Thank you to Robin Raven for allowing us to reprint this interview with Ike for our blog and newsletter.
'You'll Never Be a Star': Ike Eisenmann on 'Escape to Witch Mountain,' his new memoir, and surviving child stardom
Ike Eisenmann spent his childhood doing something most kids only dream about. He starred in movies and appeared on hit television shows, working alongside Hollywood legends, and became a child star in the 1970s. Best known as Tony Malone in Disney's *Escape to Witch Mountain* (1975) and its sequel *Return from Witch Mountain* (1978), Eisenmann built an impressive résumé across some of the most iconic television series of the era before stepping away from the spotlight in his twenties. Decades later, he has finally told his story in his debut memoir, *You'll Never Be a Star: My Fantastic Journey to Disney, Star Trek and Beyond* ; the book’s title carries far more weight than it might initially suggest.
For years, Ike Eisenmann resisted the idea of writing a memoir. "It was the last thing in the world I ever wanted to do," he said. The push that finally got him there came from an unexpected place: a press junket he shared with his *Witch Mountain* costar Kim Richards, held to promote the DVD release of both films following the 2009 reboot's premiere.
"I noticed she was having a really hard time answering any of the questions," Eisenmann recalled. "She just had very scattered memories, and I had to kind of fill in the blanks and tell all these stories." When the two said goodbye at the end of the day, Richards hugged him and said something that surprised him. "She said, 'How do you remember all that stuff? I don't remember anything.'"
That moment planted a seed. "I said to my wife at the time, I'm gonna have to figure this out," he noted. It still took years before he fully committed because writing intimidated him, and the high quality of memoirs published by his contemporaries raised the bar even further. Eventually he found his footing. "I found my voice," he said, "and when I found my voice telling my stories and the stories I wanted to tell, everything really rolled out."
One of the most distinctive choices Eisenmann made in crafting the memoir was to tell his story through the perspective of his younger self, resisting the pull toward adult hindsight that shapes most celebrity memoirs. Remarkably, he said the approach came naturally. "My memories of everything are so vivid and remain that way to this day, that it was really just like walking through my head and just describing what I was going through," he shared.
The result, as his wife observed after reading the finished book, was that the first half genuinely sounds like it is coming from a young person, with the voice maturing alongside Eisenmann as the story progresses. "I can't say I went back and changed anything to accommodate that," he said. "That was just my focus." He was deliberate about his intentions from the very start. "I didn't want it to be reflective; I wanted readers to have an immersive experience."
That immersive quality was also a point of personal conviction. Child acting, he emphasized, is nothing like it looks from the outside. "As much fun as I had as a child actor, it's hard work," he said. "When everyone watches the TV shows and the movies with child actors, the kids look like they're just having a great time, and it seems so easy. It's not."
On *Escape to Witch Mountain* in particular, he and Richards were in nearly every single scene, which meant they worked every day with breaks for mandatory schooling on set. "We'd go into school, come out, go to work, go back to school, like that," he recalled. The book, he said, was his way of giving readers "a more experiential understanding of what that's like."
The memoir's title was the last piece of the puzzle to fall into place, and it turned out to be the most powerful one. Eisenmann had been struggling with it for some time when his wife offered a simple suggestion: pull it from within the story itself. "She said, 'What about what your father used to say to you all the time?'" he recalled. "And I thought, oh my God, that's it."
Ike’s father was jealous of his child’s success in Hollywood and resentful that he hadn’t risen to fame as an actor himself, and he used to cruelly tell Ike, “You’ll never be a star!”
"That was a very painful thing to have to suffer and survive," Eisenmann said.
So thoroughly had those words conditioned him that even now, decades later, referring to himself as a star remains genuinely difficult. "Saying that I became a star, or I was a star, or an ex child star, really is difficult for me to say," he admitted. "'Cause that's how much he conditioned me against it."
Writing the memoir required Eisenmann to do something he had long avoided: fully excavate his relationship with his father. "He was instrumental in everything," he said. "He put me in the business. He was my stage father. He was with me on set all the time." Weaving that story into the book was painful but ultimately transformative.
"I just started really releasing all of the repressed frustration, anger, and sadness," he shared. Part of that release came through a discovery his wife made: a checklist of symptoms associated with narcissistic personality disorder. He was able to see clearly that every one of those applied to his father.
The clinical framework helped make sense of dynamics he had struggled to understand for most of his life. "The thing about narcissists, true narcissists, is that they don't think they have a problem," he said. "So they never seek help. They rarely get therapy, so there's very little psychological research about how they function."
He added that the storytelling itself became its own form of release which was something beyond what he had anticipated. "It was overwhelming," he said. "It's like, oh, my God, oh, my God. This is painful. This is beautiful." That, he said, was the catharsis: "Having it spill out, that someone else could read it and make sense of it."
