(4 of 7)
The movie screen is a cage too. Animal instincts are on display in there, prowling for our pleasure. Handsome creatures (the performers) assume the shapes of pretty beasts (the characters). Being observed through these gilded bars, in brutal or glamorous close-up, has to be confining for a film actor. The mixture of exhibitionism and vulnerability in any performer must be volatile, toxic. Even more so for an actress, since the history of movies, as has been said a million times, is the history of men looking at women. And most certainly for a child starlet who, at first, is utterly spontaneous, innocent, exposed -- often exploited and, perhaps, as isolated as Fred Tate.
Foster says she directed the Little Man Tate script "because I understood it so much." How could she not? She was an exceptional child from the age of three, when she shot her first Coppertone commercial. She was in TV shows and movies at nine: a beautiful blond girl, her sad eyes overwhelming a toothsome * smile. She was Becky Thatcher, Tom Sawyer's muse of civility, and Addie Pray, beguiling con artist of the Paper Moon series, and a one-kid sorority of spunky Disney heroines. How many girls of the '70s wanted to be Jodie Foster? Movie stars are to fall in love with. Or, if they are children, to adopt. How many parents wanted to trade in their daughters for this one?
It takes a smart heart and the carapace of an armadillo to emerge sane, let alone healthy, from child celebrity. Jodie Foster somehow did it, and the somehow is her mother. Brandy, a former publicist, separated from Lucius Foster III, a real estate agent, before their fourth child, Alicia Christian (Jodie), was born in Los Angeles on Nov. 19, 1962. The atypical stage mother, Brandy won Jodie's loving respect because she urged and loved rather than pushed and shoved. "She'd seen a lot of wayward souls in Hollywood. She didn't want a cripple for a child; she wanted me to fly. She also wanted me to have a serious and heroic career. So she chose some risky, off-beat movies."
In any kind of movie, Jodie was off-beat because from girlhood she always seemed the older woman. Not yet 10, playing Becky Thatcher, she instructs the young truant in the meaning of the word philanderer. A year or so later, as wizened Audrey in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, she shows Alice's son how to steal guitar strings from a music store, asks him if he wants to get high on Ripple, and nonchalantly reveals that her "mom turns tricks in the Ramada Inn from 3 on in the afternoon." Not long after Alice, she was Tallulah, a sleek gun moll, in Bugsy Malone, Alan Parker's weird-but-it-works munchkin musical. The same year she played Iris, Taxi Driver's notorious pre-teen hooker -- rude talk and skimpy clothes ill-suiting a good girl stranded in hell. And with each new movie, it seemed as if Jodie had skipped another grade. Her intelligence gave her a precocious maturity; the Foster child was already a Foster parent.