The Fresh-Face Factory

She

stars in a TV series that wins its time slots on two different networks. She co-starred in one Hollywood film last month (Agent Cody Banks) and has her name alone above the title in another opening in May (The Lizzie McGuire Movie). A 10-year show-biz veteran, she receives a staggering 375,000 fan e-mails a week, asking advice on fashion, makeup and boyfriends.

So what does Hilary Duff want to do when she turns 16?

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Drive. "I'm just obsessing about getting my license," says the star of Lizzie McGuire, a hit on the Disney Channel and ABC's Saturday mornings. "That's all I think about. I'm counting down the days." She really is. She knows she has about 170 to go.

When he turned 16, 16 months ago, Frankie Muniz gave himself a birthday present: he bought the VW Jetta that Vin Diesel drove in The Fast and the Furious. But the Muggsy Bogues-size star of Fox's Malcolm in the Middle has bigger toys in mind. He would like to own the Los Angeles Clippers. Somebody should tell Muniz that's a TV actor's ambition. If he thought himself a true movie star — and he should, having headlined last year's hit Big Fat Liar and the current Agent Cody Banks — he would dream bigger: take over the Lakers. Own Shaq. Sit next to Jack.

Amanda Bynes didn't need a car or a Kobe when she turned 16. She wanted a starring role in a film, and she was prepared to be patient. She has been called the new Lucille Ball and the next Gilda Radner, thanks to her deft, daft turns on the Nickelodeon skit-com series All That. Nick's Kids Choice awards named her Favorite Television Actress three years running. But, she says, "I want to be looked at as an adult actress. That's why I didn't want to do a big movie when I was 11. I was waiting till I was a little bit older." Bynes got her wish. The romantic comedy What a Girl Wants (she's the girl) opened last weekend, a day after her 17th birthday.

Muniz may be thought of as just another cute, cunning face, smiling from inside your living-room furniture. Duff and Bynes may be familiar to everyone under 14 and nobody over. (Bynes' appeal was so dense and narrow that MTV bookers thought she was a little kid when her publicists approached them last month.) But these teens don't see TV as the apogee of their career arc. They want to be movie stars. And now Hollywood wants that too.

The studios, finally acknowledging the power of the tween audience, are packaging 10- to 15-year-olds for their own TV shows, then rewrapping them for the big screen. Muniz, even as he girds for his fifth season as Malcolm, is so much a fixture in theatrical films that a Cody Banks sequel is already in the works. Bynes and Duff, the twin Tweens' Queens of kid TV, aim to become Hollywood movie princesses.

"It's almost like a throwback to the old Hollywood system where studios would have their own players, a stable of talent," says trend tracker Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations Co. "These are stars that are already in the fold. They are already part of a studio product line. So why not bring these stars up from TV to the big screen and hope that the kids who love them on TV will follow them?"

Rich Ross, Disney Channel's president of Entertainment and a former programming sachem at Nickelodeon, is more emphatic. "Kids' TV is where you find the stars, not of tomorrow, but of today," he avers. "Movie directors don't need casting tapes anymore; they just need to turn on the TV. This is a golden age — Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, 2003."

In the '30s and '40s, when moviegoing was a family adventure, young actors ruled. Rooney was the top box-office draw in America, and Garland sent adults and kids over the rainbow. Teen soprano Deanna Durbin was, at 14, the world's highest paid actress. At the same age, Bonita Granville had her own series: the Nancy Drew films. Our Gang and the Dead End Kids filled out the program.

That was pre-TV, of course. The home medium soon functioned as a baby-sitter and an incubator for precocious talent: Billy Gray of Father Knows Best, Ronny Howard (later Oscar-winning director Ron) on The Andy Griffith Show and the endless cattle, or calf, call of Bradys, Huxtables and Facts of Lifers. But those youngsters could rarely transform their video adorability to the higher voltage of films. The minors stayed in the minors. Big-screen producers remained oblivious to the 8-to-13 set. Nobody thought to make, say, a black-cast Cody Banks spy saga: Agent Urkel.

"What's great about the kids today," Ross says, "is that they can act exactly the age they are. That's the throwback to Mickey and Judy putting on a show. Today kids put on a show every day, and millions come to watch." Ross is referring to Nick and the Disney Channel, two of cable's major revenue and talent streams. But he and others are convinced that the stars — and, more important, their fans — can meet in the movie theaters. "Those are people who are likely to leave their house and go and buy tickets," says Stan Rogow, who produced the Lizzie McGuire show and movie. "And they can't travel alone, so they bring a parent. The tween audience has developed from barely a concept three years ago to a group that delivers in ratings and box office." Muniz's Big Fat Liar last year grossed nearly $50 million (on a $15 million budget), and Cody Banks pulled in a robust $36 million in its first three weeks.