Eventually, Eisenmann made the difficult decision to cut off contact entirely. His father responded with years of letters — begging, cursing, and threatening — all of which Eisenmann kept. "I wanted to have the evidence in my hands of the damage he wanted to inflict on me," he said. He pulled direct quotes from those letters for the book.
Making peace with the situation ultimately came down to acceptance. "I just had to accept it," he said, "and I had to take care of myself. I just had to make sure I don't recreate that relationship anywhere else in my life, and I haven't."
*Escape to Witch Mountain* turns 51 this year, and its hold on audiences shows no signs of loosening. Eisenmann has thought carefully about why. "It's that outsider thing," he said. "All kids go through it. So many children feel like that as they're trying to discover who they are." The film tells the story of two children who discover they have powers that cannot be controlled or taken from them.
"Think of how out of control we sometimes feel as kids," he said. "Now you're a child with telekinetic power that humans can't control. The children are controlling everything that's going on. That is just one of the greatest fantasies that a child could enjoy."
He marveled that it was a privilege to play one of those characters. He also observed that the film's reach has now extended across generations, with fans telling him their grandchildren watch it repeatedly.
Watching the film still stirs something deep in him. Most recently, he and his wife watched it together as she reached the *Witch Mountain* section of the memoir in the published hardcover so it would be fresh in her mind as she read. "It's still an overwhelmingly emotional experience for me," he shared. "I get caught up in remembering the making of it, even as I enjoy the storytelling. And sometimes I look at Kim and I and say, ‘How the heck did a 9-year-old and 11-year-old kid actually do what we did?’"
The sequel brought a noticeably different energy, and Eisenmann embraced it fully. Where *Escape to Witch Mountain* leaned darker, *Return from Witch Mountain* was broader, funnier, and more in keeping with the traditional Disney style of the era.
"I thought it was much more the style of a traditional Disney live action movie of the '70s than *Escape to Witch Mountain* was," he remembered. His character Tony spends much of the film under mind control — which, he admitted with some amusement, had its advantages. "I didn't have to work very hard to do that, so that was kind of nice," he joked. "All I had to do was walk around with a zombie stare for most of the movie, so that was fun for me."
His bond with Richards has endured across more than five decades. "I call her my fictional sister," Eisenmann said warmly. "Because she is. She's always a sister to me." The two do not stay in constant contact, but the connection between them is immediate whenever they reunite. "Every time we get back together, it's like we go right back to those days," he recalled.
That reunion was especially meaningful on the set of the 2009 reimagining, *Race to Witch Mountain* , when both were invited back for cameos. Director Andy Fickman told Eisenmann in advance that the entire crew consisted of devoted fans. "He said, 'Everyone working on this movie are all huge fans. We actually had to turn people down that wanted to just meet you guys because we didn't have enough jobs for people to do,'" Eisenmann said.
Walking onto that set brought a wave of emotion. What struck him most was that their cameos weren't merely decorative. "We actually were a part of moving the story forward," he said, "and I thought that was fantastic."
Beyond *Witch Mountain* , Eisenmann built one of the more quietly impressive guest-star résumés of the era, appearing on *Gunsmoke* , *Wonder Woman* , *Fantasy Island* , *The Jeffersons* , and two memorable episodes of *Little House on the Prairie* . Of all those experiences, working with Michael Landon left perhaps the deepest impression.
"There could have been no greater creative, generous, talented person in all of Hollywood, period," he recounted what it was like to work with Michael Landon. "Disney was my favorite studio to work for, but *Little House on the Prairie* was my favorite crew to work with."
Landon had created an environment unlike anything Eisenmann had encountered elsewhere. It was one where warmth and professionalism coexisted seamlessly, where everyone knew when to joke and when to get to work, and where kids got to have fun. He said that was "kind of unheard of in television".
What left him genuinely awestruck was watching Landon's ability to cry on demand, then pivot immediately back to directing. "He could produce full blown, blubbering tears by the time the guy hit the slate," he recalled. "Then afterwards he'd wipe his eyes and say, 'All right, let's turn around for a 2-shot over here.' And I could hardly believe it."
Landon thought so highly of Eisenmann's work that he invited him back a second time to play a different character years later with no audition required. The same thing happened on *Gunsmoke* , where he first appeared at age ten and was brought back again within a couple of years. "Anytime I can go work on a fun show like *Gunsmoke* or *Little House* and I didn't have to audition, I was really honored by that," he said.
*Wonder Woman* held its own particular thrill — not least because of the star herself. "Who didn't like *Wonder Woman* ?" he said with a laugh. Meeting Lynda Carter in person delivered a surprise. "She's like eight feet tall, especially with those boots," he joked. "You can't really see that on television." He later learned, after the fact, that the two episodes he appeared in were the final ones of the entire series.
