Object.watch or am I off track?

[AMayer]

I am fairly new to flash and have a unique problem I hope someone can help me with. For a project, I have about 1600 legacy SWF files, some with buttons, that that need to be fit within kiosk navigation. Some are just simple displays of a JPG but some contain questions with response required on the screen. The first kind are easy enough, it's the ones with buttons that pose a problem.

The slide SWF's were originally loaded into a navigation SWF using loadMovie. The nav SWF has buttons, FFbutton and RRbutton, that the button in the slide SWF sets states for after user response:

tellTarget("../../FFbutton&quot
{
ButtonAction = "nextframe";
}

I am trying to build a replacement for the nav SWF that traps the button presses on the slide. The slides are fully licensed, but FLA's are not available. With my limited knowledge, I have tried setting up a button, FFbutton, and then added the script into frame 1:

ButtonForward = function(prop, oldVal, newVal){
// do something
}
FFbutton.ButtonAction = "nextframe";
FFbutton.watch("ButtonAction",ButtonForward);

I have also tried just creating FFbutton as an object but nothing seems to work. It doesn't seem like there is any communication going on between the movies. The slide SWF also looks for a variable in the nav SWF using:

if (thispage == ../:currentpage) {

Although I set currentpage in my nav movie I am not convinced this is working within the slide either.

Any tips?