2009 May 09 « 12 Films. 12 Weeks. There are worse ways to spend a summer.

Auditions from the Other Side of the Table

May 9, 2009 at 9:54 pm | Posted in Mike Lavoie | Leave a comment

I’ve been auditioning for a long time. In college I auditioned for Carlyn Davis Casting and was so nervous that I kept transposing the paragraphs from the monologue I thought I had learned cold the day before. After three minutes of narrative incoherence, the casting agent said, “I have no idea what you just said,” which was totally fine, because neither did I. But for some reason, he allowed me into his database. I guess he knew what he was talking about since I got cast in a regional anti-drug infomercial a few months later. I had no lines – I just got cuffed and pushed into the back of a police cruiser. I made more money that day in 2002 than I have in my nine years of acting since. I even made residuals. God bless the American war on drugs.

Playing a casting agent for a day was an illuminating experience. So many people tried to wow us (probably because we welcomed them to “wow” us in the audition notice), but what I really wanted to see was them being themselves. As big a fan as I am of Bruce Campbell, I did not want to see a rendition of his monologue from Army of Darkness. Even when he did it, it was kind of ridiculous. That said, an actor can be lousy in a monologue and great in a scene and vice versa. But since most of the scripts are as of yet unwritten the monologue system was really the only way to do it.

At least now we know what we’re working with. It’s like SNL in a way: you gather a team and write for them and see how that turns out. If we get a crazy person and fire them in the middle of the shoot, at least that’ll make for an interesting blog entry or police report.

On we go!

Posted by Mike

Auditions

May 9, 2009 at 7:37 pm | Posted in Keith Boynton | 1 Comment

Auditions were today. I spent all week juggling actors’ schedules using the deeply primitive messaging system on BreakdownServices (oh, how I longed for GMail!). And of course, after hours upon hours of trying to schedule things in a way that made sense for us and accommodated the actor’s conflicts, a good percentage of the people I scheduled just didn’t bother to show up. Which filled me with vindictive rage.

But it went well! We saw a fairly small number of time-wasting nut-jobs, quite a few decent actors, and several truly exciting possibilities – potential muses, as it were. We didn’t rush, but we didn’t spend much time twiddling our thumbs, either; James kept things running smoothly, and kept the waiting actors entertained. Most of the auditioners seemed to appreciate the complimentary Blow-Pops we provided (courtesy of Robb). And Mike could be relied upon to glance down at the “Special Skills” section of each resume and demand a demonstration of each performer’s most intriguing talent – so we were treated to a few sentences of ASL, a beautiful woman counting in binary on her fingers, a very high-pitched Borat impersonation, and an absolutely dead-on Kerri Strug. (Alas, the woman who can spit her gum up in the air and catch it in her mouth didn’t have any gum with her, so we had to take her word for it.)

After the audition, the four of us repaired to The Triple Crown, where we discussed and debated what we had just seen. This was interesting, but much more low-stakes than it would be for a typical audition; at the end of the day, these actors aren’t actually competing, since we can write roles for as many of them as we see fit. But do we dare to cast them based purely on our memories and speculations? Or do we write the films, and then hold a callback? In other words, should we make people audition for roles that we wrote specifically for them? Is that evil, or prudent, or both? Time will tell …

Posted by Keith