Payton Champagne is sneaking out of the house, disappearing through a convenient trap door hidden under his bedroom rug … before popping back up through the floor, closing the door and then doing it again. Repeatedly.

Failing to actually leave the house would appear counterproductive to sneaking out. But don’t blame Payton. It’s in the script.

“Come on back, Payton. Look around — make sure Mom and Dad are asleep,” director Frank Eberling instructs, as the 14-year-old Port St. Lucie actor shimmies back into the bedroom, which is actually a raised wooden platform constructed in the corner of a West Palm Beach production studio.

Payton’s mock sneaking, which will take more than an hour to film, will become just 15 scant seconds or so of Turkles, a kids’ movie written and directed by documentary filmmaker and teacher Eberling, and featuring a cast and crew made up largely from adult and child actors from Jupiter’s Burt Reynolds Institute of Film and Theater.

The movie, which follows a group of kids at fictional Camp Loggerhead as they discover who’s stealing vulnerable turtle eggs, began shooting Monday at Parallax Productions, in the former Channel 12 studios, and continues over the next several weeks at Juno Beach Pier Park, Carlin Park and John D. MacArthur State Park.

Eberling says that the movie, a project of a filmmaking class he teaches at the Reynolds Institute called Real To Reel In Real Time, was written with the talents and abilities of the mostly amateur actors in mind, and has a budget of less than $200,000, “like the money spent on doughnuts on a regular movie,” he says.

“Frank has a wealth of experience, and to be (involved) is just pure joy,” says actor/comedian Todd Vittum, both the film’s associate producer and one of its on-screen villains. “This is his and Mr. Reynolds’ way of giving back. Being here reinforces a lot of things I knew about filmmaking, and some I didn’t know.”

Turkles is the second kids’ movie to shoot in Palm Beach County this summer. Earlier this month, a student crew from West Palm Beach’s G-Star School Of The Arts wrapped up work on It’s A Dog-Gone Tale: Destiny’s Stand, featuring actors Barry Bostwick and Ron Palillo.

John Leguizamo isn’t known for PG comedy, but he’s a hit for the third time around in Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, adding a lispy voice to Sid, a sloth struggling with his new role as an adoptive parent.

Leguizamo gets back to his trademark high-energy, no-holds-barred humor this month when he takes his new stand-up show John Leguizamo Live! on a summer tour in selected cities. Parade.com’s Jeanne Wolf found out that John is just as funny up close and personal.

He (sort of) approached his role like Robert De Niro.
“I studied with Strasberg. I’m a method guy. So I went to the zoo and I looked at the giant three-toed sloth and the smaller ones. OK, there wasn’t really much to see until there was a little sloth romance. They don’t move much except when they mate. They mate really quickly, which is very bizarre.”

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Even he thinks he’s beginning to look like Sid.
“I’m getting older and my eyes are getting further apart and I’m getting a little green. As you get older, you get a little mold. I try to be Sid at home sometimes and my kids go, ‘Dad, please. Just be yourself.’ I like that sloth a lot but when it comes to cartoon characters, Bugs Bunny is my man. He was so irreverent, respected no one and just lived his damn rabbit life the way he pleased.”

The biggest challenge in his life.
“It’s funny that in the movie Sid sort of adopts a couple of dinosaur babies because he wants to be a father. Then he finds out what that means. I didn’t realize how difficult parenting was going to be. You’ve got to help your kids figure out their own purpose in life while you’re trying to figure out your purpose in life. Where’s the manual? If I could find the right parenting manual, I would be reading it.”

But he’s a fun dad.
“I’m hands-on. I’m the fun dad. I’m a little strict, but for the right reasons. I love playing sports with my kids. And I’m the fun, goofy dad. I play all kinds of games with them.”

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Except when it comes to four-letter words.
“They’re not allowed to say bad words. And if I say a bad word, I have to give them a quarter. With those quarters they’ve bought themselves a car. And now they’re working on a condo.”

Growing up isn’t what it used to be.
“I used to go every place by myself. When I was eight I was already walking by myself to school because it was a couple blocks away. I was in the subways when I was 10 years old. You’d play on the street until the street lamps went on. But with my kids there’s always somebody watching them. It’s a very different time. My kids are never allowed to go anywhere alone.”

Sticking up for a fellow Puerto Rican-American.
“I think those Supreme Court Justices are just afraid of Judge Sotomayor. You can tell that they got panic in their eyes ’cause they know this Puerto Rican woman is going to come in there. She’s used to dealing with Latin macho dudes. She’s going to steam roll them. And they’re terrified. And they should be because she’s not going to take ‘no’ for an answer.”

