-case what-ifs, but
Hughes works the sunnier side of the street. Where King sees
horror -- in childhood abandonment, in the convulsions of
adolescence -- Hughes finds humor. For King's teens, horror is
sex and death, a corpse in a clinch. But Kevin makes fear his
friend; he psychs himself into a hero's role and plays it out in
real life.

    Correction: reel life. For Home Alone, as artfully directed
by Chris Columbus, is a flat-out fantasy decorated with suburban
furniture. Which is why the inevitable Op-Ed grumbling, like a
New York Times piece that called the movie "Christmas on Elm
Street," misses every point the movie makes. Lighten up,
Grinches. See the lines at the mall multiplexes. Everybody is
going, from tots to teens, yuppies to grannies. Everyone is
laughing at the same jokes. Everyone comes out feeling pretty
good. Home Alone turns the movie house into what it used to be
but rarely is: an ad hoc community, bathing in fond sentiment
and boisterous wit. And perhaps that is the best thing kid power
can hope to deliver to an America that may have little else to
believe in, laugh about or cherish.