- Charlie Korsmo, Hook, 1990. “Steven had me screen-test with Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman,” recalled Joey. “I was just too young for the role. (Seven)., Steven came up to me: ‘Don’t worry about it, Joey. I’m going to get you in a movie this summer.’ Not only a nice promise to get, but to have it be one of the biggest box-office smashes of all time? That’s a pretty good trade.” Plus the first sequel. And not only that… again. In the mighty Jursassic Park, he was the grandson of Richard Attenborough – who immediately cast him in his next directing gig, Shadowlands, with yet another Spielberg pal, Debra Winger.
- Gregory Smith, Small Soldiers, 1997. Change of Alan Abernathy, the kid who inadvertently started the toy wars in what Chicago critic Roger Ebert called to films in one. He preferred the family flick “to the mean, violent action picture on the inside.”
- Joel Haley Osment, AI, 2000. When still musing on a version of the Brian Aldiss novel, Supertoys Last All Day Long, in 1992, directing legend Stanley Kubrick filmed four weeks of Top Secret tests of nine-year-old Mazzello. He made Jurassic Park the following year for Steven Spielberg, who eventually inherited the Aldis project by which time Joey, too young for Peter Pan’s son, was now too old, Kubrick kept the kid under contract for two more years for his next never-made project, The Aryan Papers, with Julia Roberts and Uma Thurman (based on Louis Begley’s Holocaust novel, Wartime Lies).
Birth year: Death year: Other name: Casting Calls: 3