Sorry, I guess I didn't mean to say that I wanted the movie clips to appear at exactly the same time. What was happening was this: they were appearing one after the other, but each one would disappear before the next would show, so at the end of the movie, only 1 would be present on the screen. I wanted them all to show up in the end. I figured out what had to be done, and have posted the code below. For each clip that i wanted to load, I needed to use createEmptyMovieClip() and use loadMovie to load each movie into a different empty movie clip. To insure that they all show on the screen in the end, the empty movie clips had to have different names and be at different depths.
Code:
for (var i:Number=1; i<=5; i++) {
// get the depth and file location from root variables
var depth = eval("_root.thing" + i).charAt(0);
var swfLocation = eval("_root.thing" + i).substring(2, (eval(thing+i)).length);
// load the movie in empty movie clip
createEmptyMovieClip("container" + i, depth);
loadMovie(swfLocation, "container" + i);
}
Thanks for all the help! Sorry that I wasn't very clear about what I needed.