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Who would have believed he loves math.
“I actually tutored other kids in calculus in college. They all failed. I also tutored Spanish. The kids failed that, too. But there’s only so far a teacher can take his students. To me, math in college was the only thing that I felt that you could believe in, that was finite, that had answers. It helped me through those years. Then I dropped out of college.”

He hasn’t changed a lot since he was a kid.
“I’d get in tons of trouble. I was always getting taken to the office by the security guard. That’s when they discovered that I had a little Ritalin problem — and I wasn’t even taking it. I remember I was doing children’s theater and I was out-of-control. The other actors hated me. I would be in the middle of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and I’d be doing Jerry Lewis. Sometimes, they’d actually hold me down backstage so I couldn’t run out and be insane. They said, ‘John, either you go or we go.’”

Transformers 2 and G.I. Joe step aside. Behold the next generation of toy-inspired movies.

Movies are fun, no matter how old you are, but sometimes it can be tough to find something the whole family can watch. With the help of the folks at Kids In Mind, this is a look at the films in theaters now that are family friendly:

Imagine That: Eddie Murphy seems to always make time for the youngsters — he worked on Daddy Day Care after all — and this movie should appeal to people that treasure the connection between a father and his daughter. Murphy plays a hard-working businessman who doesn’t have time for his little girl (played by Tara Shahidi), but when she begins to somehow come up with tips that helps his career, he changes his behavior.

Kids In Mind gives Imagine That safe scores in all three criteria it uses: sex/nudity, violence/gore and profanity.

Up: Pixar’s latest centers around an older man, saddened by the loss of his wife, taking the adventure of a lifetime — with a young, unexpected guest tagging along.

Kids In Mind gives Up even safer scores than Imagine That.

Night At The Museum: Battle Of The Smithsonian: The sequel to the successful Ben Stiller vehicle brings him back as the one-time security guard, now a successful inventor. He ventures to Washington’s famed museum to save the exhibits he grew fond of.

Kids In Mind gives the film mild scores in all three criteria.

Land of the Lost: Surprisingly, this film that’s based on a popular kids’ series from the 1970s is basically not too kid-friendly, though the areas Kids In Mind point out indicate this could be a good movie for high-school aged kids.

Other movies that score in the “mid-range” for Kids In Mind include:
– My Life In Ruins
– Star Trek
– Angels and Demons

With the remake of “The Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3” coming out on Friday, film fans will wonder if the Denzel Washington-John Travolta “retaking” can match the gritty ‘70s original with Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw. (We say no.)

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The animated action comedy “Up” took flight with a $68.2 million opening weekend, maintaining a perfect box-office track record for Pixar Animation, whose 10 films all have been commercial and critical hits.

“Up” had the third-best opening for a film from Disney-owned Pixar, just behind the $70 million debuts for “Finding Nemo” and “The Incredibles.” Last summer’s Disney-Pixar release, “WALL-E,” debuted with $63.1 million.

Like its Pixar predecessors, which include the “Toy Story” movies,” “Finding Nemo” and “Ratatouille,” “Up” earned glowing reviews from critics.

“Usually things that are very popular with audiences don’t necessarily go over that well with critics. These things do both, and pretty much consistently every time,” said Hollywood.com box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian. “The Disney-Pixar collaboration is probably the closet thing to box-office perfection out there.”

“Up” took over the No. 1 spot from 20th Century Fox’s “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian,” which slipped to second-place with $25.5 million. The “Museum” sequel raised its 10-day total to $105.3 million.

The weekend’s other new wide release, Universal Pictures’ horror tale “Drag Me to Hell,” opened at No. 3 with $16.6 million. It was a relatively modest return for director Sam Raimi, whose three “Spider-Man” movies had blockbuster opening weekends.

Paramount Pictures’ “Star Trek” steered a strong course, coming in at No. 5 with $12.8 million and passing the computer-animated “Monsters vs. Aliens” as the year’s top-grossing movie so far.

“Star Trek” raised its domestic total to $209.5 million, becoming the first 2009 release to cross the $200 million mark.

“Up” features the voice of Ed Asner in the adventures of a lonely widower who ties helium balloons to his house and flies to a South American adventure with a 9-year-old stowaway.

“An elderly gentleman and a young boy traveling off to South America; it’s not your typical animated story and not necessarily the easiest story to convey,” said Mark Zoradi, president of Disney’s motion-picture group. “That’s why I give a lot of credit to the marketing team for taking a movie that wasn’t easy to convey to the public and opening it to the highest levels of animation that we’ve ever done for an original story.”

Factoring in higher admission prices, earlier Pixar movies such as “Toy Story 2″ and “Monsters, Inc.” sold more tickets than “Up” over their first weekends.

