I was once almost a movie star. Well, maybe not a star but at least a real actor. Hmmm...actually, that's not quite right either. The truth is that once - as a child - I appeared in a movie, and I'm not sure but I think it might have just been part of a scam.
As so often happens, my memories were jogged recently by a song, one that I hadn't heard for many years. Its title is "Good Old Days," and you might recognize it as the theme song for The Little Rascals (sometimes called Our Gang), a series of short films that started in the silent era and continued for the next couple of decades. The idea was the brainchild of director/producer Hal Roach, and although they weren't very PC by today's standards, they were popular at the time.
Over the life of the series the producers went through a lot of pint-size actors. Some of those kids never had another acting job but others, such as Jackie Cooper, went on to later fame. Still others became pretty well-known as young actors, but had mixed results as adult actors. George "Spanky"
McFarland and his sidekick Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer were two that fell into that classification.
Eventually, some of those old films began showing up on TV screens and entertaining a whole new generation, and have continued to do so in the years since. I was a teen by the time they first appeared on TV in the mid 1950s, but that's when I found out something that might have been the key to the beginnings of my own short-lived film career a few years before.
It turned out that my mother had grown up in the same rural area of Illinois as Alfalfa, and knew him as a young boy. Seeing him become famous would surely have made her more susceptible to an opportunity that came along when I was about eight or nine.
Article comments