12 Films. 12 Weeks. There are worse ways to spend a summer.

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