“Up” drew both family crowds and adults without children, and the film’s 3-D release accounted for 51 percent of the total gross, according to Disney.

Hollywood finished the month with record revenues of $1.02 billion, coming in slightly ahead of the previous high in May 2007, according to Hollywood.com.

Momentum for the year continued to slow from the record pace set in the first four months of 2009. While May revenues came in 4.7 percent above those of May 2008, Hollywood has not yet had a sky-high opening on the order of last year’s action hits “Iron Man” and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” which both topped $300 million domestically.

Overall weekend revenues were at $167 million, virtually even with the same period last year.

Total revenues for 2009 rose to $4.1 billion, up 13.7 percent. Movie attendance was about 11 percent ahead of last year’s.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Hollywood.com. Final figures will be released Monday.

1. “Up,” $68.2 million.

2. “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian,” $25.5 million.

3. “Drag Me to Hell,” $16.6 million.

4. “Terminator Salvation,” $16.1 million.

5. “Star Trek,” $12.8 million.

6. “Angels & Demons,” $11.2 million.

7. “Dance Flick,” $4.9 million.

8. “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” $3.9 million.

9. “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past,” $1.9 million.

10. “Obsessed,” $665,000.

When 37-year-old Monika Pugh was growing up, she wanted to look just like the beautiful princesses of Walt Disney’s animated movies “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty.”

“I can remember wanting the long hair, and the fair skin, and thinking ‘This is what beauty is. This is what you aspire to be,’” she says.

While most girls don’t grow up to be princesses, a little African-American girl like Pugh couldn’t even find a Disney heroine with her brown skin or natural hair.

So she’s thrilled that her 11-year-old daughter, Courtlyn Patrick, will be able to claim otherwise. Earlier this month, Disney released the trailer for its upcoming movie, “The Princess and the Frog,” featuring Tiana, the studio’s first African-American princess. The movie comes out in December.

“I am just so happy about it,” says Pugh, now a guidance counselor at West Palm Beach’s Roosevelt Middle School. “It’ll give our young girls a whole different self-image of themselves, to know that beauty (comes in) all colors, and that we are all princesses in our own way.”

Tiana, voiced in the film by Tony winner and No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency co-star Anika Noni Rose, is not only the first African-American princess, but the first major human character of African descent in Disney’s nearly 82-year history of animated films. While the pantheon of princesses includes Asian (Mulan), Native American (Pocahontas) and Arab (Princess Jasmine of Aladin) characters, the studio’s only African characters, as well as the only ones voiced by African-American actors, were singing, talking animals, as seen in The Lion King, Tarzan, The Little Mermaid and Dumbo.

(Technically, the exceptions are James Baskett and Glenn Leedy, who appeared in human form during the live-action scenes from the partially-animated Song Of The South in 1946, a film long controversial for its stereotypical, subservient portrayals of African-Americans.)

The Princess And The Frog has seen its own share of controversy since its production was announced in 2007, when it was originally called The Frog Princess and the heroine, then named Maddy, was reportedly a chamber maid working for a rich white girl in New Orleans and presumably reinforcing those stereotypes that tainted Song of the South. But now, she’s a princess named Tiana, who kisses a frog who claims to be a bewitched prince in an attempt to turn him human. Unfortunately, Tiana winds up in amphibian form herself, setting off the usual Disney mad-cap adventure.

Local parents like Pugh, who’ve made many trips to the nearby Magic Kingdom for their little girls to rub royal shoulders with Cinderella and company, are thrilled at the idea that they could be shaking hands with a princess who looks like them.

“(Courtlyn) has been every princess for Halloween,” Pugh says. “Now she has one more she can relate to, where (she) can say ‘That could be me!’”

North Palm Beach resident Billy Van Ee, the white adoptive father of two African-American children, 6-year-old son Lucas and princess-obsessed Lacey, who turns 3 in June, says his family has “been waiting for this. There’s not a lot of African-Americans represented in the media, and much of what there is, is negative. I read about the doll test in the 1950s, where black kids picked white dolls over black ones. That really stuck with me. In my household, I want to make sure there are positive images, like Michelle Obama, and now Tiana.”

Disney representatives didn’t respond to requests to elaborate on their plans for introducing Tiana to the pack of princesses at their theme parks, but a company spokeswoman confirmed that she’s being added to their merchandise line. At New York’s annual Toy Fair exhibition in February, Disney unveiled a collection of dolls, play sets and dress-up costumes inspired by the movie, and presented voice actor Rose with a custom Tiana doll.

While sociologists acknowledge Tiana’s positive aspects, they’re not so quick to hand Disney any prizes for altruism.

