The Fresh-Face Factory

By RICHARD CORLISS

She stars in a TV series that wins its time slots on two different networks. She co-starred in one Hollywood film last month (Agent Cody Banks) and has her name alone above the title in another opening in May (The Lizzie McGuire Movie). A 10-year show-biz veteran, she receives a staggering 375,000 fan e-mails a week, asking advice on fashion, makeup and boyfriends.

So what does Hilary Duff want to do when she turns 16?

Drive. "I'm just obsessing about getting my license," says the star of Lizzie McGuire, a hit on the Disney Channel and ABC's Saturday mornings. "That's all I think about. I'm counting down the days." She really is. She knows she has about 170 to go.

When he turned 16, 16 months ago, Frankie Muniz gave himself a birthday present: he bought the VW Jetta that Vin Diesel drove in The Fast and the Furious. But the Muggsy Bogues-size star of Fox's Malcolm in the Middle has bigger toys in mind. He would like to own the Los Angeles Clippers. Somebody should tell Muniz that's a TV actor's ambition. If he thought himself a true movie star--and he should, having headlined last year's hit Big Fat Liar and the current Agent Cody Banks--he would dream bigger: take over the Lakers. Own Shaq. Sit next to Jack.

Amanda Bynes didn't need a car or a Kobe when she turned 16. She wanted a starring role in a film, and she was prepared to be patient. She has been called the new Lucille Ball and the next Gilda Radner, thanks to her deft, daft turns on the Nickelodeon skit-com series All That. Nick's Kids Choice awards named her Favorite Television Actress three years running. But, she says, "I want to be looked at as an adult actress. That's why I didn't want to do a big movie when I was 11. I was waiting till I was a little bit older." Bynes got her wish. The romantic comedy What a Girl Wants (she's the girl) opened last weekend, a day after her 17th birthday.

Muniz may be thought of as just another cute, cunning face, smiling from inside your living-room furniture. Duff and Bynes may be familiar to everyone under 14 and nobody over. (Bynes' appeal was so dense and narrow that MTV bookers thought she was a little kid when her publicists approached them last month.) But these teens don't see TV as the apogee of their career arc. They want to be movie stars. And now Hollywood wants that too.

The studios, finally acknowledging the power of the tween audience, are packaging 10- to 15-year-olds for their own TV shows, then rewrapping them for the big screen. Muniz, even as he girds for his fifth season as Malcolm, is so much a fixture in theatrical films that a Cody Banks sequel is already in the works. Bynes and Duff, the twin Tweens' Queens of kid TV, aim to become Hollywood movie princesses.

"It's almost like a throwback to the old Hollywood system where studios would have their own players, a stable of talent," says trend tracker Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations Co. "These are stars that are already in the fold. They are already part of a studio product line. So why not bring these stars up from TV to the big screen and hope that the kids who love them on TV will follow them?"

Rich Ross, Disney Channel's president of Entertainment and a former programming sachem at Nickelodeon, is more emphatic. "Kids' TV is where you find the stars, not of tomorrow, but of today," he avers. "Movie directors don't need casting tapes anymore; they just need to turn on the TV. This is a golden age--Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, 2003."

In the '30s and '40s, when moviegoing was a family adventure, young actors ruled. Rooney was the top box-office draw in America, and Garland sent adults and kids over the rainbow. Teen soprano Deanna Durbin was, at 14, the world's highest paid actress. At the same age, Bonita Granville had her own series: the Nancy Drew films. Our Gang and the Dead End Kids filled out the program.

That was pre-TV, of course. The home medium soon functioned as a baby-sitter and an incubator for precocious talent: Billy Gray of Father Knows Best, Ronny Howard (later Oscar-winning director Ron) on The Andy Griffith Show and the endless cattle, or calf, call of Bradys, Huxtables and Facts of Lifers. But those youngsters could rarely transform their video adorability to the higher voltage of films. The minors stayed in the minors. Big-screen producers remained oblivious to the 8-to-13 set. Nobody thought to make, say, a black-cast Cody Banks spy saga: Agent Urkel.

"What's great about the kids today," Ross says, "is that they can act exactly the age they are. That's the throwback to Mickey and Judy putting on a show. Today kids put on a show every day, and millions come to watch." Ross is referring to Nick and the Disney Channel, two of cable's major revenue and talent streams. But he and others are convinced that the stars--and, more important, their fans--can meet in the movie theaters. "Those are people who are likely to leave their house and go and buy tickets," says Stan Rogow, who produced the Lizzie McGuire show and movie. "And they can't travel alone, so they bring a parent. The tween audience has developed from barely a concept three years ago to a group that delivers in ratings and box office." Muniz's Big Fat Liar last year grossed nearly $50 million (on a $15 million budget), and Cody Banks pulled in a robust $36 million in its first three weeks.

