Jackie Coogan and the fall of Hollywood's child stars

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/jackie-coogan-and-fall-hollywoods-child-stars

by samclemens • 2 years ago

43 43 2 years ago

h2odragon4• 2 years ago

When I was 17, my Dad told me he was "investing" the near million dollars that was my share of the sales of software I'd written.

When I was 34, he passed, and I had to wrap up his estate. Discovered that I was on the paperwork for several corporations I had never heard of; that there was no money left, and some of the details of how he spent it all. We apparently contributed to Nashville getting their hockey team, among other fun diversions having nothing to do with the business we had been in.

Still aint got over the bitterness.

geraldhh• 2 years ago

otoh most 17 year old's would probably not do any better.

is the morale here that nobody should have "invested" it anywhere?

kiba2• 2 years ago

Stick it into an index fund.

tinco• 2 years ago

Not sure if they wouldn't. The sort of companies 17yr's hear about and are excited about in the past 20 years have all done extremely well. Perhaps that's a quirk of the past 20 years, but I wouldn't dismiss 17yr olds investment strategies out of hand.

They would do a lot better than what sounds like shady angel investments and sports team sponsorships.

huytersd• 2 years ago

Nonsense. If my son did that it would go straight into a low risk index fund or bond.

thinkingtoilet• 2 years ago

You can put it in a trust and hire someone to manage it, but that has it's own complications. Other than that, an index fund. Dead simple.

majormajor• 2 years ago

The moral, if you want one, is that if you're going to "protect" your kid "for their own good" instead of letting them have a say in it than you damn well better not fuck up.

A 17 year old who screws up can learn some lessons. A 17 year old who was screwed by their father? Less so.

Bluestrike2• 2 years ago

Considering the fact that the commenter's father lost or wasted all of it, he'd have probably been better had it sat in a checking account for the intervening years. Or under a mattress in wadded up dollar bills. Even if you're completely clueless about investing and you just walk into your bank and ask to talk to someone about what to do with it, you'd still come out ahead even if they push you towards mutual funds with excessive fees. Pretty much anything would have been better.

I'm not a parent, but I have trouble imagining how I'd ever feel comfortable directly managing my (hypothetical) kid's earnings like that. It just seems like, no matter what you do, you're creating a dynamic that could undermine or outright destroy your relationship. Especially if some of those investments go poorly.

kevinventullo• 2 years ago

Out of curiosity, what was the nature of the software you had sold as a teenager?

h2odragon4• 2 years ago

Bid estimating package for building earthen structures

zackmorris• 2 years ago

You just nailed why "nobody wants to work anymore".

I grew up in the 80s and Gen X people like me mostly remember asking our Boomer parents for money and they would maybe give us $20 or tell us to get a job. Meanwhile many of them (not mine) were making bank. We grew up with the understanding that there would simply be no money for us other than what we earned ourselves. The minimum wage would never increase, working people's taxes would never decrease, rich people's taxes would never increase, social security would be gone by the time we retire, etc etc etc. It never made sense to me how the hippie generation that learned so much about consciousness and the human condition managed to unlearn all of that and revert to a greed-is-good gilded age philosophy of trickle-down economics.

So I've come to equate deciding for others with sin. Because the ultimate sin is to look out for oneself and deny the agency of another under whatever mental construct floats your boat. That's what stuff like the golden rule and 10 commandments are about.

We're seeing this today with center-right populist politics where its proponents call grown adults snowflakes for calling out exploitation. And even the center-left silently supports neoliberal colonialism if it supports its narrative. This is why I could never vote for a republican that thinks he/she knows better than me while undercutting me, or a democrat who claims to act in my interests while gentrifying my community to raise my rent for example.

The elders currently in charge of government think they have some wisdom that comes with age, but they can't hear us when we tell them that there are no adults in the room. Because the world is literally burning while they obsess themselves with materialistic pursuits that will materially diminish the quality of life for us and future generations.

Meanwhile Millenials and Gen Z seem to be rejecting this patriarchy. And Gen X largely wants no part of withholding resources from others "for their own good". I see two possible futures around 2030: a head-in-the-sand focus on the comfort of the family like in the early 2000s and 1990 where actual world peace is put out of sight and mind, or a silent revolution where the old guard retires and young people pay those inherited resources forward to automate the drudgery that consumes our waking lives so that we can move into the New Age.

