I used to be a child actor. My best job was a play at Berkeley Repertory Theatre when I was fourteen. Child labor laws are a bit tricky in the business, so I was double cast with another actor. That means we took turns playing the same role so we weren’t working fulltime and could still go to school and stuff. I was double cast with a kid named Eli Marienthal. He had solid career. He was in a bunch of movies and TV shows. You might not know his name, but you’ve seen him before. Anyway, we had a couple weeks of rehearsals together and one time we got out early and had the whole afternoon to spend in Berkeley before our moms came to pick us up. We decided to go to the movies and so we did.
There’s no good way of setting up this story so I will just say what fucking happened. We bought tickets to The Iron Giant because it was Rated PG and snuck into American Pie because it was Rated R and we wanted to see it. We were teenagers and teenagers are supposed to rebel. That was the first time I snuck into a movie. I felt like a badass. It wasn’t until a few years later that I realized how cool that situation actually was. I bought a ticket to a movie so I could sneak into another movie with a friend who was in both movies. Yessiree, Eli Marienthal was the voice of Hogarth Hughes, the animated protagonist in The Iron Giant, and he also played Stifler’s little brother in American Pie. It’s not as exciting as seeing Jim Carrey movies with Jim Carrey, but it’s still pretty cool. I’ll take it. It’s also kind of funny that people used to sneak into movies. Now we just download them.
Critically Rated at 14/17
Written, Rated, and Reviewed by Brendan H. Young
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