Home › Entertainment › Movies
His years on 'Wonder Years' served Savage on 'Daddy' set
TriStar Pictures Director Fred Savage, right, coaches child actor Spencir Bridges before a shot.
STORY TOOLS
More from Movies
Fred Savage knows from experience what it's like to work with child actors.
"It's just incredibly important, particularly with young actors, to have a positive atmosphere on the set," said Savage, whose big-screen directing debut is "Daddy Day Camp," which opened Wednesday.
Savage was 12 when he first appeared as Kevin Arnold, the wide-eyed kid growing up in the 1960s in "The Wonder Years," which ran six seasons on ABC.
Since then, he has matured as both an actor (starring in the short-lived sitcoms "Working" and "Crumbs") and as a director of episodic TV — including stints on such kid-centric series as "Zoey 101," "Hannah Montana," "That's So Raven" and "Unfabulous."
"My experiences working as a young actor helped inform the way that I approach directing other young actors, and with actors in general," said Savage, 31, now married and with a year-old son.
In "Daddy Day Camp," Cuba Gooding Jr. plays day care operator Charlie Hinton (the role Eddie Murphy played in 2003's "Daddy Day Care"), this time working to rescue his childhood summer camp from bankruptcy.
The movie was filmed last summer in Utah, with a cast of child actors mostly chosen locally. Hiring that much local talent is unusual, said Judi McKee, Utah casting director for "Daddy Day Camp." Usually, major child roles are cast in Hollywood.
There are, however, budgetary issues. "When you have to bring a kid in from out of town, you also have to cart along their parents," she said. "It gets very complicated and expensive, so they really like to find kids locally."
"There tends to be a veneer of professionalism with kids in L.A.," Savage said. "The ones we got in Salt Lake were totally professional, but they were just real kids."
— Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service
(Requires free registration.)
Article discussions on this site are to support community debates of issues related to our stories and editorials.
Discussions should not stray from the subject of the story or editorial.
We do not allow the following:
We reserve the right to delete threads and/or ban users for these or other reasons we deem necessary.
Opinions are the sole responsibility of the person posting them. You agree not to post comments that are off topic, defamatory, obscene, abusive, threatening or an invasion of privacy. Violators may be banned. Click here for our full user agreement.