Some of the teen TV shows and films are throwbacks to classic (i.e., old) Hollywood fodder. Lizzie McGuire, a genteel sitcom about a middle schooler, her parents and school friends, provides cheerful role models and helpful homilies. Dissing gets scrubbed into snappy patter, dysfunction into amiable eccentricity. And Duff makes the medicine go down with spoonfuls of beguilement. A budding beauty with good comic timing and the sense not to hit her emotions on the nose, she almost turns Lizzie into a striver. "She doesn't exactly fit in at school," Duff says. "Even though she's cool, and she dresses cool, she doesn't know who she is yet."

Malcolm skews a bit older, with more roughhouse and cynicism, but Muniz's feature films are traditional anxiety fantasies for kids: Big Fat Liar put some brisk wit into its boy-who-cried-wolf plot; Cody Banks is a wan recycling of Spy Kids with a 007 fixation. The Bynes and Duff movie vehicles are more nakedly retro. What a Girl Wants is based on the '50s Sandra Dee bauble The Reluctant Debutante, while The Lizzie McGuire Movie could be Gidget Goes to Rome with an updated pop score. Both put their budding stars in glamorous foreign capitals (London and Rome), where they addle the locals with a sturdy detergent called American charm.

What a Girl Wants, the story of a New York City teen who seeks out her English-aristocrat dad (Colin Firth), takes the easy route of proving Bynes' appeal by making oafs and prigs of the Brits. But in this fable of father finding and mother hugging, Bynes shows her mastery of the pratfall--in one scene, off a fashion-show catwalk and into Prince Charles' lap. She also expertly editorializes with her giant green eyes, which could be out of a Keane or Cocteau painting. She bats, crosses or demurely averts them until the viewer yells uncle, or benignly feels like one.

"I was always kind of goofy," says Bynes. "And I had all this energy. Getting to put on wigs and props and doing characters was perfect for me." On Nick, she did acute impressions of Barbara Walters and Judge Judy and played Ashley, a sweetly sadistic advice columnist. She also refined her pratfall skills, which she now hopes to mothball. On television, she recalls, "I was always ruining something. It was fun for a little bit, but then it got to the point where we were thinking of what I would fall into or off of next."

Teen actors, like baby Tiger Woodses and Michelle Kwans, have been doing what they're good at since early kidhood. Muniz was a trouper at 8, as Tiny Tim in a Christmas Carol in Raleigh, N.C. Bynes was discovered at 10 at a kids' stand-up workshop in Los Angeles. Duff loved playacting in her Houston home: "When I was a kid, I would turn the TV off and act out the scenes myself." At 7, she turned pro.

For these actors, being a kid is a full-time job, with scripts to memorize, tutoring to endure--and all that fan mail. Can they also be ordinary youngsters? Or do they just play them on TV? Duff and Bynes seem to pull it off: nice girls with a grownup sense of proportion. "I pride myself on not being Hollywood," Bynes says. "I could go to the parties and stuff, but for me it's so fake. I know my whole career is based on being perky, but I'm more laid back than people would assume." Duff, when asked about her family, includes the dogs, as if they naturally belong with her parents and elder sister. For her, Hollywood is just a place to work. "The hardest part is being away from home," she says, as if Oz couldn't hold a candle to Kansas.

Of course, all this could be ... acting. For sure, the top kid stars aren't ready to hang it up. Indeed, they are mapping out futures beyond their comfortable TV hits. Duff says, when she first played Lizzie, "I was going through the same period of my life that Lizzie was, so it was kind of cool. But I'm older now," she says, sounding like Travolta when he vaulted from Welcome Back, Kotter to Saturday Night Fever. (The Lizzie TV series has probably shot its last episode, allowing Duff to pursue her film career.) Bynes is even more determined: "I want longevity. I want to be where you don't get sick of me because in one year I'm in so many movies." She seems to realize that for her, What a Girl Wants isn't quite what Roman Holiday was for Audrey Hepburn. "I'm waiting to find something a little bit above this movie. I don't want to go down in maturity."

These kid stars sound mature already. Even before they were 16, they didn't need a license to drive themselves to the top. --Reported by Desa Philadelphia/Los Angeles

With reporting by Desa Philadelphia/Los Angeles