Early Education

Freshman Charlie Korsmo is discussing his former Hollywood career. It’s not like you have to drag the details out of him, but it’s not like you don’t. He’s happy to talk, he says. It’s just no big deal.

At 9, he starred with Jessica Lange in “Men Don’t Leave” and with William Hurt in “The Doctor.” At 10, he starred with Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss in “What About Bob?” At 11, he starred with Warren Beatty and Madonna in “Dick Tracy” and at 12, starred with Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams in Steven Spielberg’s “Hook.”

“When you’re with these people, they’re just people,” says Korsmo, who hosted a PBS Special and at 12, was a guest on the Tonight Show. “My only flirting with fame is boy, this isn’t something you need. It’s not the big glamorous thing you expect.”

Now 18, Korsmo is studying aeronautics and astronautics at MIT and daydreams about becoming an astronaut. “It’s kind of a long shot,” he says, “but so is making movies.”

Hated School

Born in North Dakota, he moved to Minneapolis when his parents divorced. He was 8, the same year he saw a sitcom shot on a visit to Universal Studios in L.A. and thought, I could do that. Back home, he auditioned for dozens of TV ads, landing a two-second spot in a bakery commercial folding a flag. “I never thought of making movies. I just wanted to make a few hundred dollars to buy a Nintendo,” he says.

But he also wanted to duck third grade.

At 4, he read with 12th grade comprehension, hounded his mother for answers to existential questions, and at 8, was doing college math. “I loved learning but hated school,” he says.

“Oh, it was awful,” recalls his mother in a telephone conversation. “He hated school so much. He scored at the ceiling in nearly every subject, so I just let him be in the movies.”

When a casting director touring the U.S. asked him if he could grasp the plot of “Men Don’t Leave,” he replied: “My Dad’s dead, my Mom’s sick, and my life’s a mess.” The comment launched his career. “I was just glad I didn’t have to go to third grade,” says Korsmo, who for the next five years studied with a studio tutor.

“Acting is hard work,” he says. “For two weeks in Chicago we filmed a scene where I was running in the rain. In the middle of the night, we’d drive two hours to the middle of nowhere and film all night. I’d run and it was freezing, and I was soaking wet, and then all of it was cut out of the movie.”

When he auditioned for “Dick Tracy,” the studio sent him straight to L.A. and to Warren Beatty’s kitchen, where he was hired by him on the spot. He says of those temporary moves to Hollywood: “It wasn’t a big party.”

Mostly, he was alone. His family and friends took turns staying with him. Often he worked 14-hour days. He was homesick. He had no friends his age. Strangers began to surround him in restaurants and on the street, asking for his autograph. Once he was mobbed by a crowd. Then he began to get weird mail. Dustin Hoffman advised him: “Get out while you can.”

Back to School

“I remember talking with Robin Williams one day when I was going off to lunch. He asked me where I was going and I said, ‘Taco Bell.’ ‘Oh, Taco Bell,’ he said, ‘I wish I could go there.’”

“People think actors are pretentious for having people get them stuff, but they can’t go. You get mobbed everywhere.

“At 13, being famous doesn’t have many advantages. It’s not like I got a lot of special treatment; I never went anywhere to get any. I didn’t go to parties, and at 10, it wasn’t as if women were falling all over me.

“I didn’t go to school. I was missing everything about being a teenager, the first school dances and stuff, and I couldn’t spend my money because you can’t get it until you’re 18.”

So he retired from Hollywood at age 13 and returned to Minneapolis and to eighth grade. “It was a tough decision because I hated school,” he says, but now he is glad.

At MIT, where he recently starred in Gilbert & Sullivan’s “HMS Pinafore,” sometimes he is recognized. It happens less often now, he says, but recently at a New York pay phone, a stranger knocked on the glass, mouthing, “Aren’t you the guy in “Hook”?

“It’s weird,” he says. “Sometimes people say: ‘Weren’t you on “Different Strokes?”‘ Or, ‘Are you that kid from “Home Alone”?’ Or just, ‘How do I know you?’

“I say, ‘I don’t know.’ I don’t want to rehash the whole thing for everybody. Making movies was a real weird kind of adult experience. In a way it was like MIT, in that it was a great education. The big lesson is people are people. They’re smart, funny, creative people, but they’re people. I don’t talk to Dustin Hoffman any different from how I talk to you.”

No?

“No, of course not.”

He laughs. “If he wanted to know all this garbage, I’d tell him.”

by Liz Karagianis

On Topic: arts, students