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5,000 boys auditioned to be the new ''Beaver'' Cleaver
Hopefuls read lines for Jerry Mathers himself.
You say: Hollywood has no new ideas anymore, they just keep rebooting old stuff. We say: there is nothing new under the sun.
Case in point: The 1997 movie, Leave It to Beaver, a comedy movie that sought to bring the Cleavers back into the pop culture forefront for a new generation. The same characters that you came to know and love in the 1957 series were now on the big screen! Ward, June, and the boys, but also Lumpy, Eddie and more. The movie even had cameos from Barbara Billingsley, Ken Osmond and Frank Bank.
Of course, the most important part in a Beaver movie is, well, Beaver. It wouldn't be easy to find a young'un to fill Jerry Mathers' shoes.
Thus, the search for the youngest Cleaver began. The producers went on a national casting tour, hitting Chicago, L.A., Boston, Minneapolis and other cities where they saw hundreds of kids. Hundreds of young hopefuls turned up each day to read for not only Beaver, but the other members of the gang. Along with the directors, the children read their lines for Frank Bank (Lumpy), Tony Dow (Wally), Ken Osmond (Eddie), Barbara Billingsley (June), and the Beav himself, Jerry Mathers.
In the end, over 5,000 boys read for Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver. The winner was little Cameron Finley, a then-8-year-old from the Dallas area, who submitted a home video. "They must've had it about an hour when they called him to come out for an audition," his mother said in the Orlando Sentinel.
Cameron, though this was his first starring role, was not taken in by the sudden fame. "I'm not a movie star," he told the Fort-Worth Star Telegram on opening night. "I'm the star of a movie. There's a difference."
Finley hadn't seen the original Leave It to Beaver, a choice that he said was deliberate. "They didn't want me to see it," he explained, "because they thought it would mess up the way I acted. They liked the way I already acted. They didn't want me to act like Jerry Mathers."
The movie was slated to have two sequels, but after the movie was a critical and financial failure, the studio quietly canceled them. Though the reviews weren't good for the film itself, critics praised Cameron Finley. "The bright spot is the Beaver," a film critic from The Cincinnati Post wrote. "Little 10-year-old Cameron Finley really captures the essence of what made Beaver Cleaver so beloved. Beaver has no censor, he just says what's on his mind. Jerry Mathers managed to make us believe that, and so does Finley."
After Beaver, Finley made a few more onscreen appearances including the Sandra Bullock movie Hope Floats, before choosing to quit acting at the age of 12 so he could be a "normal kid". Finley later went to the University of California and is currently a molecular biologist, where he's published scientific articles such as "Caveolin isoform switching as a molecular, structural, and metabolic regulator of microglia" and "Epicatechin regulation of mitochondrial structure and function is opioid receptor dependent."
Gee, Wally, those are some ten-dollar words!
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17 Comments
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I never realized that "Beaver" was *that* Cameron Finley!