*Fantasy Island* brought one of the most memorable behind-the-scenes stories of Eisenmann's career, and it’s one that didn't make it into the book. He nearly lost the role because he was only 17 at the time, and the production team worried that his school requirements would slow things down. His agent made a bold promise on his behalf: he would complete every scene in a single take. "I couldn't even believe I did this, but I did," he recollected.
Ricardo Montalbán, not knowing about the restriction, interrupted filming mid-production to advocate for Eisenmann to have more time on a particularly emotional scene. "The entire crew just stopped and looked at each other because they all knew what the rules were," Eisenmann said. The director relented, Eisenmann did a second take, and delivered something even stronger than the first. Montalbán turned to the room and said, “Ah, see? That's what I was talking about."
During the making of *Return from Witch Mountain* , Eisenmann did something that took courage: he walked, entirely on his own initiative, into the Disney animation building with a sketchbook full of original cartoon characters and asked the head of animation to take a look. He was a child at the time, but the man who looked at his art liked what he saw. "He said, 'When you're ready, after you graduate high school, if you still want to pursue this, we will send you to CalArts,'" Eisenmann recalled. The offer was extraordinary. Disney had helped build CalArts specifically to train its next generation of animators. But by the time he graduated, his interests had shifted. He later returned to his love of art and spent years in the art world.
## ‘The Blair Witch Mountain Project’
Ike Eisenmann’s dynamic creative energy led him to make a very memorable short film, too. When *The Blair Witch Project* became a cultural phenomenon, homemade parodies began proliferating across the early internet. One day, while he was walking through his house, Eisenmann had an idea. "I thought, *The Blair Witch Mountain Project* . I should do that. That's funny," he said. The concept: a wannabe TV reporter named Blair Billings Lee, desperate for a story to anchor her demo reel, decides to hunt down Tony and Tia.
He got Kim Richards on board, borrowed a friend's RV, recruited another friend with a digital camera, and shot the whole thing. "It was so, so much fun to shoot and put together," he said.
The finished short was voted one of the top ten *Blair Witch* spoofs out of more than 275 entries on a digital film website. He told me he’s thinking of sharing it on his Facebook page soon.
By his mid-twenties, Eisenmann had made a definitive decision: he was done with on-camera work. He transitioned into voiceover work in post-production, creating custom background voices for film and television, and described the shift as "life changing and life saving."
His colleagues in the industry were baffled. "Many of my coworkers looked at me like I was crazy," he recalled. "'Why would you leave a career that you have to come do this?' But that's what they were trying to work towards." His response was simple. "I said, because I've done it. I'm ready to move on."
"Being in the spotlight never really meant anything to me," he said frankly. "It didn't necessarily feed me in a way that it does for a lot of performers." Without the constant pressure of auditioning, something he described as having worn him out completely, he found a career that gave him everything he loved about the business while stripping away everything he didn't.
"I was still doing extremely creative acting work," he noted. "It was so much fun. I was working with incredible people. It was just all behind the scenes." He spent roughly 25 years in that world.
As for another book, don't expect one. "I won't publish anything ever again," he said plainly. The process, he explained, is simply too long and too daunting. Besides, he feels something rare and complete about where he has arrived. "I really feel like I have now completed my life's work," he said. "This is the culmination. I have this long career. I have all these stories and experiences. Now I'm sharing that with other people, and it's so gratifying."
Not everything about the transition out of childhood stardom was easy. Eisenmann is candid in the memoir about years of depression in young adulthood. He traced those struggles back to the difficulties with his father and the stress of trying to sustain a career in an industry that doesn't make that transition simple. But he never turned to drugs or alcohol, and he credits a fierce determination not to go down the road he watched kill too many of his peers.
The memorial service for his close friend Dana Plato, who died of a drug overdose, crystallized something essential for him. "I said to myself, I will never allow this to happen to me, no matter how bad," he shared. "I'll find a way." And he ultimately worked through his trauma and found peace.
Now retired and, by his own description, still figuring out what that means, Eisenmann said the response to the memoir has moved him deeply. Readers are telling him it's a fast read they couldn't put down, that the behind-the-scenes material is fascinating, and that the emotional throughline resonates. "They are getting everything I intended to do," he said. "You can't ask for more than that as an artist."
What he hadn't fully anticipated was how personally the book would land for readers who recognized their own experiences in his. "I wasn't really thinking I was gonna be reaching out to people that had a similar painful experience with a parent," he said. "That's just suddenly been the icing on a cake I was very happy with."
As for what he would tell the boy he once was — the child actor navigating long days on set, a complicated father, and a world that kept asking more of him than most adults would ever be asked — the answer came quickly and simply. "Just keep having fun," he said. "It's all gonna work out fine in the end."
*You'll Never Be a Star: My Fantastic Journey to Disney, Star Trek and Beyond* is available now. Follow Ike Eisenmann on Facebook and Instagram for updates on signings and public appearances.