TMS Retro: It's 1976—Are You Team Tatum or Team Jodie?

(Paramount Pictures / ABC Television)

In an old 1977 interview with Jodie Foster uploaded on YouTube, the interviewer asks the teen starlet if she ever “feels like a big shot.” To which she responds, “Sometimes when people ask me for my autograph. Or when I’m at a screening and someone says, ‘Hey, there’s Tatum O’Neal.’” This is very amusing in retrospect since the average person in 2022 is much more likely to know who Jodie is than Tatum. But in the late 1970s, there were no two adolescent girls with more exposure in Hollywood than Tatum O’Neal and Jodie Foster. Tatum was the scene-stealing daughter of popular actors Ryan O’Neal and Joanna Moore; while Jodie was the biggest child star at Walt Disney Studios since Hayley Mills in the early 1960s. For a cute, charismatic young actress to co-star in films, Tatum and Jodie were in regular rotation on the casting sheets, along with brunettes Brooke Shields and Kristy McNichol. 1976 in particular was a pretty similar year for the blondes. Both starred in very successful family comedies [Tatum in Michael Ritchie’s Bad News Bears, Jodie in Gary Nelson’s Freaky Friday]; and both were in retro films that underperformed with critics and audiences [Tatum in Peter Bogdanovich’s Nickelodeon, Jodie in Alan Parker’s Bugsy Malone].

(Columbia Pictures)

But Jodie also had another feature that year which would set the standard for the rest of the tomboy’s career. Not long after Tatum made history as the youngest person to win an Academy Award for her film debut in Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon (1973); Jodie played the best friend of Ellen Burstyn’s on-screen son in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974). That same year Jodie also replaced Tatum in ABC’s short-lived series spin-off of “Paper Moon” (1974-75). But it was her experience with Scorsese that would come in handy when only two years later she was cast as the controversial character of Iris in the New York director’s Taxi Driver (1976). The role of a 12-year-old child prostitute opposite Robert De Niro was a part most child actresses (or their parents) were understandably hesitant to sign up for. But the delicate and subtle execution of the film’s subplot garnered wide acclaim and Jodie her first Oscar nomination. Taxi Driver, along with Nicolas Gessner’s The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), put Jodie on the map for serious projects.

(Paramount Pictures)

 Jodie’s and Tatum’s tween-to-teen stardoms were at their peaks in 1976, but the comparisons to each other wouldn’t last too long. Unlike Jodie who had a seemingly stable home life despite her extraordinary success, Tatum is the cautionary tale on the other end of the coin. Very public struggles with drugs and her turbulent relationships with both her family and significant others were big reasons why Tatum never became a grown-up movie star like Jodie. Another was that, in my opinion, a lot of Tatum’s fame relied on her precocious, smart-alecky presence that was lost through the process of aging. She had a few more modest hits, notably Bryan Forbes’ International Velvet (1978) and Roland F. Maxwell’s Little Darlings (1980), and a recurring role on FX’s popular series “Rescue Me” (2005-2011); but her prime ended up being as a youngster. Yet through her three children from her marriage to ex-husband/tennis player John McEnroe and eventual sobriety, Tatum can still be proud of all her accomplishments.

As we all know, Jodie is now one of the greatest child star success stories of all time. After a brief slump in the 1980s, the blonde thespian went on to get a college degree from Yale; win Best Actress at the Oscars twice—for Jonathan Kaplan’s The Accused (1988) and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991)—dabble with directing including Little Man Tate (1991) and The Beaver (2011); and now has her own family that includes two sons.

Jodie and Tatum ultimately had very different lives and careers, but both made their marks timelessly on pop culture.