Sob! The messy lives of our teen stars

By Jae-Ha Kim
Media Life Magazine
April 24, 2006

Back then, Hollywood was respectable, much like the rest of America. A secret was a secret to be kept, and the studio moguls made sure they were kept.

Gay stars were seen dating beautiful starlets. Babies born less than nine months after a celeb’s wedding were described to the press as premature births, despite their plump girth. Indiscreet photos of stars in compromising positions were bought up and the negatives destroyed. That was Hollywood up through the 1950s.

Flash forward to the 21st Century, to a very different Hollywood, and a very different America. It’s all so much messier.

Young actors who should still be waiting tables star in their own television shows, typically about messy young lives. But the messiness follows the stars into their personal lives, where they seem intent on reenacting the characters they portray every week–tortured, confused, rebellious and often stupid. Their personal lives become in turn the soap-filled storylines of the celeb TV shows and magazines, creating an endless circle of angst and teen drama for America to digest.

Messiness is in.

“One Tree Hill’s” Chad Michael Murray, blond, adorable and not bad at portraying a teen, married co-star Sophia Bush, but it lasted just five months, ending last September. You’d think Murray might have wanted to take time to reflect on what went wrong, hang with his boys, and maybe even mourn the dissolution of his marriage.

Nope.

Two months later, Murray, 24, began courting Kenzie Dalton, then a 17-year-old extra on his show. Recently, around the same time the high school senior turned 18, Murray proposed marriage.

Talan Torriero, a 19-year-old cast member of MTV’s reality series “Laguna Beach,” proposed to Kimberly Stewart after dating her for less than two months, handing her a five-carat diamond from Neil Lane. Stewart, 26, is best known for being Rod’s daughter and Paris Hilton’s bestfriendforever.

Never mind that Torriero and Stewart broke off the engagement shortly thereafter, or that there’s no way the kid could’ve afforded the ring. The whole union smelled of a tacky publicity stunt to promote his wannabe recording career and her desire to be as famous as the oft-engaged Hilton, who’s traded one young Greek gazillionaire for another.

So it was a little messy. People paid attention.

How different from 50 years ago. In the old Hollywood of Marlon Brando and James Dean, they may have played messy characters at times, and their personal lives could get real messy, but they remained apart, seldom becoming headlines. The actors knew when they were acting and when they were playing. They knew the difference.

Why so much messiness these days?

Leading it all is the explosion in recent years of TV networks, such as the WB, looking to fill their schedules with shows that appeal to younger audiences, shows staring teens. There were always teens on TV but playing teens in a family led by adults, so their off-screen characters had to stay unsullied by scandal. The new teen stars face none of those constraints.

There also the explosion in celebrity tabs. Where People once ruled, as recently as five years ago, there are now a half-dozen such titles. They need stories, and what passes for a story is just about anything. For teen actors, it takes little imagination to come up with schemes to act their way onto the celeb magazines pages or featured on one of the TV gossip shows.

But there’s another reason, simple age. The great hell-raisers of past years were celebrated movie actors, the likes of Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, and they were as famous for their off-screen exploits, the drinking and philandering and anti-social behavior.

They’ve either been tamed by time, or infirmity, or common sense. Or they’ve simply run out of new, imaginative ways to screw up. They simply aren’t the copy they once were. So the burden has passed to a younger generation. Pity that it’s a less talented one.

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Meanwhile, elsewhere in popcult, the video game-turned-film “Silent Hill” was the No. 1 movie at the box offices over the weekend, with $20.2 million in ticket sales. “Scary Movie 4” dropped from the top spot to No. 2 with $17.0 million brought in.

In home movies, “Fun with Dick and Jane” was the No. 1 video rental during the week ended April 16, knocking “King Kong” down to No. 3. “An Unfinished Life” and “Wolf Creek” were also new additions to the top 10.

In music, LL Cool J’s song “Control Myself” featuring Jennifer Lopez dropped out of tits position as the No. 1 single on iTunes for April 23, falling to No. 2 and giving way to Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day.”

And in books, “Two Little Girls in Blue” by Mary Higgins Clark remained No. 1 on The New York Times hardcover fiction bestsellers list for the week ended April 15, but three new releases made the top five: “Dark Harbor” by Stuart Woods, “Oakdale Confidential” by Anonymous and “Dark Tort” by Diane Mott Davidson.