The odds say that the former future is most likely based on history, but I suspect that the incalculable rage that young people feel towards the rich and powerful may alchemize into a level of healing love that the world hasn't seen yet. In other words if you have children, they will self-actualize in the ways which you were denied, and that wind-in-our-sails shift from conservatism towards investment in the future will play out across the population at large and deliver rapid spiritual evolution and innovation like we saw during the pandemic. So we should probably maintain vigilance in the face of one last sabotage as the powers that be attempt to cement minority rule by the elites before they pass.

glitchc3• 2 years ago

The fly in the ointment is that Millenials are turning out to be just as materialistic as the Boomers.

2017: https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/millennials-are-most-derided-gen...

2022: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/02191...

nineplay• 2 years ago

Gen X people like me mostly remember asking our Boomer parents

Millennials are the children of Boomers, not Gen X.

at_a_remove2• 2 years ago

We're getting a little far afield here, but I find all of those "You Big Silly, Social Security Isn't Going Bankrupt" articles, which eventually make the correction that we just won't be getting our expected benefits out of the fund quite a bit like those technically correct "we won't ever run out of oil" stances. It's true, the last few barrels of oil will probably reside in a museum somewhere, priced like a Gaughin, but for all practical purposes ...

For all practical purposes, the Boomers have this locust-y feel about them. Not malevolent so much as blindly hungry, leaving little behind. Their consumption and barren futures aren't a concern for them, they'll be dead, and we will, like Coogan, have been robbed on a generational scale. We will hear Lillian Coogan's words in many variations: "No promises were ever made to give Jackie anything."

IncreasePosts• 2 years ago

Wait, so you've owned a slice of the Nashville Predators since the late 90s? I thought sports teams have been a great investment over the past 20 years?

h2odragon4• 2 years ago

no, he got scammed by those folks for some amount. They did a Cayman Islands "carry trade" deal and i have no idea what happened there.

TehShrike2• 2 years ago

Children should be allowed to own property.

aetherson2• 2 years ago

They should. However, we should understand that for all the failings of parents as managers of a child's money, a five year old child is also not going to make good financial decisions, and there does need to be someone who can make prudent, and indeed numerate, decisions on the child's behalf.

firebat45• 2 years ago

Children may not be able to make good decisions with their money, but many adults aren't either, especially when it is someone else's money (ie, their kids).

A child should retain full control of their own money up to a certain value. Above that, they should be assigned a fiduciary to take care of the rest.

pizzafeelsright• 2 years ago

No. Children are property.

razakel• 2 years ago

To quote Lady Hale, that is a startling proposition.

TehShrike2• 2 years ago

Both can be true!

marcinzm• 2 years ago

How does this prevent these issues? Do you think a 5 year old child would not sign over all their property to their dear parents and/or manager if asked? It just increases the number of people who would try to swindle the kid since literally anyone interacting with the kid could do it.

PopAlongKid• 2 years ago

I mistook Jackie Coogan for another child star of the same era, Jackie Cooper.

tamaharbor• 2 years ago

Me too. Among many other things… Coogan played Uncle Fester in the Addams Family television series, Cooper played Jackie in the Our Gang / Little Rascals comedy series.

croisillon2• 2 years ago

oh wow wikipedia, "Cooper supported Republican presidential candidates and appeared at rallies for Herbert Hoover in 1932", the guy was born in 1922!

Gorath• 2 years ago

He was nominated for an academy award at age nine, this hardly seems far fetched. Have you forgotten this is a thread about child stars? Or are you just being intentionally misleading

lupusreal2• 2 years ago

Children are never good at acting anyway, I wish writers wouldn't write stories that require child actors.

ceejayoz2• 2 years ago

Watch the audition for the kid in ET and tell me kids can't ever be good actors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA5giyG8E7g

No kids in TV/film would leave a very odd gap in the stories we can tell.

lupusreal2• 2 years ago

For each their own I guess, I hated ET even when I was a kid.

kevinmchugh• 2 years ago

I find that children rarely have much range, but they can be cast inline with their natural inclinations or personality. There's a number of tv shows where the kid actors get worse over time, as they're asked to do more kinds of storytelling (stranger things is a good example).

at_a_remove2• 2 years ago

This isn't true. It's rare, but there are some terrific child actors. Watch the original IT to note just how good Seth Green and Emily Perkins are. Dakota Fanning and her sister. Haley Joel Osment felt very natural in The Sixth Sense. Brooke Shields in Alice, Sweet Alice was more in control of her performance than most adults.

Anyway, kids in movies and television shows aren't going away. We have to make sure they are well-treated.

Jackie Coogan and the fall of Hollywood's child stars

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