Portrait of the artist as a former child star

For a whole generation of television watchers, the fates of former child stars are like a bad traffic accident: we don't like to look at them, but we can't look away. As California director Joal Ryan found making her new film -- which is loosely based on the life of Diff'rent Strokes teen-idol-gone-wrong Dana Plato -- there is a little bit of former child star in all of us.

by Ellen Barry

In the end, it's the details that haunt us. It's Gary Coleman (Arnold) at the opening of his video arcade, which contains very few video games, selling his autograph for five bucks a shot. It's Todd Bridges (Willis), arrested again in January, this time for ramming someone with his car in a video-arcade dispute. And -- long after Arnold's molestation and Nancy Reagan's guest appearance are forgotten forever -- it's Dana Plato (Kimberly), whose video-store rampage began when she was turned down for a job picking up garbage.

We can change the subject to welfare reform or asteroids, but the images stick with us: Erin Moran (Joanie), waitressing in a diner two hours outside of LA, sending her regrets to the Happy Days reunion; Danny Bonaduce of The Partridge Family rushing a transvestite prostitute in an Arizona convenience store; Jay North, once Mr. Wilson's pint-sized nemesis on Dennis the Menace, spending his golden years as a prison guard in Florida.

And even when we're not looking for them, former child stars pop up spookily at the margins of the industry: Real People's tot correspondent Peter Billingsley in his underwear, astride a mostly naked blonde, hitting her with a riding crop on a made-for-cable sitcom; Lisa Whelchel (Blair Warner on The Facts of Life), hawking fitness equipment on a late-night infomercial; a thousand Arnold Horshacks playing themselves on a thousand episodes of Ellen.

---

We will, we will stalk you

---

Ever since the day '20s moppet Jackie Coogan subpoenaed his mother, former child stars have instilled in Americans a reflexive tingle of uneasiness, as if, somehow, we had to answer for no longer considering them cute. But in these nostalgia-soaked times, our hunger for the goods on former child stars has grown obsessive, and -- what's more -- former-child-star tracking capabilities have shot forward into the 21st century.

Log on to the WASHED-UPdate web page, and in a matter of seconds you can be faced with the career trajectories of Anson "Potsie" Williams and Donny "Ralph Malph" Most. One link away, and you're comparing accounts of Soleil Moon Frye's 18th birthday party. Apocrypha is everywhere. The truth and the fiction, equally strange, meld together in a grotesque mass of information. (For the record, Eddie Haskell was not Johnny "Wadd" Holmes. Cindy Brady never sold her body; she is involved in silk-screening.) There are more Baby Janes than ever, and less space for them to hide in.

It was with an eye toward this morbid fascination that California filmmaker Joal Ryan began filming Former Child Star, a tale of faded celebrity and petty crime loosely based on the career of Dana Plato. Ryan's project rapidly expanded to include an e-zine called Former Child Star-Palooza, which features an entire column devoted to former child star sightings, which runs along these lines: "I shared a table with JOEY LAWRENCE at a country club." What Ryan set out to do was tap an odd pop-culture fixation. What she has discovered is an unpredictable depth of feeling.

"Former child stars, they just -- I don't know -- freak us out," Ryan says. "It might be a peer thing."

Part 2 - The early death of Nicholas Bradford

Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.