Controlling nested movieclips

I’m working on a game. And I decided to put all the bosses nested in a single movieclip. I did this so I could do collision detection and general code involving the bosses on a single movie clip rather than writing code for each one. The way it works logically is

masterboss
|
bosslist (movie clip containing a different boss on each frame
| | |
boss1 boss2 boss3
and nested within those are boss attacks. I’m trying to reference the boss attack level. Which it seems I can do if each of the nested movieclips have an instance name.
However as soon as I add an instance name gives me the error
1046: Type was not found or was not a compile-time constant: bossList.
Anyone have any ideas or thoughts? Any kind of help would be greatly appreciated.