“On one hand, (Tiana) can be viewed as evidence that Disney has embraced American multi-culturalism. On the other hand, the diversification of Disney characters can be seen as a rather cynical ploy to increase market share,” says Kevin Howley, associate professor of media studies at Indiana’s DePauw University. “If these films validate anything, it is a child’s ability to consume Disney products and merchandise.”

Charles Gallagher, chair of the sociology department at La Salle University in Philadelphia, agrees that it’s great for more little girls to have a regal role model, but is concerned that Tiana might be misunderstood as a signal that American racism has been eradicated.

“She is a metaphor for how America, particularly white America, would like to see itself, that with the election of Barack Obama, that we are in some post-racial society,” he says. “That’s not the case…There is no shortage of social science research pointing at continuing or growing racial disparity. But who wants a bummer?”

Even in his cynicism, Gallagher acknowledges that a beautiful African-American princess is a world away from the asexual, stereotypical slave images of Gone With The Wind and Aunt Jemima – “We’re moving beyond the Mammys and the Stepin Fetchits, to a multicultural, full image of what you can be,” he says.

Parents like Van Ee and Pugh accept that the princesses and their assorted lunchboxes, dress-up kits and dolls are big business for Disney, but don’t mind giving their business to positive images for their girls.

“Some little girls go through this princess phase, and I want (Lacey) to come out the other side having had one she can relate to,” Van Ee says.

Courtlyn Patrick, who’s beginning to come out the other side of her princess phase, is still interested enough to be intrigued by Tiana.

“I think it’s just good that anybody can be a princess, not because of the color of their skin,” she says. “Everybody is a princess in their own way.”

See the trailer:

Earlier this month, I marveled at Star Trek‘s almost universal critical goodwill — at one point, it had a perfect 100-percent Rotten Tomatoes rating, though it has since fallen a bit to 95 percent.

Prepare to be marveled again.

Up, the latest family adventure from Disney’s Pixar, is soaring at 97 percent at RT. Its score at Metacritic is a similar 95.

(In fact, not only are critics saying it’s worth seeing, but they’re adding that it needs to be seen in 3-D. So break out the glasses.)

Many critics say that the strength of Up doesn’t lie as much in the visual — although it’s once again up to Pixar’s incredible standards — but in the storytelling.

• James Berardinelli of Reelviews says Up is an example of a studio growing up with its audience: “A film like Up makes it clear that Pixar has moved beyond the point where it feels the need to pander to children.”

• Washington City Paper‘s Tricia Olszewski calls Up a “perfect outing at the movies”: “Considering the marvels Pixar has already given us year after year, that’s a stunning achievement.”

• James Rocchi of Redbox says it’s a great story about real people: “What makes Up soar head and shoulders above its peers is how it ultimately shows us Carl (the main character) trying to leave the world for the better.”

(It seems almost shocking that someone would hate this movie, but New York Press‘ Armond White does — his review comes out almost angrily against Pixar and its movies and calls it overbearing and cute. “All this deflated cinema and Pixarism mischaracterizes what good animation can be, as in Coraline, Monster House, Chicken Little, Teacher’s Pet, The Iron Giant.” Proof that you truly can’t please everyone.)

(As an aside, I saw Star Trek recently — while I certainly enjoyed the film and what J.J. Abrams did with the franchise, I can’t say I’d consider it one of this year’s best films, given what I think a year’s best kind of movie should be. It’s great fun, but I found myself comparing characters rather than really paying attention to what almost was a too-convoluted plot. Still, Abrams did a good job of resetting things for what will be an inevitable slew of sequels.)

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It seems that the hottest, most in-demand star in Hollywood is a 79-year-old guy who’s been perfecting crankiness for almost 40 years.

Ed Asner, who voices high-flying curmudgeon Carl Fredricksen in Pixar’s new Up, disproves the notion that there’s no work for actors well past their pretty stage. He’s actually in two movies opening Friday; he also plays — surprise — an overbearing father in the indie movie Gigantic.

It seems that gruff, spunk-hating persona that we’ve loved since the first time Mary Richards met Lou Grant on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” is back in vogue.

When asked by The Wall Street Journal if there were any similarities between him and Up‘s Carl Fredericksen, Asner replied: “Well, obviously I’m better looking.”

He’s still got spunk.

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For almost 15 years, the geniuses of Pixar Studios have used the same basic formula — combine the wonder and life lessons of classic Disney animation with the awe-inspiring coolness of technology and the zip of famously familiar voices, and let the magic — and the John Ratzenberger — happen.

As Pixar’s 10th picture, the curmudgeon-meets-chipper-Explorer buddy adventure Up, is released, we count down the studio’s best.

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