Back in December, 2009, shortly before Christmas, Andrew Chamberlain was a nine-year-old Village School fourth-grader playing his first major stage role as Boy Scrooge in McCarter Theater’s production of “A Christmas Carol.” His mother, Melissa, was pretty much just like any other proud mom, juggling her work-from-home telecommuting job as a marketing manager for Cybernetics (a storage networking company headquartered in Virginia) and driving him to rehearsals, making sure he got his homework done, and applauding his performances, along with her husband, Jeffrey, and Andrew’s older brother, William. Asked back then whether Andrew planned to continue his acting career, she said no decisions had been made.
Fast forward to summer, 2011. What a difference a year and a half can make. Andrew has completed numerous short films, a book trailer for Harper Collins, and a music video. He has been featured in several short films, which are being selected and screened at film festivals all over the world, including the Festival du Cinema de Paris, the New York Short Film Festival, and the Garden State Film Festival. One short film, “Bubblegum,” in which he plays the lead role, screens on Sunday, July 10, at the New Hope Film Festival. The 14-minute film, about a little boy named Samuel who will do anything to get a simple taste of bubblegum, has no dialogue and is directed by Marco Chiavarelli.
Melissa Chamberlain served as creative consultant and co-producer on the film, helping with continuity issues for the director, such as making sure Andrew’s wardrobe was matched to the scenes he was in (most films are shot out of sequence), and creating materials needed to submit the film to festivals.
In a story posted on the film website slated.com, she tells an on-set anecdote in which one night, while the cast and crew were shooting in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, a drunk man walked in off the street to show Andrew how to “properly” steal a pack of gum. Chamberlain was on the verge of calling the police, but ultimately the man went back outside and just watched the filming.
She will work with Chiavarelli on his next film too, “Oblivion,” taking on the role of a traditional producer, and will be involved in financing, casting, and production scheduling. She will also be involved in the finalizing the script. Andrew is not in this film.
This month, Andrew will be shooting his first feature film, “Hide Your Smiling Faces,” by the award-winning director Daniel Patrick Carbone.
Andrew’s life has changed dramatically and so has that of his mom, who, last September, made a joint decision with her husband, Jeff, to quit her job to support their son’s budding acting career. Her new role as “momager” has required the family to work out a whole new balancing act.
Since Cybernetics is a technology firm, Chamberlain explained she could “work from anywhere.” That was manageable during the initial stages of Andrew’s career, but as it took off, it became impossible for her to juggle the demands of full-time work with auditions and film shoots. “Plus the film stuff is fun, and I like to watch what is happening rather than keep my eyes on a laptop. I now have a much greater appreciation of the technical side of filmmaking,” says Chamberlain.
Jeff Chamberlain is a patent attorney and principal at Kacvinsky Daisak PLLC, and because his clients are all over the world, he can work out of a home office and be home when his wife is not. So, for example, he can be there when Andrew’s brother, William, comes home from Grover Middle School, where he is a rising seventh grader.
Melissa Chamberlain says it was Andrew’s theater experience at McCarter, which requires hours of rehearsal time and several matinee and evening performances, that helped prepare her family for the new whirlwind of activity required by his success. “We made adjustments and completely organized our lives around Andrew’s schedule. But we were so thrilled he was having the experience, and we enjoyed every minute of it.”
She says their home life is not as affected when Andrew is making a film. “Shooting a film is a different type of disruption because Andrew and I are away from home. Fortunately, we haven’t had to go too far for too long — Brooklyn for ‘Bubblegum’ and we’ll be in Sussex County for ‘Hide Your Smiling Faces.’”
Chamberlain says no day is typical, but each day can be as exhausting as it is exciting and fulfilling. She says the skill set she acquired working as a marketing director would make her a good producer. “While films are artistic endeavors, they are also products that are enormously expensive to produce. I’d be the person watching the bottom line.” But when it comes to managing Andrew’s career it’s her organization skills that are most called into play.
“We use a giant desk calendar to get a quick visual take on what we need to do and where we’re going to be but sometimes an audition will come up, and you have less than a day’s notice. That can make planning anything a challenge. This summer, we could not make any major plans — for camps, vacations — because Andrew did not get an offer on the film until mid June. Now, at least, we can plan August.”
One of the key challenges is to ensure that his long days, travel, and the sheer time and energy it takes to audition, rehearse, and shoot do not interfere with Andrew’s school work (he will enter sixth grade at Grover in the fall). Chamberlain says it helps that the West Windsor-Plainsboro school system is supportive. “We do our best to work his schedule around school and minimize his absences,” she says, adding that it helps that Andrew is a good student and diligent about staying on top of his work. At this point, she says they would love for him to go to college and that is definitely part of his future plans.
There are many stories of child actors being exploited financially or losing all of their money due to mismanagement or bad investments. Do they worry about that at all? “Right now, money hasn’t been a big issue because there hasn’t been a lot of it, but everything he makes is 100 percent his,” says Chamberlain.
While Andrew is eligible to join the Screen Actors Guild, an actors union, she says they have not yet gone that route. “We want him to be able to do non-union projects. There is a lot of great stuff out there. He’ll join SAG at some point, and we’ll set up a trust account.”
