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The mood on the Pretty Baby set was quite different. Shields recalls that Director Malle "usually talked to my mother, not me. She'd come back and tell me what he said. He was afraid to talk to me, I think. In the beginning, on the set, no one knew what to say to me. Then I tried to talk to the people on the set more as an adult than a little kid. After that it was fun. In the beginning Malle directed me more than the others, but soon we were all treated the same."
Their first auditions, the moments when someone looked and guessed correctly that the Arriflex cameras would like what they saw, are so far in the past for some of these veterans that it is hard for them to remember how they felt. Lane, who was six when she won a role in a La Mama Theater production of Medea—in Greek—was asked to say words backwards to determine her linguistic facility. Shields had to smash plates, because the young whore in Pretty Baby has a scene in which she smashes glass photographic plates. Mariel Hemingway did not have to go through an audition; as Lipstick began to take form, someone mentioned to her older sister Margaux, the star, that a girl had to be found to play her younger sister. Margaux thought of Mariel, and a few months later critics were saying that this serious, chubby-faced 13-year-old was the better actress. Tatum O'Neal auditioned for her role in Paper Moon without knowing what was going on. Director Peter Bogdanovich dropped by the O'Neal house, and Tatum's cool backchat persuaded him to hire her.
Linda Manz went to school one day three years ago in Manhattan—something she did not always do—and was told that a casting agent named Barbara Claman had put out a call for street kids. Manz, tough and wiry, an alley cat, swaggered into Claman's office and bummed a cigarette; if nothing else came of the interview, she would be one smoke to the good. She remembers that Claman "told me to pretend that I got busted for pickpocketing and that I didn't do it and I was telling the cop about it. So I just let loose with some four-letter words, and I think that did it."
Whatever did it, Manz, like the rest of this season's crop of wild flowers, bloomed quickly. A look at the garden: