She details her horrifying experience of being sexually assaulted as a teenager, by an older actor she’d loved and trusted. She finally heads to New York to learn her craft at the Actors Studio, confessing, “I wanted to be taken seriously.” She films her teen self talking about what she wants to achieve next, to the sound of Liz Phair’s “Mesmerizing.” But that goes right into footage of her roles in cheesy flicks like Pumpkinhead 2: Blood Wings and the TV remake of Piranha. She had breast reduction surgery at 15, one of the first celebrities to go public about this experience.Īs she points out in the movie, nobody really wants to see kiddie stars grow up. For Frye, it was complicated by her body-image issues she was still young enough to be going to summer camp when the mean kids started calling her “Punky Boobster.” There’s an infuriating scene of a guest appearance on The Wonder Years, with Fred Savage’s character - and the adults behind the camera - ogling her chest. As soon as Punky got cancelled, her career came to a crashing halt, and that’s really where the story begins - none of these kids are equipped to handle the rejection and failure of show biz. She draws hearts around his name.īut like virtually all her fellow kid stars from the Reagan era, she didn’t make the move into adult stardom. We see a page from her teen diary, for the momentous day when Mark Wahlberg calls her. She waxes poetic about her romance with Danny Boy O’Connor - you know, the second-most famous rapper from House of Pain, during the “Jump Around” era. She likes to ask her friends about their philosophy of life, so we get the pensées of Emmanuel Lewis and Michael Rappaport and Corey Feldman. Frye was carrying her camera before social media or the internet boom, so nobody worries about getting filmed while they party, booze it up, do drugs. There’s even a clip from everybody’s favorite Punky Brewster episode, the one where Buzz Aldrin visits to heal her grief over the 1986 Challenger explosion.įor a junkie of early Nineties pop culture, Kid 90 is definitely a trip down memory lane. There’s a highlight reel of her childhood fame, including Frye smiling in a TV ad for raisins and schmoozing with Joan Rivers, Nancy Reagan, George H.W. The tapes sat in a storage facility for 20 years. The best-case scenario is you get to live the rest of your life as a schnook. And she was going to document every fucking second of it, so that she could share it someday.” It’s the Goodfellas of child-star sagas, about growing up in a dirty business you can never escape. It’s timed to coincide with the new Punky reboot on Peacock, starring Frye as a single mom.Īs she says in the movie, “Somewhere inside, that teenage girl knew that she was gonna have a story to tell, knew that she was going to go on an adventure. Kid 90, a new documentary that’s now streaming on Hulu, turns her home-movie footage into a time capsule of show-biz kids growing up in Nineties Hollywood. The show was eventually cancelled in 1988 - and that’s when Frye started toting a video camera around, filming her other child-star friends, just in time for their awkward teen years. She played America’s favorite wise-cracking moppet, wearing mismatched high-tops and extolling the virtues of Punky Power. Soleil Moon Frye became the ultimate Eighties child star on Punky Brewster, at the age of seven.
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