Buddy Foster

So I was watching an old hillbilly exploitation movie called Sixteen, about a family in rural Georgia in the mid-'70s. The mother is Mercedes McCambridge (who dubbed the demon voice in The Exorcist). The older "teenage" son and daughter go skinny-dipping, a little odd for a brother and sister. Then the family takes the Trailways to the county fair where the two of them become separated. The girl is molested by a motorcycle daredevil and the boy runs off with an exotic dancer.

I liked the other kid in the movie---the little brother. He looked like a 1970s kid with long hair parted on one side. He gave an energetic performance as a teenage rural Southern degenerate. I didn't recognize him, so I googled his name. Turned out to be Jodie Foster's brother, Buddy Foster. He had played one of Ken Berry's kids on Mayberry RFD. I remember him from Adam 12 and Dragnet. He was the voice of a kid in The Point and you know the animated commercial where a kid asks Mr Owl how many licks to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop? That was him. Played a Wolf Boy on The Six Million Dollar man.

He wrote a book called Foster Child, about his life as a child actor and about his sister, Jodie Foster. She publicly attacked him for it, accusing him of wanting "money and attention" (this coming from a millionaire movie star) and said that all he ever did was break their mother's heart.

Apparently his broken-hearted mother had comforted herself by spending all of Buddy's money. He had earned half a million dollars as a child actor (well over $2 million in today's money) but when he tried collect it as an adult, he discovered that his long-suffering mother had blown it all.

Dragnet

All you had to do was read your cue cards as fast as you can.

When you watch old episodes of Dragnet and see those actors standing there reading their teleprompters as fast as they can, you feel like maybe YOU could be an actor, too!

The show went from radio to television in the 1950s. Unlike most shows that made this switch, it kept the same cast.

On the radio, actors don't memorize lines. They stand in front of the microphone reading their script. Webb preferred this, so when the show went to television, pretty much all the dialog was on cue cards and teleprompters. Actors rarely had to remember lines.

If you watch the show, at least the color episodes, you can see that all the dialog scenes are shot in a studio. There is an establishing shot with a voice over narration, then the dialog is done in a studio in front of a rear screen projection. It worked pretty well most of the time. Could be done fairly easily now in front of a green screen.

It seems like it would be a good approach. You could get better performances both from stage actors who tend to over do it, and non-actors who usually talk very, very slow.