“Momager” Chamberlain’s ease with people and ability to go with the flow can be credited in large part to being raised in a military family. She was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and ended up in Yorktown, Virginia, where her father eventually retired. In between, she lived in Spain, Germany, and southern California. After earning her bachelor’s in psychology from Christopher Newport University in Virginia in 1988, she began her marketing career in that state, which is where she met her husband in 1989. He was an engineer at that time, working at Newport News Shipbuilding. William was born in 1998, Andrew in 2000. Less than a week after Andrew was born, Jeff’s legal career took the family to New York City. It was during a 2002 visit to Princeton to attend Communiversity with friends that they happened to visit West Windsor and fell in love with the Berrien City neighborhood.
Chamberlain, who has also done graduate coursework in social psychology at Princeton University, says she could write a book full of anecdotes about the funny and interesting things that happen almost on a daily basis. For example, Andrew recently was called back for a feature film and she was helping him prepare by running his lines with him. “His character had a monologue full of language you would not be able to print in a family paper. It was really shocking. But we talked about it and decided the overall project was worth it. We were walking down the street with our dog, and Andrew recited this monologue over and over for me. I was just waiting for someone to come around the corner and give me my Bad Mommy Badge. We were all a bit relieved that he didn’t get that project.”
Another time, she and Andrew came home on the train after wrapping a day’s shoot on the movie “Slumberland” in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City. “We had been in freezing rain all day, and Andrew was in full make-up with a gash on his face inflicted by a giant crow. It was very awkward. Andrew loved the attention. I did not.” In an E-mail she adds: “During that film shoot, Andrew’s clothes had to be ripped to shreds, and he had a lot of graphic makeup on — and he insisted on going home in that state in order to show his brother. I walked through Penn Station with him that way, and I was pretty sure people either thought we were homeless or in need of child protective services.”
Chamberlain says Andrew, as yet, is unfazed by his success and not quite used to the newfound attention he is receiving. “At the Garden State Film Festival, he was asked for his autograph for the first time, and he had no idea what that was about,” she says. “I said, ‘You’re just supposed to write your name on a piece of paper.’ He said, ‘Huh?’ But he did it, and for the rest of the festival he made sure he had a pen in his pocket.”
The hardest part for Chamberlain, she says, is the audition process, but luckily, that is not the case for Andrew. “He doesn’t stress over it and actually goes in and comes out smiling. And I can happily say he doesn’t seem at all preoccupied when we are waiting for a decision. It’s me waiting by the phone because sometimes I just fall in love with a project and want that experience for him.”
Chamberlain says William, Andrew’s older brother, is involved in acting to a lesser extent. “Last fall I was watching William film a scene in a film called ‘The Fault’ — and he was so good that I started to panic a little. “I can’t juggle two of them!” She says that at this point, William prefers to make films rather than star in them. “He makes stop motion films on his iPod that are pretty good, and he wants to go to film school,” she says.
One would think that a huge challenge of having a child star is keeping him grounded, especially among his friends and schoolmates, but Chamberlain says that Andrew makes that part of the job easy. “Andrew is very grounded. He reads constantly, he likes hanging out at Waterworks, he just ran his first 5K race, and he wants to run cross country at Grover. As a working actor he understands that it’s a job and that it’s hard work and that people are counting on him to help bring projects to fruition where there can be a lot at stake. People who have not spent a lot of time on film sets perhaps have an idea that it’s glamorous and fun — and at times it is — but there’s also a lot of standing around between take after take of the same scene.”
Chamberlain is confident that the skills Andrew is learning now will stay with him. “During a post-screening Q&A after ‘Bubblegum’ a reporter asked Andrew what’s the hardest thing about making a film, and he said, ‘being patient.’ He’s learning things through filmmaking that will help him no matter what he does.”
As for Chamberlain, she confesses she has absolutely no interest in being on camera, but she is discovering talents related to the producing side of film. “I’ve helped in casting projects and in scouting locations. I’ve found that if you spend enough time on film sets, people will put you to work.”
She also took screenwriting classes last year at New York Film Academy and New York University and finished a feature-length screenplay called “Private Investigations,” which she describes as a film noir-style murder mystery that she may submit to workshops and festivals later this year.
She feels that the most important thing she can do for Andrew is to connect him with projects where he will meet talented people, learn a lot, and have fun. “That’s where being a parent-manager helps, because I put his interests first. When he had a ‘real’ talent manager in New York, he was getting called in for commercials and even a TV pilot, but it was not the kind of thing Andrew likes. Andrew likes more nuanced, dramatic film projects, and so that is our focus.
“A non-parent talent manager with a stake in Andrew’s income is going to send a kid out for anything. That didn’t last for us, but we ended that relationship on good terms.”
Currently she searches the acting trade publications Backstage and Actor’s Access for auditions and since Andrew has made his rounds with casting directors in New York, sometimes he gets calls “out of the blue,” says Chamberlain. She plans to look for a film agent this fall, someone who can see bigger opportunities she does not have access to. No matter what happens, though, Chamberlain says, “I’ll always be his ‘momager’ — until he’s old enough to fire me.”
Second Annual Festival, New Hope Film Festival, New Hope Arts Center, 2 Stockton Avenue, New Hope, PA. Sunday, July 10, 11 a.m.
Screening of “The Choctow Funeral Cry” and other shorts at 11 a.m. and “99 Percent Sure” and “Bubblegum,” starring child actor Andrew Chamberlain of West Windsor, at 3:15 p.m. $6 per session. Discounts for students, seniors, and online. 215-862-5768 or www.newhopefilmfestival.com.
