The ‘kid’ wants back in the picture

Riley Weston vanished from Hollywood six years ago, after her bosses learned she was not the teenage writing and acting prodigy they thought she was -- a cute, eccentric girl who reached into her backpack and pulled out uncommonly polished scripts.

Instead, she was a 32-year-old divorcee who fibbed about her age to keep working in an industry forever seeking youth. After the scandal broke, her agents dumped her and the Walt Disney Co. let her $500,000 TV development deal lapse. She apologized to director Ron Howard, Disney TV executive Lloyd Braun and writer-producer J.J. Abrams. Morley Safer used her fall from grace as exhibit A in a “60 Minutes” piece on ageism in Hollywood.

Now pushing 40, Weston wants a comeback in the TV business.

Last month she returned to Los Angeles after exile in a cabin near her family home in upstate New York. She says she’s taking meetings, looking for a manager and pitching her growing pile of scripts. And on Wednesday, superstation WGN will air a syndicated made-for-TV movie, “Christmas at Water’s Edge,” which marks Weston’s first official writing credit since the 1998 scandal. She even has an on-camera role in the movie -- playing a troubled teenager.

“I took some time off and figured out whether this is really what I want to do,” she said last week. “I really want to do it all. There’s nothing I don’t want to be a part of in this business.”

Some who worked closely with her during the late 1990s were a little surprised to hear of her comeback plans.

“I thought she was an eccentric teenager,” said producer Abrams, who hired Weston as a writer on the WB network’s hot teen drama about the lives and loves of college kids, “Felicity.” He hasn’t stayed in touch with her since the controversy, which he said unfolded as real-life farce.

Weston’s whiz-kid act “would have been a great story if it had been true,” Abrams said. “It turned out to be a great story of another kind.”

A Hollywood truism holds that the town will forgive anything, box-office failure excepted. And as Weston points out, her fraud was hardly big-time. Actors chop years off their ages as frequently as producers lie about production budgets. So maybe the only surprising thing about her attempt at a second act is that it took her so long.

“Hollywood is a place where, with any perseverance, you can really reinvent yourself,” said Chris Harbert, Weston’s former agent, who hasn’t spoken to her in six years.

Yet Weston’s con job struck a chord in Hollywood, where the relationship between age and the ability to find work has always been a sore subject. Executives believed she was that rarity -- a talented writer whose tender age provided insight into the viewers the networks desperately seek. When the lie was exposed, cynics sneered that the teen-craving industry got what it deserved.

Weston insists that she didn’t set out to dupe Hollywood. She knew performers routinely lied about their ages to get parts. And she had a natural physical advantage; she was 4-foot-11 and had always looked far younger than her peers.

“I’m an actor who just wanted an audition,” she said.

Starting in the late 1980s, she won guest parts as kids on family shows like “Growing Pains” and “Who’s the Boss?,” using the stage name Kimberlee Kramer. But she grew disenchanted showing up for auditions and being handed scripts that she felt were loaded with cliches about teenagers.

So she began writing her own material. Meanwhile, she changed her name to Riley Elizabeth Weston (she declines to give her real surname but says her birth name is Kimberlee).

By 1997, Weston was pitching a drama pilot she had written about three teenage sisters. The show never went anywhere, but Weston charmed the agents at United Talent Agency, who thought they’d discovered a wunderkind. They took Weston at her word that she was 18 and home-schooled.

“All she talked about was how much she loved this teddy-bear backpack her mom had bought her,” said Harbert, who has since left UTA and now works for Creative Artists Agency. “We thought, ‘She’s so cute!’ We were all such morons.”

(For the record, Weston says the teddy-bear backpack was only a prop for “Felicity.”)

Weston soon became the Next Big Thing. She got the staff job on “Felicity” and co-wrote one episode with Abrams. She even had a small on-screen part. Entertainment Weekly named her one of the 100 most creative people in the industry, and she was profiled on “Entertainment Tonight.”

At the time, Weston said she nearly forgot that she’d lied about her age. “I didn’t think it was that big of a deal,” she said. “They wanted to have a young woman [on the writing staff] to ‘mirror’ Felicity.”

Then came the crash. According to Weston, a casting director for whom she’d once worked as a baby-sitter called industry friends to say Weston was hardly a teenager. Then someone faxed UTA documents containing Weston’s real birth date.

Harbert said his client initially denied she had misrepresented her age but eventually confessed. The trade paper Variety got the story, which was then picked up by other media. Ron Howard’s Imagine Television, which produced “Felicity” with Touchstone, issued a statement saying it was “saddened” by Weston’s dishonesty.

Weston, by telephone last week, declined to discuss details of what happened next other than to say, “I don’t think anybody reacted all too well.”

She complained at the time that no one would hire her. She lived off her Disney money and did some theater in Burbank, then moved back to the East Coast to be closer to her family. But she kept writing: a novel (as yet unpublished), a screenplay (sold to Artisan Pictures, never produced) and song lyrics.

Not long ago, she got a call from Los Angeles producer Cleveland O’Neal, who’d hired her a couple of years ago for a small role in a TV movie. He needed someone to help write “Christmas at Water’s Edge,” a holiday-themed TV movie starring former “Cosby Show” kid Keshia Knight Pulliam.

(Tribune Co., publisher of The Times, owns WGN, which is broadcasting the movie.)

“A talent like Riley is a real find because she’s not working as much as she would be if the ‘scandal’ had not happened,” O’Neal said.

As for Weston, she says, “I’m so happy to be back.

“I’m having the time of my life right now.”